Canadian anti-trans activist Billboard Chris on why Edinburgh spurred him to change his life

But by his own description, Chris Elston is simply a devoted father who wants to make the world a better place for his young daughters.

Mr Elston - better known as Billboard Chris - gave up a six-figure job in finance to become an international anti-trans activist and free speech campaigner.

For some, he is a hate figure. For others, he is a hero.

Edinburgh, he says, was part of the impetus for this life change.

In 2020, he was reading Harry Potter to his eight-year-old younger daughter every night before bed.

At the same time, he read of the now infamous incident involving an “I Love JK Rowling” poster at Waverley station.

The controversial campaigner Kelly-Jay Keen paid for the poster to be displayed to coincide with the author’s birthday, but it was removed by Network Rail in short order, having been deemed “too political”.

“I just got tired of people not being able to talk about this,” Mr Elston said. “We can't even say we love the world's greatest children's author now, and people are getting fired from their jobs for acknowledging reality.

“It's just totally nuts.”

In response, he paid for a billboard in Vancouver with the same message - I Love JK Rowling.

It too lasted a day before being removed, this time over an allegation of “hate speech” relating to Ms Rowling’s gender-critical beliefs.

Mr Elston said sign companies in Canada blocked him, but he put up billboards across the US in September that year - in San Francisco, LA, Portland, throughout Utah, Washington DC on the metro and finally Times Square.

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His frustration with the Canadian sign companies led him to the realisation that a sign could not be removed from his back - and so his A-frame campaign began.

The father-of-two began standing in the street wearing an A-frame with gender-critical statements, inviting people to talk to him.

He said: “I talk to people old school, because I grew up old school. I was born in 1975 and social media is very harmful for many reasons, but it's also not helpful when it comes to debate.”

Mr Elston does, however, use social media to his advantage. In a day, Mr Elston might speak to between 20 and 30 people in person, but his videos of the interactions are viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

His core message is that young people questioning their gender should not receive experimental cross-sex hormones - an issue he describes as “the biggest medical scandal in human history”.

So far, he has visited more than 100 cities around the world and many of those multiple times. The welcome is, to put it lightly, mixed. Recently in Brussels he was arrested.

In London this month, Mr Elston was attacked during a pro-Palestine march where vanilla ice cream was smashed into his head.

Backed by a number of conservative advocacy groups, he recently took successful free speech legal action against the Australian online regulator over a tweet.

He and his wife, a primary teacher, have been married for 19 years and she is entirely supportive of his career pivot.

Financially it has been a “struggle”, but Mr Elston said he planned to campaign for the rest of his life, given it was “much more satisfying than chasing money at some job”.

“When you have kids, your life becomes about the legacy you leave for your children,” he said. “I don't want them in a world that doesn't know what a woman is, in a world that's trying to change the sex of children.”

He shares a story of his daughter, when she was ten, going to her diving lesson and there was a teenager at the pool with a double mastectomy.

Mr Elston’s view is absolute. “There is no such thing as a transgender child,” he said. “They're girls and boys who need to hear the positive message that they're beautiful, just as they are, no drugs or scalpels needed.”

He points to cases in the US where young people are now suing the medical professionals who facilitated their transition.

Mr Elston also cites high numbers of autistic children identifying as transgender, and points to concerns about social contagion and the experimental nature of puberty blocking drugs given to children.

The debate around these issues in the UK has been particularly toxic, and Mr Elston said he gets more pushback here than in any North American city. That is, trans rights are more vocally supported.

In Edinburgh and Glasgow this month, he has, he said, had productive conversations.

However, recently Mr Elston was arrested in Brussels, along with his companion, a lawyer. He said he was in the street with his billboard when a small crowd formed and someone threw a glass bottle.

The Canadian called the police who asked him to leave. He refused, citing freedom of expression, and he and his companion were arrested and taken to a police station.

He was hopeful of being given a fine - “something I could fight”. But after being detained, strip searched and held in a cell for hours, they were released without charge. His signs were sent for destruction.

It wasn’t his first arrest and Mr Elston said he had also been assaulted around 50 times, including having his arm broken.

The campaigner said the debate in Scotland differed from North America because in Scotland the gender critical campaign was being spearheaded by “feminists in their ‘50s and ‘60s” who were a “totally different crowd from the North American Christians and conservatives”.

Surprisingly, he is not religious, which would explain the evangelical nature of his proselytising. He attends a Baptist church, but describes himself as “more or less agnostic”.

Mr Elston’s focus is on the medical treatment of children, but he does not take a live-and-let-live to adult transgender people.

There is, he is clear, in his view no such thing as a transgender person. “Dress however you want when you’re 40-something years old, do whatever you want to your body”, he said. But he insists there is no way to change gender.

Scottish Greens MSP Maggie Chapman, a vocal supporter of trans rights, expressed concern at the “spike in the number of individuals who have created their persona around the far-right politics of division and hatred” and Mr Elston’s campaigning in Scotland.

“Billboard Chris is just another one of these social media presences who uses their platform to push a harmful agenda and mobilise hatred,” she said.

“It only takes a few minutes to scroll through his accounts and see the content he pushes is full of homophobia, transphobia and calling anyone who declares themselves anti-fascist a terrorist.”