Lush puts transgender 'propaganda' leaflets in birthday party bags for girls as young as seven - claiming there is a global conspiracy against trans people
Lush Cosmetics placed a leaflet in party bags gifted to children as young as seven and eight, which claimed there was a global conspiracy against trans people.
Young girls received the leaflet as they left a birthday celebration event for one of the stores branches, where they also created bath bombs and soaps.
The 24-page booklet, which was created in collaboration with TransActual, claimed those in the transgender community had been made 'the target of a calculated media assault' in a bid to divert attention from 'global crises'.
It also went on to claim the media landscape was 'encouraging violence' and diverting attention 'from those nicely off' while others struggled, adding that lives had been 'devastated' by a 'tidal wave of hate'.
The leaftet, which was created by the charity TransActual and produced by Lush Costmetics 'in solidarity and allyship with trans people everywhere' also outlined terms used by the community.
It explained that while some people may describe themselves as trans, others use terms as gender-queer, gender-fluid, nongender, third gender, bi-gender, as well as trans woman, trans man and neutrois.
The document said that these were descriptions and 'not prescriptions', explaining the term intersectionality, adding: 'It just means we are all subject to multiple forms of inquality or disadvantage (or privilege and advantage).'
A mother, who was present at the party dubbed the leaflet as 'fully propaganda in tone', while also debating if it was entirely appropriate for children of such a young age.
'I feel fairly "live and let live" about what people over 18 want to do but to put this in bags going home with seven-year-old girls seems really shocking to me,' she told The Times.
'Pretty sure nobody is handing these out to little boys at football parties.'
The booklet also went on to compared the present Day US to Nazi Germany, saying how the regime led by Adolf Hitler, 'destroyed the world's first gender clinic', sent transgender individuals to concentration camps and set alight to books.
It said there were 'echoes' in the US of Germany's difficult past as trans individuals have 'their passports confiscated, birth certificates torn up, history erased, healthcare banned and legal protections removed.'
Around 20,000 leaflets were printed and shared across over 100 branches across the UK.
A 'Liberation' bath bomb, which shared the same colours as the trans flag, also came with the leaflet, with 75 per cent of profits being donated to three campaign groups, which includes TransActual and My Genderation.
On its website, Lush stated that trans people have 'come under increasing attacks in certain political and cultural spheres'.
It comes after Supreme Court unanimously decided that 'the terms woman and sex in the Equality Act refer to a 'biological woman and biological sex'.
The booklet says the Cass Review, a review led by Dr Hilary Cass on gender identity services for young people in children 'set a standard of proof' which is distinctive to trans healthcare.
It also criticised the ban on puberty blockers, claiming there were 'no major side-effects', despite the Cass Review stating that evidence indicated puberty blockers could affect bone density in teenagers.
Lush told The Times: 'The booklet was designed to be displayed in stores next to signage about the campaign and at till points, for people to take if they wished.
'It should not have been put directly into bags without being asked for and we have issued guidance to our staff to ensure that does not happen again.'
It also said that any queries regarding the leaflet's content should be put to TransActual.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
4 days ago
- Daily Mail
Download Festival is engulfed by trans row as acts threaten a boycott after organisers follow Supreme Court ruling and enforce single sex toilet policy
LGBTQ acts have threatened to boycott the Download Festival after organisers followed the Supreme Court 's ruling and said trans men and women should use toilets according to their biological sex - not the gender they identify as. Trans pop-punk artist Noahfinnce says the decision will be put people 'in danger', declaring the decision means: 'My trans sisters have to risk outing themselves in the men's [toilets]'. The row has come to the attention of Harry Potter author and women's rights campaigner JK Rowling, who said of the complaints by trans artists and campaigners: 'Nothing short of women's total capitulation will be good enough for them'. The rock and metal festival held in Donington Park, Leicestershire, between June 13 and 15 will be attended by up to 130,000 people and will feature performances from Green Day, McFly, Korn and Weezer. And six weeks on since the Supreme Court ruled trans women are legally male and trans men are legally female for the purposes of the Equality Act, Download applied it to its portaloo policy. It said this year it would be following the guidance issued by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission that 'trans women (biological men) should not be permitted to use the women's facilities and trans men (biological women) should not be permitted to use the men's facilities.' The vast majority of the portaloos on site will still be gender neutral. Yet Noahfinnce has threatened to quit claiming the decision is 'unsafe' - with some trans men and women vowing to defy the rules and use whatever toilet they want. 'I had a great time playing last year but will not be attending again if I have to queue up for the ladies' and my trans sisters have to risk outing themselves in the men's. All this does is put trans people in danger', the singer said. In a post on Twitter, Noahfinnce wrote: 'Hey @DownloadFest what the f**k are you doing? How have you got the gall to invite trans people like me to play your festival, then ban them from using the toilet? If the only way we can p*ss is by outing ourselves, then you've created an unsafe environment'. Manchester band Witch Fever said: 'The threat to trans people's safety by forcing them to enter toilets that are assigned to a gender that they don't associate with is a complete f***ing tragedy. We are hoping this decision gets changed'. American rock band Pinkshift then said on Instagram: 'Playing @downloadfest was fun last year but what f*cking music festival policies gendered bathrooms? 