Books

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

By Jonathan Haidt   Available from Penguin

After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents in many countries around the world deteriorated suddenly in the early 2010s. Why have rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicide risen so sharply, more than doubling in many cases? In this book, Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that the decline of free-play in childhood and the rise of smartphone usage among adolescents are the twin sources of increased mental distress among teenagers. Haidt delves into the latest psychological and biological research to show how, between 2010 and 2015, childhood and adolescence got rewired. As teens traded in their flip phones for smartphones packed with social media apps, time online soared while time engaging face-to-face with friends and family plummeted, and so did mental health. This profound shift took place against a backdrop of diminishing childhood freedom, as parents over-supervised every aspect of their children’s lives offline, depriving them of the experiences they most need to become strong and self-governing adults. The Anxious Generation reveals the fundamental ways in which this shift from free-play to smartphones disrupts development – from sleep deprivation to addiction – with separate in-depth analyses of the impact on girls and boys. Grounded in ancient wisdom and packed full of cutting-edge science, this eye-opening book is a life raft and a powerful call-to-arms, offering practical advice for parents, schools, governments, and teens themselves.

The End of the World is Flat

By Simon Edge   Available from Eye Books
Image of Cover of The End of the World is Flat by Simon Edge

Mel Winterbourne’s modest map-making charity, the Orange Peel Foundation, has achieved all its aims and she’s ready to shut it down. But glamorous tech billionaire Joey Talavera has other ideas. He hijacks the foundation for his own purpose: to convince the world that the earth is flat. ​Using the dark arts of social media at his new master’s behest, Mel’s ruthless young successor, Shane Foxley, turns science on its head. He persuades gullible online zealots that old-style ‘globularism’ is hateful. Teachers and airline pilots face ruin if they reject the new ‘True Earth’ orthodoxy. ​Can Mel and her fellow heretics – vilified as ‘True-Earth Rejecting Globularists’ (Tergs) – thwart Orange Peel before insanity takes over? Might the solution to the problem lie in the 15th century? ​Using his trademark mix of history and satire to poke fun at modern foibles, Simon Edge is at his razor-sharp best in a caper that may be more relevant than you think.

Gay Shame

By Gareth Roberts   Available from Hachette
Book cover of Gay Shame by Gareth Roberts

Only a few years ago, it seemed that the fight for gay rights was won in the UK: legal equality was achieved, prejudice rapidly dying out. Mission accomplished, right? Wrong, argues Gareth Roberts. Homophobia is making a major comeback under the guise of the ideology of ‘gender identity’. The enforcers of this new creed insist that attraction to people of the same sex is ‘hateful’. They argue that effeminate men and butch women can’t just be gay, but must ‘really’ be trans. Worse, this ideology has colonised the gay rights movement, capturing institutions like Stonewall and the gay press completely. Anyone who disagrees risks professional suicide. So what happened to the funny, grown-up culture, truth-telling and knowing irony of gay men? How and why was the older gay rights activism, which gifted such progress to homosexual people, hijacked? In this passionate, witty polemic, Gareth Roberts answers these questions and argues that we need a new gay liberation movement.

Transsexual Apostate

By Debbie Hayton   Available from Swift Press

In 2016, Debbie Hayton underwent gender reassignment surgery. Fast forward to today, and Hayton’s refusal to validate the standard gender identity orthodoxy has led to excommunication by the trans activist community. What happened? In a compelling first-hand account of what it means to be a transwoman — and where she feels the impulse comes from — Hayton explains why much of gender identity ideology is, in her view, false and damaging. Once a prominent member of the TUC LGBT+ committee, she charts how her views developed and put her at odds with the majority of trans activists. Instead, she issues a compassionate call to move beyond ideological conflicts, and acknowledge the legitimate concerns that many have with an agenda that asserts that transwomen are women. Hayton’s honest, humane and moving book shows that by accepting reality, transwomen can live their best lives based on the truth of who they are— rather than the fantasy of who they are not.

The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls

By Kara Dansky   Available from Amazon

Democrats and the establishment Left have abandoned and betrayed American women and girls on the altar of “gender identity,” doing untold damage in the process. It’s time for liberals and progressives—especially feminists and free speech advocates—to hold them accountable. In The Reckoning, Kara Dansky, a radical feminist and lifelong Democrat, exposes the invasion by men into female-only spaces, the harming of children, and the silencing, punishment, cancellation and even violence against women who speak out. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party, which claims to represent the interests of women, ignores the problem, while its allies in the organized Left and mainstream media paint all opposition to the “trans” agenda as “right wing.” But radical feminists are not “right wing.” They are leftists who know that sex is real and are not afraid to demand women’s hard-won rights to safe spaces and privacy. The Democrat-Left wing establishment knows all the ways in which “gender identity” harms women and girls—and plenty of boys. Yet they are sacrificing women and children to a vicious profit-driven industry that allows men to invade women’s spaces and sports, denies that sex is real, and slices up children’s bodies. Now the Democrats are facing a reckoning. Detransitioners are starting to speak out, clinicians are blowing the whistle, and women and girls, including many lesbians, have had it. Even now, the tide of common sense and decency is starting to turn in other countries that have banned harmful medical and surgical procedures for underage children and a handful of Democrats are bucking the trend at the state level. Elected Democrats will later claim they didn’t know, that they couldn’t have known, that the science has changed. But they knew. They have known all along. This book provides the evidence.

