Immigration into the UK is about to explode - again.
Friday, July 3, 2026
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British Muslims are failing
this basic test of integration (by Fiyaz Mughal)
I fear we are witnessing a profound erosion of the moral foundations that bind our society together
Last week I spoke at the Nova Exhibition in London, and it left me emotionally shaken. It tells the story of the young Israelis who travelled to the Nova music festival seeking nothing more than a night of music, friendship and freedom – only to find themselves caught in one of the most barbaric terrorist atrocities of modern times.
At 6.29am on October 7, Hamas launched its assault. Rockets rained down as terrorists breached Israel’s border, murdering hundreds of festival-goers, kidnapping many others, and leaving survivors with trauma that will endure for the rest of their lives.
Earlier this year I travelled to Israel and
interviewed one of the Nova survivors. Listening to his account was one of the
most harrowing conversations I have ever had. As someone who has spent more
than two decades working with victims of extremism, hate crime and trauma, I
recognised in his words the devastating psychological scars that terrorism
leaves behind.
I have consistently argued that British Muslims
have a moral responsibility to condemn Hamas, without hesitation, while also
acknowledging the immense suffering endured by Palestinian civilians during
Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.
These positions are not contradictory. They are
simply the minimum standard of moral consistency. Every innocent life has equal
value. Israeli and Palestinian lives deserve equal dignity, equal compassion
and equal protection. One might imagine this to be an uncontroversial position.
Increasingly, it appears not to be.
At the Nova Exhibition, I was the
only British Muslim speaker. Earlier this year, at the national demonstration
against anti-Semitism outside Downing Street on May 10, I was again the only Muslim speaker.
Think about that for a moment. In a country with around four million Muslims, only one Muslim was prepared publicly to stand alongside Britain’s Jewish community in remembrance of October 7. This points to a deeply troubling reality about integration.
Too many self-appointed Muslim “community
representatives” appear willing to speak passionately about injustice almost
everywhere except when Jewish victims are involved. Their moral language
becomes strangely selective. Their outrage has geographical and political
boundaries.
It does not extend to the young
people murdered at Nova. It does not extend to families slaughtered in the
kibbutzim. It does not extend to the Israeli women who were kidnapped and
raped. Nor does it extend to confronting Hamas’s grotesque manipulation of Islam.
As I entered the Nova Exhibition, one of the first recordings I heard was Hamas terrorists repeatedly shouting “Allahu Akbar” as terrified Jewish civilians were abducted into Gaza. Those words, among the most sacred in Islam, were being used to sanctify murder and kidnapping. These words and scenes were all over national news sources after October 7.
So where were the articles from Britain’s Muslim
leadership denouncing this abuse of our faith? Where were the public statements
explaining that invoking God’s name, while committing atrocities, is a profound
desecration of Islam itself? Their silence was deafening then, and it remains
deafening today.
Many of those granted privileged access to ministers, civil servants and public institutions appear more concerned with protecting their status than exercising moral leadership. They understand that speaking honestly about Islamist extremism carries professional and political risks.
Remaining silent is safer for them and the labels
of civic honours that many seek. Some privately express sympathy to Jewish
friends, allowing themselves to maintain the comforting image of being
committed “interfaith” figures.
Yet when it comes to stating publicly that
anti-Semitism within Muslim communities must be confronted, or that Islamist
ideology is poisoning community relations, they disappear. Silence becomes a
career strategy.
For some, avoiding controversy appears more important than defending principle. Public honours, appointments and invitations are easier to secure if one’s name does not generate uncomfortable headlines or awkward internet searches.
But honours were never intended to reward moral
timidity. They were created to recognise public courage and service, not those
prepared to overlook evil because speaking out may prove inconvenient.
Having spent more than 20 years
working to strengthen social cohesion and counter extremism, I fear we are witnessing a profound erosion of
the moral foundations that bind our society together. Political Islam and Islamist
narratives have exerted increasing influence within parts of Britain’s Muslim
communities, encouraging a world-view in which empathy becomes conditional and
universal values become tribal loyalties.
That is not the Islam with which I was raised in East Africa. The Islam I inherited taught that justice is indivisible, that compassion cannot be selective, and that every innocent human life possesses equal worth before God.
