A local chapter of a UK women’s charity is under fire after promoting a book by a trans author who wrote an explicit sex guide for children, and who called being gay a “consolation prize” for men who weren’t transgender.
The Fawcett Society prompted outrage this week after promoting a book, The Gender Games, by transgender author Juno, born James, Dawson. The West Midlands Branch of the Society runs a monthly book club and announced July’s selection in a social media post made on Thursday.
The Eventbrite registration form associated with the book club meeting summarizes the book’s main themes and compares “exclusionist feminists” — a derisive term for women who believe sex cannot be changed — to “‘alt-right’ young men.”
The announcement was met with widespread criticism, and Fawcett West Midlands quickly locked its official Twitter account in response. Some feminists pointed out that the purpose of the charity was to advance women’s causes, but that they had failed to find a female author to promote the writing of.
Why? Why not read a book relevant to women, written by a woman? It’s not as if books by men are a rarity.
— Ophelia Benson (@OpheliaBenson) July 7, 2022
Other netizens were quick to point out a homophobic comment Dawson made in 2017 during an interview with Attitude magazine, a publication targeted at gay men.
“A lot of gay men are gay men as a consolation prize, because they couldn’t be women,” said Dawson, in reference to his decision to identify as transgender. References to the comment were posted repeatedly beneath the book club announcement, with many demanding the Society address it.
Excellent, I always thought the Fawcett Society was homophobic, now, there’s proof.
— Ceri Dyke (@ce_dyke1) July 7, 2022
Prior to self-identifying as a ‘woman,’ Dawson had worked as a primary school teacher and identified as a gay man. In 2014, he published a book titled This Book is Gay, which was marketed as a guide for children aged 13 and up. The book, written in childish vernacular intended to appeal to young readers, graphically taught children how to perform sex acts, as well as provided illustrations of the acts.
“A good handie is all about the wrist action. Rub the head of his c*ck back and forth with your hand. Try different speeds and pressures until he responds positively,” suggests Dawson in the book, who also gives instructions on oral and anal sex. “As with handies and breakfast eggs, all men like their blowies served in different ways.”
As reported in 2015 by The Guardian, the presence of Dawson’s book in the juvenile non-fiction section of a public library in Wasilla, Alaska, led parents to complain. After a 10-year-old boy accessed the book, his mother, Vanessa Campbell, was “shocked” to discover it contained frank drawings and descriptions of adult sex acts.
Campbell took the matter up with the Wasilla librarian, KJ Martin-Albright, who decided that the book was “appropriately shelved.” In response, Campbell lodged a formal complaint, and a three-member committee was convened to look into the matter further. Approximately 50 people, many of them parents, turned up to the first Wasilla City Council meeting to voice concerns. The following week, citizens attended a second meeting “in droves,” with one attendant comparing the provision of such sexually explicit materials to children to “pedophile behavior.”
Shortly after the “pedophile” controversy, Dawson declared a transgender identity and adopted the name Juno. He would later say of the situation: “If anyone thinks teens aren’t experimenting with drugs and looking at porn, they’re kidding themselves.” Dawson announced his transition in a February 2016 interview with Glamour magazine after being hired as a columnist there, just three months after parents began complaining about his sex guide for children.
Earlier this year, Dawson again prompted criticism for sexualizing children in a novel he released titled Wonderland. Safe Schools Alliance UK detailed how a parent found the book stocked in their child’s secondary school library, and provided a summary of the sexually explicit content contained in Wonderland, which has as its main character a young boy who identifies as a girl named Alice.
“Male sex fantasy tropes are present throughout. The book opens inside St. Agnes, an all-girls’ boarding school where the girls presented are not only sexually active, but their bodies are described as ridden with STIs,” the Safe Schools Alliance wrote.
The review continues to explain ways that children are sexualized in Wonderland. Alice states, “The fact I exist is enough. The fact I’m young is a bonus. I’m a blow-up doll.” Added to this Alice boasts about his “perky little boobs.”
“While I’m delighted with my perky little boobs,” Alice says, “I was profoundly disappointed that my urge to cut myself didn’t vanish with the first milligram of oestrogen to pass my lips.”
Disturbingly, Alice, legally still a child, is said to have “an active, app-based sex life… with married men from outlying commuter towns,” facilitated by “hook-up culture.” Both Waterstones and Amazon UK rate this book as appropriate for children over 12.
In Dawson’s latest book, chosen by the Midlands chapter of the Fawcett Society’s book club, Dawson describes how he first began to believe he was female because he enjoyed listening to Madonna and The Spice Girls. Dawson generally preferred media that centered female characters, including Sex and the City, and confesses to a “lingering male privilege” as he was “never told I couldn’t be exactly what I wanted to be, and I wanted to be Carrie”.
Despite professing to sympathize with a women’s perspective, Dawson devotes an entire chapter of The Gender Games to what he refers to as the “TERF Wars”. Throughout, Dawson refers to prominent women’s rights campaigners with unconcealed derision. “Whether you prefer ‘TERF’ or ‘transphobe’ or ‘bigot’, I don’t really care,” writes Dawson. The term “TERF” is frequently used to harass and threaten women who question gender identity ideology.
He goes on to compare the acknowledgement of biological sex to racism, specifically using black and Muslim women to make his case. “If [my critics] had said, ‘I don’t feel safe around black women,’… or ‘I don’t like getting on planes with women in hijabs,’ we would quite rightly have accused those people of being bigoted,” he writes. “Perhaps bigotry does need to be silenced.”
Dawson also shrugged off women’s fears of male sexual violence by suggesting that lesbians pose a greater threat to women than men.
“I don’t see anyone suggesting cisgender lesbians should be banned from women’s changing rooms and bathrooms… but if anyone was going to have a good old perv — wouldn’t it be them?” Dawson says.
When discussing his own childhood, Dawson defends the use of the drugs commonly referred to as puberty blockers.
“Now I’d have been able to get my hands on those pills and prevent my body from going through boy-puberty,” Dawson laments. He scolds the reader, saying, “No children are having ‘sex changes’, you morons,” and “the practice [of halting puberty] was first trialled at the Tavistock Clinic as far back as 1992.”
Since the publication of The Gender Games in 2017, dozens of health specialists have quit the Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock Clinic out of ethical concerns.
“It feels like conversion therapy for gay children,” one male clinician told The Times. Another whistleblower, who disclosed that she was having nightmares about what she was doing, warned, “Children’s bodies are being damaged in order to treat societal issues… I would talk about it as an ‘atrocity’.” Still another clinician described a case that “haunted” her, which involved a father she suspected of being a pedophile demanding puberty-blocking drugs in order to abuse his child.
“Knowing what I know now, and with the role models we have, there’s no way I would have said I was gay. I would have gone straight to trans,” Dawson told The Herald in 2017.
Dawson’s credentials include serving as a School Role Model for Stonewall and working with the charity First Story, which runs writing and storytelling workshops in underprivileged schools.
Dawson is featured on the website of the UK charity the National Trust, and television rights to his recent book The Gender Games have been purchased by SunnyMarch, a production company founded by Benedict Cumberbatch.
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