'Thanks Noahfinnce for being the only artist [we've] seen talk about this. If Download is part of your life, speak up. They think they can get away with discrimination in the year of 2025'. Download then issued a statement declaring that the 'Festival has always been and remains for everyone', adding: 'We want to reassure all of our customers that the majority of the toilets across the site are gender neutral'. Artist and campaigner Birdy Rose said that Download had done the right thing to offer single sex toilet facilities and gender neutral toilet facilities to be available to those who want to use them. But she added: 'This should have been a good and reasonable way to make everybody happy whilst also abiding by the law. Instead 'trans' activists seem to be having an absolute meltdown, claiming that this is 'immoral' and men should just ignore the law and enter the female spaces anyway. 'So what have we learned here? Nothing is ever good enough for the woke lunatics'. Olympian Sharron Davies then tweeted: 'This is exactly what happened in world aquatics. They put on a trans events at a World Cup in Berlin. After endless complains about inclusion. So they didn't even have to be the best in their country like everyone else. Yet no one turned up. These men only want an unfair advantage in a category they have no right to be in. Very revealing… every time'. Equalities Minister Bridget Phillipson said last month that 'services should be accessed on the basis of biological sex', meaning trans women should usually use male toilets if there is no alternative provision, despite last year saying that a man who had legally changed gender 'would be using female toilets'. The Equality and Human Rights Commission has now issued guidance stating unequivocally that in workplaces and places open to the public 'trans women (biological men) should not be permitted to use the women's facilities and trans men (biological women) should not be permitted to use the men's facilities'. But Labour has been accused of being in chaos over the Supreme Court's April ruling. Guidance for schools on pupils who identify as the opposite sex may not be published before the summer holidays, for example. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has demanded Keir Starmer apologise to women after the Supreme Court's biological sex ruling. The Leader of the Opposition told the Mail that the Prime Minister - who has now dropped his belief that transgender women are women - should say sorry to those who lost jobs or were harassed in the row over equality law. In Parliament she also urged him to apologise to MP Rosie Duffield who was hounded out of Labour after she spoke up for female-only spaces - and told him to crack down on the trans activists who defaced Westminster statues in angry protests against the landmark judgment. Her comments came after Sir Keir belatedly spoke out on the declaration by Britain's top court that the legal definition of a woman should be based on biological sex, saying: 'A woman is an adult female, and the court has made that absolutely clear.' He declined to repeat his previous statement that 'trans women are women' but his official spokesman later confirmed he no longer believes it.
Scottish Sun
26-05-2025
- Scottish Sun
Brian Cox play under review after only white actors told they needed ‘woke' training
It's a production about the rise and fall of The Royal Bank of Scotland. RACE ROW Brian Cox play under review after only white actors told they needed 'woke' training Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) A RACE row has erupted over a Brian Cox play after only white actors were told they required diversity training. The National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) has launched a review after it was alleged white cast members were instructed to do lessons in misogyny and oppression awareness - while black performers were excused. Sign up for Scottish Sun newsletter Sign up 1 Brian Cox stars in the show where cast were offered diversity training. Credit: PA Succession favourite Cox, 78, will star in Make it Happen at the Dundee Rep. It's a production about the rise and fall of The Royal Bank of Scotland. The training brief stated: 'This training is not compulsory for people of colour or from the global majority, though their participation is entirely voluntary and welcomed.' Jackie Wylie, the artistic director and NTS chief executive, has ordered a review after the Free Speech Union (FSU) complained the training treated 'members of one racial group less favourably than members of others'. The union said: 'It is plain that actors of white European ancestry are protected under the characteristic of race. 'Case law suggests that having good intentions is not sufficient to counter a claim of direct discrimination.' The FSU, founded by Lord Young of Acton, said the specific exemption for black performers implied the 'training is only mandatory for actors of white, European ancestry'. Jess Mally was due to provide the £1,500 group training course. She's a London anti-racism educator who charges 'white folks' 50 per cent more than people from 'the global majority' in her publicly advertised lessons. The global majority is widely viewed as the 80 per cent of the world population who live outside Europe, North America and Australasia. Tickets for 'white and white-passing people' cost £150 a head, disabled and LGBTQ+ people pay £120 and 'black and brown' people pay £100. Brian Cox defends author JK Rowling and her campaigning on issues relating to gender The FSU has reported NTS to the UK equalities watchdog because the Equality Act prohibits employers from treating staff differently based on the protected characteristic of race, which includes skin colour, nationality and ethnic origin. The NTS said: 'We acknowledge that use of the correct language around the offer of this training is important and this is currently under review.'