If we genuinely want stronger community relations
in Britain, then we must challenge those whose moral concern extends only to
one community. We need more Muslims willing to say publicly that October 7 was
an act of evil, that Islamist anti-Semitism has no place within our faith, and
that Jewish suffering deserves exactly the same compassion we rightly demand
for Palestinians.
My hope is that in five or 10 years’ time I will no
longer be the only British Muslim standing on such platforms. That there will
be many voices speaking with confidence, integrity and moral clarity.
If that day never comes, Britain’s
social cohesion will face an increasingly bleak future. If it does, then
perhaps we will have begun to rebuild the trust that extremism has done so much to destroy.
Fiyaz Mughal OBE is
the founder of Faith Matters and Tell Mama
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/057b544345062afd
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Read some Piaget
please!
@prof_curiosity1
Among the more
striking features of the contemporary gender debate is the demographic pattern
of its support. Polling consistently shows that young women are among the
strongest supporters of transgender identity claims, including claims that bear
directly on the sex segregated spaces, services, and protections that exist
specifically because of the risks women and girls face from male violence and
predation. Understanding why requires taking young women's position seriously
rather than dismissing it, and the developmental and social psychological
literature offers a more illuminating account than simple false consciousness.
What makes this
pattern additionally significant is a parallel demographic fact The population
presenting at paediatric gender clinics underwent a complete transformation
over the single decade from approximately 2012 to 2022. A caseload that was
historically around 80 percent male became, at its peak, around 74 percent
female. At the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service, referrals rose
from approximately 250 per year in 2012 to over 5,000 per year by 2022. The
female caseload within that expansion grew by a factor of roughly forty. The
same pattern was documented in Sweden, Finland, Canada, Australia, and the
United States across the same period. The generation of young women now most
vocally supportive of the gender affirmative framework is the same generation
from which that clinic population was almost entirely drawn. These two
demographic facts are not independent of one another.
A third demographic
fact belongs alongside them. Rates of self harm among adolescent girls rose
sharply over the same period and through the same channels. Self harm in this
population is itself a documented social contagion phenomenon, spreading through
peer networks and online communities by mechanisms that researchers have
studied with increasing precision. The temporal and demographic overlap between
the rise in adolescent female self harm, the rise in adolescent female gender
clinic referrals, and the consolidation of the online environments in which
both phenomena spread is not coincidental. The Tavistock referral data and the
Cass Review both documented high rates of self harm as a presenting feature of
the adolescent female clinic population. These were not three separate groups
of young women. To a significant extent they were the same young women, and the
peer networks and online communities surrounding them were the same networks.
The older young women who now appear in polling data as strong supporters of
the gender affirmative framework were, in many cases, the friends and peers of
that population. They were responding to a real crisis in the lives of real
people they cared about. What they were not given was an accurate account of
what that crisis consisted of, or of what responses to it the evidence
supported.
The Solidarity Trap
Young women in
their teens and twenties have come of age in an institutional culture that
presents support for transgender identity as the natural extension of
progressive values they already hold. Feminism, as it has been transmitted to
this generation through education, social media, and popular culture, has been
substantially reframed around the language of inclusion, allyship, and the
rejection of exclusionary boundaries. To question whether a male bodied person
should have unrestricted access to women's changing rooms is, within this
framework, not a safeguarding question. It is a question about whether you are
a good person.
Bandura's account
of social learning is directly relevant here. Young women are not arriving at
their positions through independent assessment of the evidence. They are
acquiring them through the social environments they inhabit, the peer groups
whose approval matters to them, the institutional frameworks of schools and
universities that have adopted affirmative positions, and the online cultures
that reward solidarity and punish dissent with considerable force. The position
feels like a value freely chosen. The social mechanism producing it is
considerably less free than it appears.
The Empathy Asymmetry
Young women are, on
average, higher in empathic responsiveness than other demographic groups. This
is not a weakness. It is a genuine human capacity that has social value. It
also creates a specific vulnerability to a rhetorical framework that centres
the distress of transgender identified individuals and presents any boundary
setting as the cause of that distress.
The "better a
live son than a dead daughter" argument, examined previously, is
particularly effective on a population primed to respond to suffering and to
feel responsible for alleviating it. When the message transmitted through every
institutional channel available to a young woman is that transgender people
face elevated suicide risk and that affirmation is protective, the empathic
response is to affirm. Questioning the evidence base for that claim requires a
kind of emotional detachment from an individual's presented distress that
empathy actively works against. The young woman who asks whether the suicide
risk data actually support the conclusion she is being invited to draw is not
being asked to think more carefully. She is being asked to feel less.
