Mick Hartley

Jo Bartosch at Spiked allows herself a little optimism for a change:

It’s a new festive tradition for me. Sometime in December, an editor will ask, ‘Can I have 800 words on whether next year will be the end of trans?’.

Having spent much of the past decade writing articles explaining the obvious – that men can’t give birth and lesbians don’t have penises – I’ve learned neither to credit our political leaders with common sense, nor to make predictions about their actions. This year, however, feels different.

And the big difference this year? The Cass Review.

The review may have been a bit soggy in places. Cass used concepts and language that were straight out of the Stonewall handbook. She accepted there is such a thing as ‘transgender’ children, when there plainly isn’t. And she also laid the foundations for yet another controversial puberty-blocker experiment. But in the main, the Cass Review was a powerful piece of research. She was absolutely clear that there is no proven benefit to halting children’s development with drugs and that existing research on the treatment of kids confused about their gender is shoddy. She also highlighted the ideological bias in favour of transgenderism that had crept into clinical practice. The shockwaves rocked the political and medical establishments.

UK health secretary Wes Streeting, who was once a member of a Labour Party Facebook group where suspected TERFs were named and shamed, has fully supported the implementation of Cass’s recommendations, making the Conservatives’ emergency ban on puberty blockers permanent. In addition, he has met nurses at the centre of a legal case to secure single-sex changing facilities. He even now admits he was wrong to say ‘transwomen are women’….

But the Cass Review didn’t just shatter the consensus in British politics – the fallout has been global.

In December, a challenge to Tennessee’s state-wide ban on so-called gender-affirming care for children was heard in the US Supreme Court. When questioned about the Cass Review, Chase Strangio, a trans-activist lawyer representing the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), was forced to acknowledge that ‘there is no evidence in the studies that these treatments [puberty blockers] reduce suicide’. Strangio even added that ‘completed suicides’ among trans-identifying youth are thankfully ‘rare’. This is an astonishing volte-face. For much of the past decade, the ACLU has repeatedly claimed that ‘trans kids’ will kill themselves without access to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones….

The lie of transgenderism is so big, it needs an entire infrastructure to support it – and to bully people into silence and compliance. But thanks to the successes of the past few years, for the first time ever I can write that, yes, 2025 will be the year the trans trend crashes.