Mick Hartley

More from the excellent Café Royal Books catalogue – here with photographer Douglas Corrance:

[Photos © Cafe Royal Books/Dougls Corrance]

Julie Burchill on good form in the Spectator:

Boyish girls, climb the nearest tree and give a Tarzan whoop of victory – girly boys, fashion a floral crown and caper copiously. Thanks to the Cass Report, failing to follow sexist stereotypes (which decree that girls play with dolls and boys play with themselves) will no longer get you marched off to the sex-correction clinic. You’ll no longer be stuffed like a five-bird roast with the best that Big Pharma can tout and later shuttled off to the abattoir to have your perfectly healthy sexual organs hacked off. For the Great Trans Con has been bust as wide open as the space between India Willoughby’s ears.

Was ever a ‘liberation’ movement ever so risible from the start? Did any other allegedly oppressed group’s bid for equality include seeking to rob another oppressed group of their rights? Did any other oppressed group claim their freedom by dressing up as another oppressed group? And, crucially, did any allegedly oppressed group ever carry out such a comprehensive and conclusive capture of the most conservative and capitalist corporations and institutions? No, they didn’t – because previously, oppressed groups weren’t mostly composed of white middle-class men, as the trans-lobby are.

Like the Mitchell and Webb Nazis, the signs that the trans-mob weren’t the good guys – though they were definitely guys – were there all along. The threats of violence, rape and death while calling women who sought to preserve women’s spaces the hateful ones. The snitching to the police – such rebels! – who reacted true to form by siding with the blokes and arresting women for being impolite to men, joined by the judges who made raped women call their attackers ‘she’ out of ‘respect’. They stand revealed as a bunch of liars, fantasists and bullies, the whole rotten lot of them.

Now the reckoning has come. With it, the people who were previously vilified will be vindicated. The greatest winner will be JK Rowling, as she generally is – and she has handled her victory with characteristic wit and grace…

Predictably:

Amnesty International responds to the Cass Review, saying, “It’s concerning that sections of the media and many politicians continue to spread moral panic with no regard for the possible consequences for trans people and their families." The statement does not go into specifics. pic.twitter.com/wOO2BdRlmk

— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) April 12, 2024

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The big gap in the Cass Report, as Janice Turner in the Times notes, is the lack of data from the gender clinics that refused to cooperate:

Imagine if 9,000 children who began treatment at the Tavistock Gids clinic (the NHS Gender Identity Development Service) were interviewed as adults. How did their lives pan out? What proportion are thriving as trans? How many now regret their youthful decisions? Has their mental health improved? Is their physical health affected by hormones? How many detransitioned, and why? A longitudinal study of this size would benefit not just NHS England but gender medicine worldwide.

Surely anyone who cares about these troubled adolescents, two thirds teenage girls, would leap to assist. The study’s key barrier, that a trans person acquires a new NHS number making it impossible to link a female child to an adult with a male gender marker, had been removed by special legislation for the purposes of the review.

So the flat refusal by six out of seven adult clinics to participate is the most revealing thing in Cass. The Nottingham clinic head, Dr Derek Glidden, wouldn’t comply despite being the NHS’s most senior adviser on trans health. Relations between the adult service and the University of York team grew so hostile, meetings were abandoned. And in this we see future problems for implementing Cass’s recommendations: that was just one skirmish; what lies ahead is a war.

Gender medicine is hugely suspicious of data. Clinics are noted for professional incuriosity and institutional sloppiness. I recall judges at the Keira Bell judicial review flabbergasted by Gids’s derelict record keeping. So no wonder they feared what Cass’s researchers might find. Even without the adult data, Cass coolly blew apart everything from suicide myths to the claimed benefit of social transition. With the data, what might she have found? Perhaps detransition rates far higher than the claimed 1 per cent, or that female misery is unalleviated by amputated breasts. Then the whole clinical edifice might crumble — which it still could, now adult services face their own independent review.

The broader truth is that child gender medicine is not fuelled by science but activism; not upon “does it work?” but “does the patient demand it?” Poor data is not a glitch but a feature.

It's not a science; it's a cult.

How do you create a new evidence-based service still staffed by clinicians who abhor evidence? The very Gids therapists and psychiatrists who oversaw a medical scandal, expediting children to blockers and hormones, still work in this field. They post on social media groups about how their work was misunderstood and that, as pariahs, they’re the real victims.

How can they fall in line with Cass when they disagree on first principles: ie does a “trans child” exist? Cass’s position tilts towards trans identity being socially constructed, peer-influenced or, in girls, spurred by a fleeing from womanhood precipitated by sexual abuse or porn. But gender ideologues believe an infant contains an innate gender identity that is apparent from early childhood, and the clinician’s job is to help manifest it, by bodily mutilations if required.

Yep, a cult. If you believe in innate gender identities no amount of evidence is going to sway you. Some transitioners were unhappy? Perhaps they weren't made of the right stuff. Perhaps a more radical approach was needed. Stronger drugs! Take off more bits! Whatever the problem, nothing is going to sway that belief. It's evidence-proof. 

