Hadley Freeman:

The convicted murderer Scarlet Blake, previously known as Fangze Wang, is male. That is why he is going to a men’s prison, after being found guilty last week of strangling Jorge Martin Carreno in what was described in court as a sexually motivated killing. And yet, Thames Valley police have recorded Blake’s crime as having been committed by a woman: “Blake identified as a female in custody. As such, Blake is recorded as female in our recording system,” a spokesman for the force said.

That’s stupid. What if Blake identified as Rishi Sunak? Or Charles Windsor? Or Maggie Smith? Or a detective chief inspector with Thames Valley Police?

Yet because gender ideologues have energetically promoted the idea that gender identity is sacred, and that a man who says he’s a woman should be treated with the same respect as one who comes out as gay, the media, the police and even the court have dutifully referred to Blake as “she”.

You know what else is “sacred” i.e. worthy of respect in a democratic society? Telling the truth. That applies especially to items like who bashed and strangled and drowned this man?

…as a teenager Blake was referred to the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) at the Tavistock in London, the NHS’s only youth gender clinic, which has since been shut after numerous concerns about its methods.

He was given puberty blockers at 17 and hormone treatment the following year. He is now 26, so this would mean he was under the Tavistock’s care in about 2015-2016, a period when — as Hannah Barnes details in her 2023 book about the Tavistock, Time to Think — the clinic was prescribing blockers with especial enthusiasm, even though it was known that they affect bone density and cognitive and sexual development.

I suspect they don’t affect cognitive development in a good way.