Mick Hartley

Yes, as the Cass Report shows, "gender-affirming care" in the form of puberty blockers is based on shoddy to non-existent medical foundations. But the question that now needs to be asked is, as Helen Saxby writes in The Critic, Where is so much gender confusion coming from?

A few days after the publication of the Cass Review, another important document was made public: a legal advice report by KC Karen Monaghan, regarding the lawfulness of the Brighton Council/Allsorts Trans Inclusion Schools Toolkit. This was commissioned by a couple of Brighton parents who had experienced first-hand the devastating impact of trans ideology being promoted in their child’s school. The evidence, much like the evidence in the Cass report, must be seen as damning of all professionals who accept unevidenced ideological beliefs to the detriment of normal safeguarding duties and legal compliance. Again, many of us were not surprised. For over six years, residents of Brighton have been challenging the council over the Allsorts toolkit and its neglect of the rights of girls in particular. We have spelled out time and again the incompatibility of the toolkit with the Equality Act and Human Rights legislation, only for it to fall on deaf ears.

The mother at the centre of the case against Brighton Council, who must remain anonymous to protect her child, told me this:

Teachers at our daughter’s school transitioned her, supported binding of her breasts and knew about her being prescribed testosterone but never told us. They say the Brighton Toolkit allows them to do this. The same Toolkit has proliferated around the U.K. We were labelled irrational transphobes for questioning this practice. The Cass Report confirms we were right to be concerned. The Monaghan Advice shows the school and council were unlawful in their actions. We want every parent or teacher branded transphobic for challenging these policies to be empowered by Cass and have access to Monaghan so they can hold schools and councils to account, and vulnerable children can be supported with holistic, efficacious, evidence based and lawful care….

Trans Inclusion Schools Toolkits, such as the Allsorts/Brighton Council one, alongside an increasingly large library of trans picture books for young children, are taking away the security of fixed sex identity for children and replacing it with a confusing smorgasbord of “gender” choice which many children cannot cope with. We are creating children who are “gender-confused” or “gender-questioning” (which are both used as synonyms for “trans”) and then, as the queues grow, asking where the services are for “trans kids”. We have a schools-to-clinic pipeline.  

If you want to reduce the waiting lists for unhappy children, then part of the solution is to look more critically at the source of their unhappiness. When that source consists of outside agencies with an ideological agenda having a disproportionate influence on schools and education, that needs to be stopped. Bring on the public enquiry.