Narratives and misinfo and harm

The Telegraph tells us there’s a report, commissioned by the government Office for Science and produced by seven academics. It’s unclear whether the seven academics are scientists or not.

The 136-page report, by a group of seven academics and commissioned by the Government Office for Science, categorises “anti-LGBTQ+ narratives” as a type of “false and misleading information” seen in the UK.

Well that’s certainly not science. It might be in the basket labeled social science, but labels can easily be misapplied.

Just for a start it’s not science to prattle of “anti-LGBTQ+ narratives” – that’s just sneery political abuse. Demanding that people say men can be women is not science, and punishing or maligning people for refusing to say men can be women is not science.

They’re probably talking about social science, but if it’s social science that claims men can be women – literally be women, not just call themselves women – then it’s still not science.

The study, from May 2026, was designed to inform government policy on “identifying and tackling harmful misinformation”.

It uses data compiled by EU-funded fact-checkers to identify 11 key categories of “false and misleading information”, backed up by a list of examples.

One of the categories included is defined as “anti-LGBTQ+ narratives, ‘gender ideology’ claims targeting schools and public institutions, Pride event misrepresentation and transgender athlete controversies”.

It’s not about narratives. We are not the ones telling fairy tales. We are not the ones talking pretentious bullshit to manipulate gullible people to agree that men are women if they say they are. We’re not the ones whose entire Weltanschauung rests on a giant lie.

The examples – published alongside the report – include the case of Imane Khelif, who became embroiled in a row over biological sex when competing as a woman in Paris in 2024, despite allegedly failing sex tests the previous year.

Khelif won gold but was subsequently banned from competing in all future World Boxing events in the women’s category in the absence of proof of being biologically female.

The list suggests that saying “Imane Khelif is a man” would be an example of “racist/Islamophobic misinformation”.

So many ways of being wrong. It’s not automatically racist (even if some people who agree that Khelif is a man are racist), it has nothing to do with Islam, Islam is in fact hateful, it’s not misinformation.