Daily Mirror
23-05-2025
- Daily Mirror
'2000s pop culture thrived on turning millennial women against themselves'
Feminist author Sophie Gilbert explores the complicated relationship between pop culture and modern women in her book Girl on Girl - and details how the culture turned a generation of women to misogyny Britney Spears 's breakdown. American Pie's hero journey to get laid. Pamela Anderson 's stolen sex-tape. All of these were huge pop culture moments in the 1990s and 2000s. But with hindsight, each was an intrusion onto women's vulnerability played out for entertainment. Looking back now, it's brazenly horrific. Author and staff writer at The Atlantic, Sophie Gilbert's new book Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves explores the myriad ways that the media, from news to movies, was consumed by women and used as a weapon against themselves. Sophie spoke with The Mirror about the process of writing Girl on Girl and how society has moved on to where we are now. That is to say: in an era of OnlyFans and so-called involuntary-celibate ('in-cel') culture. Sophie says that there were many moments that jolted her into writing this book, not least the election of Donald Trump over his opponent Hillary Clinton in 2016. It is no secret that we live in a time where progress in equality is no longer guaranteed, with the recent news of a reductive definition of what the Equality Act definition of a woman passed down by the UK Supreme Court on April 16. Across the Atlantic in the States, Roe v Wade, the historic legal win for reproductive rights in 1973, was subsequently overturned in 2022. But beyond the contemporary political moment, she tells me, 'so much of wanting to write the book was trying to understand why I didn't see Britney's mental health crisis as a mental health crisis [at the time].' It was presented for all to see as a media moment across magazines and gossip forums. Now there is a near-total infiltration of technology into every facet of our daily lives, but in the 1990s and 2000s this internet was a new frontier. Sophie explains that this had a direct impact on pop culture. She told us: 'The internet had infinite space and we clicked on [relentless coverage of celebrities' daily lives]. So they just gave us more and more and more and I think we all got disgusted with ourselves in the process and projected that disgust outwards at the women who we could not stop looking at.' Visibility, both in the pop culture and beyond, is a power tool, wielded by and against women. Gilbert explains: 'The more people gave us of their lives, the more we wanted to see something that they wouldn't give us, something that we shouldn't.' The interplay between power and visibility in pop culture, particularly in depictions of sex, has exponentially increased from the 1990s to now. Beginning in 1990, HBO's documentary Real Sex, that aired until 2009, was symbolic of the heightened voyeurism of the era, where women's bodies were shown naked and engaging in various sexual acts. This context is important as it created an environment of heightened access to the ordinary person's life, with the boundaries expanded into the sex lives of regular people. But how did this translate into pop culture? In one chapter of Girl on Girl, Sophie rewatches and dissects the hit-movie American Pie, in which teenage boys are presented on a kind of hero's journey to lose their virginity. Sophie tells me about how, as a teenager, she went to see the movie with friends. She said that the movie presents sex as a 'right of passage that cements your path from boy to man.' Later, she realised that the boys she was friends with had 'absorbed this idea of entitlement to sex.' In the 1990s an entitlement to privacy was eroded away. Baywatch actress Pamela Anderson had a sex-tape of her and her then partner Tommy Lee stolen and released. The resulting court case in 1997 ruled that due to her work with Penthouse magazine, that these images of her were not private property. Gilbert says of this that it 'signif[ies] a culture that women no longer had authority over what happened to their body and certainly no longer had claims of privacy over their own body.' In recent years there has been a proliferation of sexualised content, not least in the rise of the platform OnlyFans. Punters can pay for access to a woman's body, to view them in ways they would not be permitted to in their regular day-to-day life. Gilbert said: 'I find people like Bonnie Blue so interesting too because they're really capitalizing on the profit that can be made from not just visibility but extreme visibility.' To put it another way, she adds: 'The people who get the most attention are the ones who are willing to do the most extreme things.' However, Sophie says that it is not the 'extreme stunts of sexuality' that is her concern - she says that it is an individual's choice - but rather what these sites do for women as a collective. She says that it can warp 'men's portrayal [and] understanding of women in general when they see sex being commercialized in this way.' But with every extreme trend, there is a counter-trend. Recently social media has been flooded with so-called 'trad-wife' content, where women are presented as wholesome care-givers and providers. To view it, it harkens back to 1950s womanhood, or as Sophie describes it, it is a 'new traditionalist very conservative impulse'. She said: 'What the trad-wife does is appeal to men's desires but through a more traditionalized frame. So acknowledging that what men really want is a woman who caters to them, who is very beautiful but who also is not threatening in the way that other men might find her desirable. So she's willing to stay home to raise the kids to make bread from scratch.' In Girl on Girl is an astonishing text, that speaks with forensic feminist rage against the misogyny that was so normalised in the 2000s. When I finished this book, I felt like I had been truly seen for the first time, as if the 2000s were a collective horror for women everywhere. The aftermath of which we are still contending with today.
