Mick Hartley

Hadley Freeman in the Sunday Times – Will the trans activists ever accept they lost?

Dr Hilary Cass’s recommendations to NHS England were careful and compassionate and they strongly urged against overmedicalising young people, as had been the NHS’s tendency. So presumably it’s been a straight path since then, with those who advocated doling out masculinising and feminising hormones to young people now admitting they got it wrong, and everyone singing “kumbaya”? Well. Let’s look at just the past week for a snapshot of the situation. You may require motion sickness pills for all the ups and downs.

Last weekend the health secretary, Wes Streeting, confirmed his decision to keep the ban on puberty blockers being prescribed to gender-dysphoric young people and patiently spelt out his reasons. The too-long, didn’t-read version is: “I believe in science and safeguarding and so I’m following Cass’s recommendations.” This got exactly the kind of measured response we’ve all come to expect from gender ideologues. The legal campaign group the Good Law Project, run by the tax barrister Jolyon Maugham, claimed there had been a “surge” of suicides of young people because they could no longer obtain puberty blockers. High-profile journalists and thousands of others repeated that claim. On Friday the government’s suicide adviser, Professor Louis Appleby, published a strikingly punchy review that quashed that claim and condemned those making it. Creepy fantasies about young people killing themselves are par for the course for gender ideologues. But, post Cass, flat-out lies are no longer accepted.

Just days after Streeting reaffirmed his commitment to Cass’s recommendations, the New Statesman reported that the British Medical Association was voting to disavow them. The BMA denied this but conceded that there had been “discussions” and that “the outcome of the discussions is not being made public”. The lack of transparency from the BMA is worrying, clearly. Yet the hasty denial and obfuscation are, at least, an acknowledgment that disavowing Cass would go very much against the public mood now.

The day after that it was the King’s Speech, which has nothing to do with Colin Firth, even though my brain keeps saying otherwise. For months there had been suggestions that as well as banning gay conversion therapy — the practice of trying to persuade someone they’re not gay — Labour would ban trans conversion therapy. Dr Cass has warned that this could risk “frightening therapists who are just doing their job and having an appropriate exploratory conversation with a young person”. In other words, an adult — doctor, teacher or parent — could be prosecuted if they asked an unhappy teenage girl why she thought she was a boy, and whether it might have something to do with a past traumatic experience. And what if a gay boy has internalised homophobia and so insists he must be a girl if he fancies other boys — isn’t transgenderism itself then a kind of gay conversion therapy? “No loopholes,” the reliably ill-advised Anneliese Dodds, minister for women and equalities, tweeted. And yet Labour found one, proposing not legislation but merely a draft bill banning trans conversion therapy, and carving out exceptions for “legitimate psychological support”. The draft is a sop to Labour MPs such as Zarah Sultana and Apsana Begum who insist, still, they know better than Dr Cass and young people should be given puberty blockers — the equivalent of sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting, “Nah nah nah nah naaah!” But it’s ultimately a nod to reality, and proof that Cass has made an impact on Keir Starmer.

There are people who will never accept Cass’s recommendations. For some it’s because they genuinely believe children can and should change sex, just as wine can change into Jesus’s blood. I suspect Dr Helen Webberley falls into this category, given she has made a career out of prescribing puberty blockers to children. On Friday the General Medical Council finally revoked her licence.

Others will simply be too embarrassed to admit they got this so wrong, and the publisher Hachette may well soon feel the sting of that. It is facing a claim of discrimination from a former editor, Ursula Doyle, who says she was pushed out of her job after publishing feminist books including Kathleen Stock’s bestselling Material Girls, which is critical of gender theory. Last weekend Doyle launched a crowdfunder for her case and reached her goal — £30,000 — in less than a day, proving that the time when women who refused to say two plus two equals unicorns could be quietly shoved out of their jobs is over.

Then there are parents who, for whatever reason, helped their child to transition. Some of them will never accept Cass, because to acknowledge that you facilitated your child’s self-destructive behaviour is too painful to accept. That is very sad for them, and their children. But the past hundred days suggests that in the very near future fewer children and parents will have to suffer similarly. The road will not be straight, but it’s finally in the right direction. Two plus two equals four once more.

That's surely the key to a great deal of gender activist opposition. As I think Helen Joyce was the first to point out, those parents who transed their children need to believe they did the right thing for their own sanity. Imagine, given the sacred task of bringing up children, subjecting them to medical mutilation and ruining their lives all for the sake of a cult-like fantasy that is now being exposed as dangerous nonsense from top to bottom. It's a nightmare they can only alleviate by sticking fingers in their ears and keeping on, obsessively, with the delusion.