Trouble With Gender: Sex Facts, Gender Fictions

By Alex Byrne   Available from Polity Press

In this provocative, bold, and humane book, the philosopher Alex Byrne pushes back against the new gender revolution. Drawing on evidence from biology, psychology, anthropology and sexology, Byrne exposes the flaws in the revolutionary manifesto. The book applies the tools of philosophy, accessibly and with flair, to gender, sex, transsexuality, patriarchy, our many identities, and our true or authentic selves. The topics of Trouble with Gender are relevant to us all. This is a book for anyone who has wondered ‘Is sex binary?’, ‘Why are men and women different?’, ‘What is a woman?’ or, simply, ‘Where can I go to know more about these controversies?’ Revolutions devour their own children, and the gender revolution is no exception. Trouble with Gender joins the forefront of the counter-revolution, restoring sex to its rightful place, at the centre of what it means to be human.

Women’s Rights, Gender Wrongs: the global impact of gender-identity ideology

By Kath Aiken (Editor), Sally Wainwright (Editor)   Available from Women's Declaration International

Women's Rights, Gender Wrongs explores the diverse ways that the global spread of gender-identity ideology has affected all aspects of women's lives. Writers from all continents and all walks of life discuss its personal and professional impacts on many levels. They range from a myth-busting Brazilian academic to an Angolan lesbian, from a Canadian ex-prisoner to the mother of a gender-dysphoric teenager. They cover grassroots resistance in Japan, women's spirituality, and reproductive exploitation in South America. Writers consider the loss of single-sex and lesbian space, surrogacy, prostitution, men in women's prisons, children's and human rights. There are also personal stories of women's political activism and resistance.

Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy

By Graham Linehan   Available from Eye Books

Having cut his teeth in music journalism, Graham Linehan became the finest sitcom writer of his generation. He captured the comedy zeitgeist not just as the co-creator of Father Ted but also with The IT Crowd and Black Books, winning five Baftas and a lifetime achievement award. Then his life took an unexpected turn. When he championed an unfashionable cause, TV commissioners no longer returned his emails, showbiz pals lost his number and his marriage collapsed. In an emotionally charged memoir that is by turns hilarious and harrowing, he lets us into the secrets of the writing room and colourfully describes the high-octane atmosphere of a sitcom set. But he also berates an industry where there was no one to stand by his side when he needed help. Bruised but not beaten, he explains why he chose the hill of women and girls’ rights to die on – and why, despite the hardship of cancellation, he’s not coming down from it any time soon.

DETRANS: When transition is not the solution

By Dr Az Hakeem   Available from Amazon

Increasing numbers of people are identifying as belonging to a gender different to that of their biological sex. There's a commonly held assumption that some people are ‘trans’ and ‘born into the wrong body. Most healthcare interventions will ‘affirm’ the person’s preferred gender and help them to transition often in a physically irreversible way. But what if someone who makes a gender transition later changes their mind? What if they regret making irreversible physical changes to their body? What then? This book is about the detransitioners and the desisters for whom gender transition was not the hoped for solution. The people whom society has been led to believe do not exist and who are not followed up by the gender clinics who facilitated their gender transition. But those of us who work with them clinically know all too well that they exist and that their numbers are growing rapidly. This book sheds light on the phenomenon of detransition and gives a voice to the detrans people and the parents for whom transition can impact with devastating consequences.

From the ‘Neutral’ Body to the Postmodern Cyborg: A Critique of Gender Ideology

By Silvia Guerini   Available from Spinifix Press

If the human being is allowed to be genetically manipulated and made by artificial means in the laboratory in an unstoppable crescendo of experimentation, what will be left to defend? This book is a radical critique of gender ideology and transhuman design. Silvia Guerini shows how the TQ+ rights agenda is being pushed by eugenicist capitalist technocrats at the top of Big Business, Big Philanthropy, Big Tech and Big Pharma companies. She argues that dissociation from our sexed bodies leads to dissociation from reality, with the human body transformed into a permanent construction site besieged by synthetic and artificial interventions. Erasure of the material dimension of bodies and sexual difference is an erasure of women. She explains how fundamental struggles such as the fight against genetic engineering and the fight against artificial reproduction can only advance in conjunction with an opposition to gender ideology. By linking ‘gender identity’ to the genetic modification of bodies, she warns that humanity itself is at risk of becoming a synthetic life form with synthetic emotions within a virtual, fluid, deconstructed metaverse. Today, being revolutionary means preserving everything that makes us human. It means defending the living world and nature as entities to be respected, not as parts that can be broken down and redesigned in a laboratory world. The idea of the ‘neutral’ body and body modification pave the way for the construction of the post-human cyborg and the genetic engineering of bodies. Is the last bioethical barrier about to be breached to give way to transhumanist demands? And at what cost?