And we’re being groomed via soap opera again. GC twitter went nuts on 5 July 2021 about a Hollyoaks storyline where trans character Sally St. Claire, having murdered a man, is beaten up by wicked TERFs in a women’s prison. This story appeared hard on the heels of a High Court ruling on 2 July that it is “lawful for transgender women to be housed in female jails in England and Wales”, following a case brought by a woman who alleges that she was sexually assaulted in a women’s prison by a man with a GRC.
Sally St. Claire, played by trans actor Annie Wallace, has been a Hollyoaks regular since 2015. You can read all about Sally at the carefully curated Sally St. Claire Wiki page. Do let me share this gem, apparently from Channel 4’s Hollyoaks web page … “Mrs St Claire is a no-nonsense kinda lady who arrived in the village as the new head honcho at Hollyoaks High.” Sally’s “no-nonsense” arrival was a tactful 18 months or so after the tragic death of Coronation Street’s Hayley Cropper, the first trans character in a UK soap.
I have a theory that Corrie’s Hayley Cropper was a carefully planned Trojan horse, a way of planting ideas about “trans women” in our heads, and that this was an extraordinarily successful early gambit in the war against human biological sexual reality that we are now wearily fighting. I wrote about Hayley Cropper a year ago in Uncommon Ground. As we’ve come to expect from the gender movement, the Sally St. Claire phenomenon is a worthy successor to Hayley Cropper.
Sally is played by Annie Wallace, who advised the makers of Coronation Street and the actor (a woman, Julie Hesmondhalgh) who played Hayley about how to depict a trans woman”. Ahead of the “beaten up by wicked TERFs” storyline, Annie has been reminiscing about advising Julie, and told Digital Spy’s Rainbow Crew “I'm very proud of the work I did with Coronation Street, because Hayley Cropper was such a monumentally important LGBT character. Literally one of the most important characters in the world, as far as I'm concerned. I helped a bit, but it was down to the writers and Julie Hesmondhalgh to create that character, to make her the British public's relatable trans person. And that trans person was nice and kind and unthreatening.”
Absolutely! Hayley would never have told anyone to choke on her girldick.
Annie told Loose Women that Coronation Street wanted advice “on how the storylines could be fleshed out in terms of proper legal representation – the facts about it. At the time, trans people didn’t have any rights at all really, legally.”
But how did the makers of Coronation Street find Annie Wallace? Why, via Press For Change, of course. The painfully worthy Salt Magazine highlighted Hayley’s red anorak in “People’s History Museum in five objects”, and tells us that “Initially, Hesmondhalgh’s portrayal was viewed by trans advocacy groups as clichéd and ill-informed. Annie Wallace, from the advocacy group Press For Change, was later brought on board as a consultant. She is now a soap actor in her own right and is the first transgender person to play a transgender character in British soap history.”
Press For Change was set up by another Usual Suspect, Stephen Whittle. Is anyone else old enough to remember Peter Frame’s rock family trees? Stephen Whittle keeps on appearing, all over the gender family tree. Incidentally, do not be fooled by PfC’s incredibly shonky website. They are well-connected and effective.
If Press For Change did somehow manage to arrange to have the “beaten up by wicked TERFs” storyline broadcast to cleverly coincide with the High Court judgment, it seems a bit pointless. If we’re supposed to imagine that “trans women” aren’t safe in women’s prisons, what are we supposed to think about a high court judgment that says they can be placed in the women’s estate? Are we supposed to conclude that this would be cruel and unusual, and that they’d be safer in a men’s prison?
Let me give the last word to Annie Wallace via the strangely named FemaleFirst website. Annie is, apparently, 'so tired' of facing 'gender critical' trolls online. "It's tiring, and it's monotonous... but I can, and will, block ANY 'gender critical' cultist that tries to respond to my tweets or replies negatively. Actually, I'll pre-emptively block someone if they show the slightest anti-trans prejudice. I'm tired. So tired."
Gosh, Annie. Are you tired? Good. Because although some of us women and girls are tired, there are nearly four billion of us alive today, and almost none of us believe that you are one of us. And when one of us gets tired, another of us will step up to take over the fight.
Poor tired Annie.