Mick Hartley

Zoe Strimpel in the Telegraph:

Since Hillary Cass’s report came out in April, full of damning evidence against the medicalised approach of NHS clinics like the Tavistock towards children suffering from gender confusion, many have said the worst is over. Britain is sane again, they say. We have seen off the worst of the pro-trans movement.

I have not been so sure, and indeed, jubilation does seem a bit hasty. The madness persists, as was made clear last week with news that an NHS hospital – the James Paget University Hospitals Trust in Great Yarmouth – has told people working in obstetrics and midwifery to refer to new babies’ gender as having been “assigned female/male at birth” which it claims “accurately depicts the situation of what happens at birth”. An LGBTQ+ glossary of inclusive terms was helpfully provided, and staff now know not to address any audiences as “ladies and gentlemen” – but rather as “folks”, “everyone” or “honoured guests”. Anything that implies that there are only two genders if of course verboten – so no “opposite sex” either, thank you very much.

It’s all bonkers. Barking. But the stuff about referring to gender as merely “assigned” at birth is perhaps the barkingest. It is newborns that are deemed ripe for offence, or perhaps brainwashing, if their paperwork, on the day of birth, is marked “M” or “F”? Or is it their parents – people who probably came of age in a world where there were indeed just two gender options at birth, to precisely nobody’s consternation?

The point, I think, is to emphasise what gender activists like to believe is the arbitrariness of it, because doctors can only see the superficial outward signs but are unable to perceive the gendered soul buried deep within the wee child. The way is therefore clear for the child, at some later stage, to announce that the attribution was wrong and that they now wish to change their sex in line with the gender identity at last revealed – in a sort of Damascene moment, usually on exposure to social media – as the opposite to the sex to which they were so cruelly assigned at birth.