Mick Hartley

Labour's health supremo Wes Streeting made all the right noises yesterday, after the release of the Cass Report. Julie Bindel, though, is still bitter:

In the aftermath of the Cass Report into the state of Britain’s youth gender care services, I have little interest in condemning people for stupid things they have said in the past — but I am angry about those who only changed their stance once it becomes unavoidably obvious that they were wrong all along. One obvious candidate is Labour shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting — though, admittedly, he did reposition himself in the months before the Cass Report was published.

In the past, Streeting has resorted to what I call “the Joni Mitchell diversion tactic”, attributing the toxicity of the “debate” to “both sides”. Yet Streeting himself hasn’t always been so even-handed. In 2017, he called for “specialist GPs” to be trained to prescribe “bridging hormones” while patients waited for a referral — a practice starkly at odds with the conclusions of the Cass Report.

Yesterday, though, Streeting hailed Cass’s review as “a really important” piece of work. “[It] does raise some serious concerns that are pretty scandalous. Actually I think we’ve got to ask ourselves: why is it that we’ve seen medical interventions that have been given on the basis of very weak evidence? How is it that clinicians have been silenced for coming forward?”

Really, Wes? You don’t understand how these people — including your own colleague, Rosie Duffield — have also been silenced? Of course he does. But then yesterday, disingenuity was the order of the day….

In 2008, I was officially “no-platformed” by the National Union of Students (NUS), becoming the first individual deemed so offensive and dangerous that I was blacklisted alongside five fascist groups. At the time, Streeting was president of the NUS, and I called him and asked for his help. When he refused, I asked if he would simply denounce the allegation that I was transphobic, even if he couldn’t do anything officially to get me removed from the list. He would not. Six years later, when I was considering whether to take some kind of legal action against the NUS for reputational damage, I contacted him again. He initially agreed to an off-the-record chat, but then stopped replying to my emails about a suitable time to speak. It’s funny how things change.

If I sound bitter that’s because I am. Thousands of kids have been harmed by this ideology, along with many, many adults. Those of us who have been shunned, lost jobs, friends and reputations as a result of accusations of bigotry and transphobia are, of course, secondary victims. And as for those who have played it safe? Inevitably, they will now stay silent or pretend that the evidence of harm contained in the Cass Report is a shocking revelation. The truth, of course, is that the evidence has been there all along. To those new converts now pretending otherwise: we see you.

From a Sun interview with Streeting yesterday:

Speaking to The Sun's politics show Never Mind the Ballots, Mr Streeting admitted the controversial LGBTQ-rights group Stonewall – where he once worked – had got it wrong.

Asked if he stood by the organisations’ claim that “trans women are women, get over it”, he admitted “no”.

He added: “To the extent that – and I say this with some self criticism and reflection – if you'd asked me a few years ago, on this topic, I would have said trans men are men, trans women are women. Some people are trans, get over it. Let's move on. This is all blown out of proportion.

“And now I sort of sit and reflect and think actually, there are lots of complexities.”

He went on: “I take the criticism on the chin. And at the same time, I also think that there's been some absolutely ugly rhetoric directed towards trans people who are at the wrong end of all of statistics on hate crime, on self harm, suicide, mental health.”

I didn't know he'd worked for Stonewall. 

So yes, it's a major U-turn, and credit to him for that, but he's still peddling the same old trans-as-victims myth – a position which has been central to the whole trans activist argument, but for which there's zero evidence. All the violence, all the angry abuse, has been coming from just one side in this debate – and it's not the gender criticals.