Jack Delano, January 1943. "Nelson, Illinois. Chicago and North Western Railroad freight en route from Clinton, Iowa, to Chicago. Stopping for coal and water to give passenger trains the right of way."

[Photo: Shorpy/Jack Delano for the Office of War Information]

BBC News journalist Charlie Walsham in the Spectator – How did the BBC get the trans debate so wrong?

Regrettably, I believe there is a straight line between the BBC’s capitulation to extreme trans rights ideologues and the disturbing findings in Dr Hilary Cass’s 388-page report.

Crucially, what Dr Cass has exposed was only able to happen because of a skewed and distorted national conversation around the issue of sex and gender, a narrative I believe aided by the nation’s broadcaster. Dissenting voices have been marginalised, castigated, cancelled, silenced.

Well before Dr Cass got to work, BBC employees started putting their preferred pronouns in their email signatures. Given the increasingly polarised political debate over self-ID, these virtue-signalling postscripts made a mockery of the BBC’s neutral remit; they also exerted an unspoken pressure on colleagues who resisted this posturing….

As Dr Cass tried in vain to wrest data from the uncooperative Tavistock clinic to assist her work, the BBC was doubling down on its adherence to the cultish self-ID doctrine, depicting in news reports sadistic male murderers and devious rapists as women so as not to offend these odious men; victims be damned. This approach by a news organisation on any topic, let alone a hugely disputatious issue, looks like pure propaganda.

Despite having a well-funded Verify department, the BBC has made no attempts to set out the cold, hard scientific reality that modern medicine has found no way of changing a healthy biological male human into a woman, or vice versa.

Neither has the BBC’s Disinformation and Social Media Correspondent ever tried to interrogate the often-aired claim that ‘trans women are women’, a favourite slogan of the charity Stonewall, which the BBC was closely affiliated with as recently as late 2021.

Even simply looking the other way was not enough for the BBC. Instead, it signalled what looked like a complete abandonment of accuracy on the trans issue when it upheld a complaint against the Today programme’s Justin Webb for daring to say that trans women are ‘in other words, males’.

Is the ship slowly turning, then? Yes, they had Hannah Barnes on Newsnight, asking Where have the media been?

On the other hand here's their  most prominent story on the subject today – Gender care review disappointing, says trans man:

Trans young people say they feel "disappointed" and "ignored" by the Cass Review into gender care.

One man, 19, who was part of the review's focus groups, said the positive lived experiences of trans children who had been able to access puberty blockers was not included in the report.

Not much change there, then. It's too ingrained.

Meanwhile, in Texas:

Congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee (D):

The moon is "made up mostly of gases" so we can soon live inside it, unlike the sun which is "almost" too hot to go near. pic.twitter.com/bSd9zXcEPo

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) April 9, 2024

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More at the New York Post.

The former top Democrat on the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee badly botched elementary lunar facts while speaking during the gathering at Booker T. Washington High School in Houston.

“You’ve heard the word ‘full moon.’ Sometimes you need to take the opportunity just to come out and see a full moon is that complete rounded circle, which is made up mostly of gases,” Jackson Lee, 74, told teenage pupils who gathered on a sports field ahead of the rare celestial event.

“And that’s why the question is why or how could we as humans live on the moon? Are the gases such that we could do that?” the congresswoman said.

“The sun is a mighty powerful heat, but it’s almost impossible to go near the sun. The moon is more manageable.”

Jackson Lee made a series of other questionable statements, including saying the moon, which reflects the sun’s light, gives off “unique light and energy” and misstating the scientific reason for the eclipse….

The solar eclipse was happening because the Earth was unusually close to the moon, she said — though, in fact, the eclipse was the result of the alignment of the sun and moon.

Kathleen Stock at UnHerd – How a cult captured the NHS:

Pity poor Dr Hilary Cass, the eminent paediatrician charged with managing an independent review of NHS gender services for young people, whose final report was published this week. Given the hair-trigger sensibilities of interested parties, she seems to have been unable to state unambiguously that now-popular treatments for young people confused or distressed by their sexed bodies are blatant quackery: keeping pre-pubescent kids in suspended chemical animation on the basis of a single, discredited study; dosing teenagers liberally with opposite-sex hormones; or — when a child reaches the tender age of 18, though even earlier in other countries — empowering her to have major body parts cut off.

Instead, time and again in Cass’s report she is forced back into the conceit that the most pressing problem for contemporary gender medicine is the lack of good evidence for such interventions either way. It is as if a modern-day medic had been tasked with reviewing the efficacy of trepanning, and then ordered to defend her findings in front of fanatical fifth-century devotees. “It’s not that drilling a hole in a child’s skull to release demons is necessarily harmful, you understand — indeed, it may be the best outcome in some cases. The main issue is the lack of long-term follow up.”

Alongside Cass’s cumulatively devastating account of reckless decision-making, poor evidential standards, and patchy record-keeping at Gids and elsewhere, a whole section of the report gently attempts to educate its readership about “the components of evidence-based medicine” — complete with basic explainers about randomised controlled trials, blinding processes, and the possibility of bias. She might as well be addressing an archaic people who have just emerged blinking from a time capsule, still convinced that disease is God’s punishment for insufficient acts of propitiation.