The self harm
dimension of this pressure deserves particular attention because it operates
with an additional layer of force. The emotional leverage applied to supporters
of gender affirmation is not limited to suicide risk in the abstract. In many
cases it is immediate, personal, and directed at a specific friend or peer who
is known to self harm, who presents as being in acute distress, and whose
distress is attributed, explicitly, to a failure of affirmation by those around
her. The young woman in that position is not being asked to hold a considered
political view. She is being told that her questions, her hesitations, or her
boundaries could contribute directly to her friend's injury or death. That is a
burden of a qualitatively different order from ordinary social pressure, and it
is one that operates most powerfully on precisely the demographic most disposed
to take it seriously. Understanding why young women support the gender
affirmative framework requires understanding this mechanism clearly, because it
is not reducible to ignorance or social conformity. It is empathy being
weaponised against the very people whose empathy makes them most responsive to
it.
Winnicott's account
of the False Self offers a further dimension. In social environments where the
expression of concern about female only spaces is met with social punishment,
the performance of solidarity becomes a condition of belonging. The position is
internalised. It feels authentic. The compliance dynamic sustaining it is
invisible from inside it.
What the clinic
data add to this picture is material that the empathy framework cannot easily
absorb. The adolescent girls who presented at gender services in large numbers
from around 2012 onwards showed, as a population, high rates of prior
psychiatric comorbidity including depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and
self harm, high rates of trauma, and high representation of same sex attracted
young people. The Cass Review, commissioned by NHS England and published in
2024, found that these comorbidities were inadequately assessed under the
affirmative pathway and that the evidence base for the interventions provided
was weak. A young woman whose empathic response leads her to support
affirmative care for a peer in distress is, on this evidence, not necessarily
supporting the intervention most likely to help that peer. The compassionate
response and the clinically indicated response are not the same thing, and the
institutional environment has not been transparent about that distinction.
The Safeguarding Asymmetry
There is a further
dimension to the self harm connection that the gender affirmative framework has
not adequately addressed, and that the young women supporting it have rarely
been invited to consider. Clinical and institutional safeguarding practice
applies robust protocols to adolescent self harm. A school that becomes aware a
pupil is self harming is required to respond with care, professional
assessment, parental involvement, and a pathway toward appropriate support. The
same framework that governs that response would not permit a practitioner to
tattoo a minor, or to facilitate any other permanent irreversible alteration of
a young person's body, on the basis of that young person's expressed wish
alone.
The affirmative
pathway, as it operated at its peak, provided or facilitated access to
mastectomy, cross sex hormones, and other irreversible interventions for
adolescents from a population in which self harm was a common presenting
feature, on the basis of assessment processes that the Cass Review found to be
inadequate. The logical structure of the safeguarding asymmetry is worth
stating plainly. A clinical system that treats superficial self harm as a
safeguarding emergency requiring comprehensive professional response, while
simultaneously facilitating irreversible surgical alteration of a healthy body
in the same population, is not applying its safeguarding principles
consistently. The young women who supported their peers through affirmative
pathways were not told that this asymmetry existed. They were given instead the
reassurance that the clinical pathway their friends were entering was evidence
based and appropriately governed. The independent reviews have since
established that it was neither.
The Misidentification of the Threat
A significant part
of the explanation lies in how the threat landscape has been framed for young
women. The feminist tradition that this generation has inherited emphasises,
correctly, that women face serious risks from male violence, from structural
inequality, and from the policing of female bodies and behaviour. What it has
been less successful at transmitting is the specific relevance of sex
segregated spaces and services to the management of those risks.
Young women who have
grown up with relatively routine access to mixed sex environments in schools,
universities, and workplaces may not have a fully developed intuition for why a
domestic violence refuge, a rape crisis centre, a hospital ward, or a prison
must be single sex to function as intended. The argument that a male bodied
person who identifies as a woman poses no additional risk in those environments
feels, to someone who has not examined it carefully, like the compassionate
position. The argument that biological sex remains relevant to risk assessment
in those contexts feels, within the prevailing framework, like bigotry.
