Things seem eerily quiet on the gender front in the US

And what on earth is this “Protect the Dolls” thing?

April 28, 2025

Happy Monday!

I recently came across something called “Protect the Dolls” and wondered what on earth it’s about. The Guardian explains it here.

Basically, a guy I had never heard of called Conner Ives designed a t-shirt proclaiming “Protect the Dolls” and wore it to London Fashion Week in February. Ives is evidently an American fashion designer raised in New York and living in London. This is him wearing his t-shirt in February:

Apparently, the word “doll” is used as a term of endearment for men who call themselves women (“transgender women”) and Ives is a fan of such men.

I had never heard of this term, so I did a little bit of research and found this:

Then a guy called Pedro Pascal wore the shirt to a different event in London a few days after the UK Supreme Court ruled that the word sex means sex under the UK Equality Act and called JK Rowling a “horrendous loser.”

This prompted a somewhat hilarious exchange between UK actor James Dreyfus and Rowling herself on X:

(I had no idea who Nicola Coughlan is, so I looked her up, and now I know, but I still don’t really care.)

Then actress Tilda Swinton got in on the “Protect the Dolls” action:

In contrast to Pedro Pascal and Nicola Coughlan, I actually know who Tilda Swinton is, and have enjoyed her acting. She starred, for example, in the 1992 film Orlando, which I quite enjoyed when it came out. In the film, Orlando is a young man in Elizabethan England. Queen Elizabeth grants him a plot of land on the condition that he remain young forever, and he agrees. A few centuries later, however, he awakens from a coma to learn that he’s now a woman.

Today’s gender zealots have turned Orlando into a story about “transness,” of course, but it isn’t. It’s a beautiful depiction of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 mythical novel Orlando: A Biography. It’s about many things, one of them being the ways in which men and women are treated differently in different cultures and eras. It’s a bit disappointing (but not surprising) that Swinton is now simping for men who call themselves women.

Anyway, once the t-shirt started getting so much hype, Conner Ives found himself getting increasing orders for it, so he made it available for pre-order and increased supply. According to his website:

The Protect the Dolls t-shirt was worn by Conner in the finale of our AW 2025 show. After the groundswell of interest in the t-shirt, we have decided to make it available for pre-order. All proceeds from the sale of this t-shirt will be donated directly to Trans Lifeline, a trans-lead US- based charity that delivers life-saving services to those who need them most. The hotline connects trans people to a wider community, offering support and resources they need to survive and thrive. Given the US Federal government's current hostility towards trans people, support like this is needed now more than ever.

T-shirts will ship from our London studio in 4-8 weeks. You will receive a email notification when your purchase has been dispatched.

The t-shirt is made of a 100% organic cotton, and is printed in the UK.

The “Trans Lifeline” is a “grassroots hotline and microgrants 501(c)(3) non-profit organization offering direct emotional and financial support to trans people in crisis – for the trans community, by the trans community.” The main page of its website features someone who is very obviously a man, wearing red nail polish.

Elle magazine interviewed a man named Raquel Willis about the matter and he said, “When I think of ‘Protect the Dolls,’ I’m thinking of the high rates of murder and violence in Black and brown trans communities, and particularly to Black and brown trans women, and I’m thinking of high rates of suicidality. Taglines and slogans are great, but they have to lead people to a deeper political education. Do people actually know how to protect the dolls?”

Willis is the co-founder of something called the Gender Liberation Movement, and last December, he joined some of his fellow men in a women’s bathroom at the US Capitol to protest the House Speaker’s decision to maintain single-sex bathrooms.

So that’s what “Protect the Dolls” is about—protecting men who call themselves women and invade female-only spaces (from evil, nasty TERFs, I guess). Or, as one of my UK TERF buddies said on X yesterday:

(Sorry.)

But what I have been really interested in is how the conversation about the UK Supreme Court’s April 16 ruling that sex is real under the Equality Act has been playing out in the UK versus how it’s playing out in the US. From my vantage point, it seems like the gender zealots have been losing their minds in the UK. I’m not seeing anything like that here.

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