JIM Taylor’s response (Dec 23) avoids the substance of my argument, as he has done previously, by reframing it as hostility to boundaries themselves, while introducing a further troubling element that also requires challenge: the selective and instrumental use of mental health language to delegitimise disagreement.
No-one disputes that boundaries exist, or that law, biology and safeguarding matter. The question is how boundaries are drawn, justified and enacted in practice – and what they teach those subject to them. Boundaries do not apply themselves. They are interpreted and enforced by institutions, and experienced by people, including children. Treating them as self-evident truths removes accountability for their consequences.
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Taylor repeatedly invokes “nature” and “binary sex” as if these alone resolve complex social and developmental questions. That move is not clarification but closure. The existence of sex does not, by itself, determine how youth organisations should respond to children navigating trust, belonging and exclusion. Such judgements require proportionality and care, not assertions of inevitability.
More concerning is the way mental health is deployed rhetorically. We are told that contemporary recognition of trans children has produced “unprecedented mental ill-health”, while those questioning exclusion are implicitly cast as indulging confusion or pathology. This framing is neither neutral nor evidence-based. It treats mental distress as a political consequence rather than a human response to social conditions, and it applies psychiatric language selectively to discredit one group while absolving others of scrutiny.
It is professional overreach when someone like Sandie Peggie, trained only in adult nursing, publicly describes a protected group as “delusional”, and it is dangerously ignorant and stigmatising when lay commentators do the same.
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Using mental health as a cautionary tale against inclusion, while denying the psychological impact of exclusion, is not safeguarding. It is moral sorting. In this misreading, distress becomes meaningful only when it supports a preferred narrative; otherwise it is dismissed or reframed as ideological manipulation.
That is precisely the kind of discriminatory application of mental health language that should concern anyone serious about child welfare.
Taylor also imports disputes from elsewhere – adult workplace cases, legal interpretations presented as settled fact – and projects them onto children’s settings. This is deflection. Asking how exclusion is justified or explained to children is not denying sex, law or safeguarding. It is asking whether those concepts are being operationalised responsibly.
The issue is not respect for boundaries, but insistence that only one interpretation of them is legitimate, and that questioning it constitutes moral or psychological failure. That is not neutrality. It is certainty standing in for judgement.
Ron Lumiere
via email
THAIR haes been a whein clavers anent the friendship of Ms Duncan-Glancy and someone who has admitted some sex charge. I would like to say that whoever the MSP chooses to be friends with is no-one’s business but hers. There are busybodies everywhere sticking their impertinent noses into other people’s affairs. The only thing which should concern anyone is Ms Duncan-Glancy’s performance as an MSP. The self-righteous and the unco guid should awa an bile thair heids.
R Mill Irving
Gifford, East Lothian
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