Mick Hartley

Helen Joyce in The Critic:

Of the aphorisms attributed to the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, none is more famous than that you should build a golden bridge over which your enemies can retreat. If they are backed into a corner, the idea goes, their only way out will be through you. But if running away is easy and tempting, winning may not require wading through rivers of blood.

For some who profess the trans neo-religion, the Cass Report, published in April, looks like a golden bridge. Distinguished paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass said nothing in it that critics of gender clinics’ reckless experimentation haven’t been saying for years. But she said it in a government-commissioned report and demonstrated the near-total lack of an evidence base.

Just two of 103 academic papers that fit the criteria for inclusion in the literature review were judged to be high quality, and the rest were either worthless or inconclusive. An awful lot of people who spent years insisting not just that gender-confused kids should be chemically castrated with puberty blockers and speedily prescribed cross-sex hormones, but also that women can have penises and all the other trans articles of faith, are now looking for a face-saving way to recant.

Amongst them is Keir Starmer. In 2021 the Labour leader said backbencher Rosie Duffield was wrong to say that only women have a cervix; post-Cass he admits that “biologically, she of course is right”. Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, who used to say “trans women are women, get over it”, now says the next Labour government will “work to implement the expert recommendations of the Cass review”.

Why did two clever men ever believe that men could become women? Or that little children could discern their innate gender identities before they could tie their shoelaces?

Streeting, like so many gay men, was presumably misled by some gay campaign groups’ adoption of trans ideology despite its incompatibility with gay people’s rights. As for Sir Keir, he’s a lawyer, and lawyers are prone to believing that laws can overwrite reality.

His insistence pre-Cass that “99.9 per cent” of women don’t have penises makes sense if you think a government-issued piece of paper determines your sex (the 0.1 per cent are men with gender recognition certificates stating their “acquired gender” as female).

Funny how many people fell for this when they have no trouble understanding the concept of a “legal fiction” when the government declares Rwanda safe.

Streeting surely understands that the more that is done to end the scandal of sterilising gender-confused children before he picks up the health portfolio, the better for him. Sir Keir no doubt wants to avoid questions about women’s penises at every press conference he gives as prime minister. As John Maynard Keynes nearly said, when the incentives change, I change my mind.

The hope now is that many of the cowards who remained professionally deaf and blind to the downsides of pretending sex can change, join the rush for the exit. The self-proclaimed sceptics who used to be so scathing about homoeopathy but swallowed the ludicrous claim that it was possible to be “born in the wrong body”. The New Atheists who genuflected to a godless neo-religion. The civil servants supposed to uphold impartiality in public life, who put their pronouns in their email signatures….