In this week’s episode of No Fear, No Favour, Sam and Cath sit down with two women who saw the safeguarding crisis around gender medicine long before the mainstream press dared touch it: Stephanie Davies-Arai, founder of Transgender Trend, and Shelley Charlesworth, former BBC journalist turned campaigner.

Transgender Trend launched in 2015 at a time when the BBC, children’s TV, and the wider media were enthusiastically platforming the idea of ‘trans children’, presenting it as benign, progressive or inevitable.

Stephanie and Shelley watched something very different happening: sharp rises in referrals, a surge in experimental medical interventions, and a media narrative that shut down scrutiny at the very moment scrutiny was most needed.

Across this conversation, recorded just before the details were released of a new UK clinical trial - which it’s claimed will assess the risks and benefits of puberty-blocking drugs - they take us inside:

🔹 What they heard in Helen Webberley’s Times Radio interview - and why it matters

Stephanie explains why Webberley’s claims aren’t fringe outliers but the quiet part said out loud: that activists want children on cross-sex hormones early, that puberty blockers were never truly ‘reversible’, and that private providers continue to work around NHS restrictions.

🔹 How Britain ended up medicalising distressed kids

We walk back through the timeline: I Am Leo, Victoria Derbyshire’s 2016 interviews with two young boys being encouraged to “live as girls”, and Louis Theroux’s “Transgender Kids” documentary. In each case, Transgender Trend raised alarms long before the Tavistock clinic collapsed under scrutiny. Stephanie recalls that 2014–2015 media frenzy coinciding directly with the explosion in referrals to the Tavistock.

🔹 The BBC’s unique responsibility and its failure to act

Shelley describes repeated attempts to warn senior BBC figures, including formal letters to Charlotte Moore, then the BBC’s Chief Content Officer, Jessica Schibli, head of creative diversity, and the corporation’s global safeguarding lead Kim Collins, which were brushed aside. Even after Newsnight exposed the crisis, children’s content continued promoting gender-identity ideology to young audiences.

🔹 Why ‘Are you denying trans people exist?’ is a bad-faith question

The guests dismantle this media trope, explaining the biological reality, the legal reality, and the psychological needs that drive such rhetorical ‘gotchas’.

🔹 What needs to happen next

From removing outdated children’s content on iPlayer, to launching proper investigations into what’s happening in schools, to producing healthy, reality-based programming, they argue that the BBC must confront the full scale of the harm and rebuild trust with parents.

Why this episode matters:

Stephanie and Shelley have spent a decade trying - and failing - to get the UK’s most powerful broadcaster to face a safeguarding scandal unfolding in plain sight. As Stephanie puts it, children’s sense of reality itself was being reshaped. And as Shelley explains, failing to act wasn’t passive - it was a choice.

Listen now, and please share widely.

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