This
misidentification is compounded by a feature of the adolescent female referral
population that has been documented but rarely foregrounded in public
discussion. A substantial proportion of the girls presenting at gender clinics
were same sex attracted young people whose distress was rooted, at least in
part, in the difficulty of developing a lesbian identity in social contexts
that still carried residual stigma. The gender affirmative framework offered
those young women a reframing of their same sex attraction as a male
heterosexual identity, providing community belonging and a coherent explanatory
narrative for their distress. The young women in their peer groups who
supported that reframing were not wrong to respond to the distress. They were
responding, however, to a framing of it that the independent clinical reviews
have since found to be inadequately evidenced. The threat they perceived, of a
friend in crisis who needed affirmation, was real. The specific response they
were encouraged to offer was not the only one available, and may not have been
the most helpful.
That crisis
frequently included self harm. A peer group supporting a friend who is
simultaneously self harming, identifying as transgender, and receiving
institutional affirmation of both the identity and the clinical pathway
associated with it is not well positioned to ask whether those presentations
are connected, whether the self harm and the gender distress share a common
origin in unaddressed psychological need, or whether the affirmative pathway
resolves the underlying distress or redirects it into a medicalised channel.
Those are the questions that comprehensive clinical assessment should answer.
The Cass Review found that such assessment was routinely not being completed.
The peer group, lacking both the professional framework and the institutional
permission to ask those questions, could only respond to what was visible: a friend
in distress who said she needed affirmation, in a social environment that said
affirmation was the only compassionate response.
This is a failure
of transmission, not of intelligence. The women who built the sex segregated
services now under pressure built them in direct response to their experience
of male violence and male entitlement. That experiential foundation is not
being passed on with the clarity it requires.
The Online Environment and Social Contagion
The online
environments in which young women's social identities are substantially formed
have specific features that amplify this dynamic. Social media platforms reward
emotional intensity, in group solidarity, and the public performance of correct
values. They punish dissent, boundary questioning, and the expression of
positions that the in group has designated as harmful. The young woman who
expresses concern about male bodied people in women's changing rooms does not
receive a considered rebuttal. She receives social punishment in the form of pile
ons, unfollowing, accusations of bigotry, and potential real world consequences
including loss of friendships and professional opportunities.
Vygotsky's account
of cognitive development through social interaction is relevant here. Thinking
happens in social contexts and is shaped by the tools and frameworks those
contexts provide. A young woman whose social environment provides no legitimate
framework for expressing concern about sex based rights, and active punishment
for attempting to do so, is not well positioned to develop a considered
position on the question. The thoughts that cannot be expressed without social
cost tend not to be fully formed.
The convergence of
self harm and gender identity content in online environments used by adolescent
girls is a specific and documented feature of those platforms rather than an
incidental overlap. The communities in which gender identity frameworks
circulated among adolescent girls were frequently the same communities in which
self harm content circulated, and the algorithmic logic of recommendation
systems tends to draw users deeper into emotionally intense content regardless
of its clinical character. A young woman who enters an online community through
distress of any kind may encounter both self harm content and gender identity
frameworks as part of the same information environment, presented with
equivalent social validation. The research on self harm contagion in online
environments applies with equal force to gender identity frameworks spreading
through the same channels by the same mechanisms. The Tavistock data documented
social clustering as a conspicuous feature of the adolescent female referral
population, meaning the simultaneous presentation of multiple young people from
the same friendship group, school, or online community. Independent clinical
reviews in Sweden and Finland reached similar observations. The online
environment was not a background factor in the demographic shift. It was a
primary transmission mechanism, and it operated on the same population of
adolescent girls whose older sisters and peers now appear in polling data as
the strongest supporters of the gender affirmative framework.
The Generational Transmission Failure
There is a further
dimension that feminist analysis has been slow to examine. The generation of
women who built second wave feminism, who understood from direct experience why
sex based protections matter and who fought to establish them in law and
policy, has not always transmitted that understanding effectively to younger
women. In some cases the transmission has been actively impeded by an
institutional feminism that adopted the affirmative framework and presented any
concern about sex based rights as reactionary.
The result is a
generational gap in feminist understanding that serves neither generation well.
Older women who raise concerns about the erosion of sex based rights are
characterised as dinosaurs by younger women who have not been given the tools
to understand why those rights were established in the first place. Younger
women who express discomfort with aspects of the affirmative model are given no
legitimate framework within mainstream feminist culture for developing that
discomfort into a coherent position.
