Mick Hartley

Jenny Hjul in the Telegraph on Nicola Sturgeon’s misconceived trans crusade:

A shameful dereliction of duty is taking place in Scotland under the noses of the Scottish NHS and driven by the ideological fervour of the Nationalist administration led by Nicola Sturgeon. According to a report this week, children as young as nine have been prescribed life altering puberty blockers at Scotland’s controversial gender clinic, dubbed “Sturgeon’s Tavistock” after the scandal-hit London centre that has been ordered to shut down.

The Glasgow-based Sandyford continues to operate, despite calls for it to close over its treatment of vulnerable children with what critics say are experimental and dangerous drugs. A report by NHS clinicians found 79 children aged between nine and 18 were referred for puberty-suppressing medication. Nearly 40 per cent of the youngsters undergoing gender treatment suffered from mental health problems and a disproportionately high number had autism.

Meanwhile, psychiatrists and campaigners have accused Sturgeon’s government of pursuing an “ideologically-driven activist agenda” based on affirming children’s feelings of gender dysphoria rather than on medical evidence. These are not the kind of headlines the First Minister would have envisioned when she embarked on her crusade to become the UK’s greatest social reformer, focusing her zeal on the transgender cause.

Distancing herself from medical opinion and the public debate in England, she has not only backed the Sandyford but ploughed ahead with legislation to make it easier for transgender people to self-identify as the opposite sex. In the past week especially, the extent of her detachment from mainstream views on this issue has become obvious, with a political backlash that has taken her by surprise.

Not that she's taking any notice of the criticism: it's hands over ears and la-la-la-you're-transphobic.

It is the disturbing stories emerging from the Sandyford, though, that are most likely to resonate with the Scottish public, perhaps until now reluctant to engage fully with toxic transgender politics. 

Dr David Bell, a whistleblower at the Tavistock, spelt out the harm done to children once they take puberty blockers. “The very act of starting them is putting them on a medical pathway, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he told The Telegraph. “Once you are on the drugs you become very frightened of coming off them because you have made puberty into a phobic object. Sandyford should be shut down. NHS England has agreed that the gender service at Tavistock be shut down for these reasons. It is not that English children have different bodies or genes or minds to Scottish children.”

Those who speak out against Sturgeon’s transgender agenda are typically labelled transphobic, bullied into submission (some MSPs considering voting against her legislation last week were reportedly leant on and pressured by their fellow MSPs)…. But when children are so clearly the victims of such government groupthink, ordinary voters will surely question what is being done in their name.

In embracing the militant trans lobby so wholeheartedly, with no understanding of the repercussions for women and children, Sturgeon no doubt considered herself in the vanguard of progressive politics. And yet, by allowing herself to be captured by extremists, she has shown how out of touch she is with majority opinion in Scotland, on either side of the independence divide.

The Labour Party, should it get into power here, seems determined to follow in Sturgeon's footsteps – again in the belief that they're in the vanguard of progressive politics.