Mick Hartley

Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph:

When Dr Hilary Cass was commissioned to report on standards of care within the NHS, it was as if finally an adult had stepped into the room. She and her team have looked at the evidence and practices that had recently evolved the affirmative model (designed to support and affirm an individual’s gender identity) and found much wanting. She also signalled the high levels of comorbidities with gender dysphoria. A high proportion of these girls who did not want to be girls were autistic. Many had troubled childhoods or had been in care. Many were gay. All of this resulted in the unravelling of Gids and a ban on puberty blockers.

In the full report, which is due to be published this week, Cass is not only concerned with medical intervention (puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, surgery) but is also expected to come out against “social transition”. Though this is not something that happens within the health service it is, she says, an “active intervention because it may have significant effects on the child or young person in terms of psychological functioning. There are different views on the benefits versus the harms of early social transition… it is not a neutral act and better information is needed about outcomes.”

Some believe that socially transitioning kids will lock them into a gender identity and medical pathway that is detrimental. Cass emphasises that gender expression is indeed fluid and changeable for adolescents and that many may take till their mid-20s to settle. In other words, leave these kids alone.

Indeed, faced with this huge increase in kids saying they are trans, many schools have acquiesced. Yet teachers are not clinicians, nor are they there to diagnose children. Do they understand what they are doing? The entire narrative around trans children has been imported from America but it is breaking apart.

Breaking apart here, maybe. In America, I think, not so much. And we still don't know how the next Labour government will deal with this. Starmer is already under huge pressure from the left – notably at the moment over Gaza. Can he afford to battle them on gender stuff as well? It's clear enough that he doesn't have any firm personal beliefs here: he'll just do what he thinks will make life easier. All the more reason then to establish firm principles on protecting children from the gender cult before Labour comes to power.

Now is the time to step back and ask ourselves how we got here. The trans child is a manifestation of a recent story that the culture has told itself. This is a story of social contagion combined with the genuine distress of mostly young girls.

Children cannot be blamed for acting out but the adults who have encouraged this, while patting themselves on the back for their progressive views, still need to be challenged. Cass is but the start.