Erikson's account
of identity formation is relevant here. Young women are in the developmental
phase in which identity is being constructed in relation to peer groups,
institutional frameworks, and the values those frameworks transmit. An identity
built around progressive solidarity, including solidarity with transgender
claims, is not a cynical performance. It is a genuine developmental achievement
within the social context that produced it. The problem is not with the young
women. It is with the social context that has failed to provide them with the full
picture of what they are being asked to endorse.
The clinic referral
figures make that failure concrete. A generation of adolescent girls presented
at gender services in numbers that no clinical framework had anticipated or
prepared for, with a comorbidity profile that included high rates of self harm
and that warranted comprehensive psychological assessment, in a context of
documented peer and online influence. The institutional response, in many
services, was an affirmative pathway that did not require that assessment to be
completed before social or medical steps were taken. The older young women who
supported their peers through that process, and who now appear in polling data
as strong supporters of the gender affirmative framework, were not given the
information that would have allowed them to evaluate what they were supporting.
They were not told that the clinical pathway their friends were entering had an
evidence base that five independent international reviews would subsequently
find to be weak. They were not told that the safeguarding protocols governing
that pathway were, by the standards applied to other interventions in the same
population, inadequate. They were told that affirmation was safe, evidence
based, and compassionate, and that questioning it was harmful. On the available
evidence, at least the first two of those claims were false.
What Is Actually at Stake
The rights being
eroded are not abstract. Single sex spaces exist because women and girls are at
elevated risk of voyeurism, sexual assault, and harassment from male bodied
people in contexts of undress or physical vulnerability. Domestic violence
refuges are single sex because women fleeing male violence require environments
from which male bodied people are excluded as a condition of physical and
psychological safety. Rape crisis services are single sex because the trauma of
male sexual violence requires a recovery environment defined by the absence of
male bodies. Female prisons are single sex because the incarceration of male
bodied people among a female prison population creates documented risks of
sexual violence.
These are not
theoretical concerns. They are the documented reasons why these spaces were
established. The young woman who supports the erosion of these boundaries in the
name of inclusion is not being asked to make a small concession to compassion.
She is being asked to dismantle a safeguarding architecture built in direct
response to the real world consequences of male violence against women.
That she is often
unaware of this is not her failure. It is the failure of the institutions,
educational frameworks, and cultural transmission mechanisms that should have
made it clear. The same institutional failure that produced a generation of
young women supportive of the erosion of sex based rights also produced, in the
same cohort, the largest wave of adolescent female gender clinic referrals ever
recorded, in a population characterised by high rates of self harm and
inadequate clinical assessment. The phenomena share a cause, and addressing
either requires being honest about all of them.
Conclusion
Young women's
support for transgender identity claims, including claims that undermine sex
based rights, is not irrational. It is the predictable product of social
learning in an institutional environment that has framed affirmation as
compassion and boundary setting as bigotry, transmitted through online cultures
that punish dissent, to a demographic with high empathic responsiveness and
incomplete access to the history of why sex based protections were established.
The demographic
data from paediatric gender clinics, and the self harm data from the same
population, sit alongside this picture not as separate concerns but as its
empirical correlates. The same social environment that shaped the political
views of young women shaped the clinical presentations of their younger sisters
and peers. The forty fold increase in adolescent female referrals over a single
decade, the social clustering patterns, the high rates of self harm and psychiatric
comorbidity, the disproportionate representation of same sex attracted young
people, the safeguarding asymmetry between the treatment of self harm and the
facilitation of irreversible surgery in the same population, and the inadequate
assessment documented by five independent international reviews are all
features of the same cultural moment that polling captures when it records
young women as the strongest supporters of the gender affirmative framework.
These young women were responding to real distress in people they loved. They
were doing so within an institutional environment that gave them a false
account of what that distress consisted of and what the evidence supported as a
response to it.
Understanding
this does not require condescending to young women. It requires taking
seriously the social and developmental mechanisms that shape all human belief
formation, and asking honestly whether the institutional environment
surrounding this generation of young women has given them the information and the
conceptual tools they need to form genuinely considered positions on questions
that bear directly on their own safety and rights.
The
answer, on the evidence, is that it has not. Correcting that failure is not a
political project. It is an educational one, and it is one that respects young
women enough to give them the full picture rather than the approved version of
it.
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