In a sense, though, this is indeed very like one group to whom the report is addressed: those clinicians, parents and patients immersed in bubbles of identity affirmation, and cognitively isolated from any reasoning or evidence that would confound their worldview. Perhaps unusually for a medical review, it is clear from Cass’s overtly respectful tone and at times still-euphemistic language that her aim is not just to inform these readers but also to deprogram them.

The very first sentence of her report begins with a weary disavowal of Stonewall-endorsed paranoias (“This Review is not about… undermining the validity of trans identities, challenging the right of people to express themselves, or rolling back on people’s rights to healthcare”). Somewhat nonsensically, references to “birth-registered females” are scattered throughout the text, as if the author were somehow only concerned with those with birth certificates — presumably an attempt to build bridges with child-like souls still convinced sex is something coercively assigned to neonates at random. Generally, there is a sense of gingerly addressing a group of emotionally labile people who are not quite ready to face the whole truth….

One could be forgiven for thinking that medical culture should easily be able to condemn bizarre physical interventions performed upon children in the name of religion, without having to undertake a four-year clinical review first. Indeed, lawmakers have previously criminalised practices such as FGM without requiring any such tests. But one instructive thing we can learn from the wreckage of gender medicine is that, with the right kind of institutional and rhetorical scaffolding, doctors can become unsure about what their goals are supposed to be. It’s no good telling them to first do no harm, when they can’t work out how to reliably detect it.

Remember the "non-binary" Canadian who went to court demanding that the taxpayer fund his visit to Austin Texas, where he'd get a vagina to go with his penis? – a "penile-preserving vaginoplasty". Well, he's won his case:

An Ontario resident has successfully secured public funding for a specialized gender-affirming surgery argued to be "experimental" by the provincial health insurer following a years-long legal battle.

"Gender-affirming", ffs. Which gender? Both at once? Delusion-affirming more like.

The prospective patient, identified only as K.S. in documents filed with the provincial Health Services Appeal and Review Board (HSARB), was seeking coverage under the Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) for a penile-preserving vaginoplasty, a procedure in which a vaginal cavity is surgically created while keeping the penis intact.

K.S., whose identity is protected under a publication ban, identifies as non-binary. She presents as predominantly female and uses she/her pronouns, but does not align with the gender binary. The reason why K.S. is seeking this particular procedure is because it aligns with her identity – and having the provincial insurer previously deny her request made her feel “less than".

“There have been so many times that I have had to justify myself to just be,” K.S. previously told CTV News Toronto. “People who aren’t trans or nonbinary don’t have to get that permission to exist.”

Following Wednesday’s decision, K.S. said that she is "ecstatic" over the decision.

He won't be feeling so ecstatic when, inevitably, the complications set in. For the rest of his life.

And this:

K.S. was first denied coverage for the procedure in 2022, with OHIP claiming it wasn't an insurable service.

She successfully overturned that decision in an appeal to the HSARB arguing, in part, her reason for wanting a vaginoplasty without a penectomy would validate her non-binary identity, putting an end to her gender dysphoria that she’s felt since her teenage years.

At that hearing, OHIP called Dr. Yonah Krakowsky, a sexual medicine surgeon at Women's College Hospital, who, although supporting patient autonomy, testified vaginoplasty without penectomy is considered experimental by most surgeons.

Still, K.S.' submissions that the procedure she seeks is identical to the process used with some vaginoplasties in the province were sufficient to see the panel rule in her favour.

"Considered experimental by most surgeons"? Jesus. How about "criminal", "gross malpractice", "an obscene travesty of medical care"?

O Canada.

Update: apparently our man is a diaper fetishist, and experiences spells where he's “obsessed” with incontinence. After the operation the diapers will be less of a fetish, more of a necessity. He's also bi-polar and suffers from depression – which makes medical collusion with his delusions even more unforgiveable.

There's Wes Streeting and his welcome volte face on trans issues after the Cass Report. On the other hand:

Angela Rayner has declined to apologise for endorsing a charter describing feminist organisations that raised fears about the treatment of trans children as “hate groups”.

When Ms Rayner stood to be the deputy Labour leader in 2020, she backed a trans rights charter that described bodies including Women’s Place UK, which campaigns for single-sex rape refuges for women, as “trans-exclusionist hate groups”.

In the wake of the Cass review into the treatment of children with gender issues, which concluded that much of the evidence for gender medicine was “shaky” and that drugs such as puberty blockers should be used with extreme caution, Ms Rayner faced calls to renounce the comments. However, her spokesman declined to apologise.

High-profile Labour figures have previously made remarks endorsing the views of trans activists, including Sir Keir Starmer, the party leader, who in 2022 said that “trans women are women”….

The charter signed by Ms Rayner called on signatories to “organise and fight against transphobic organisations such as Woman’s Place UK, LGB Alliance and other trans-exclusionist hate groups”.

Speaking to The Telegraph, Kate Barker, the charity’s chief executive, said: “We hope Angela Rayner will reflect on the Cass review and reconsider her opinion of LGB Alliance. It is not ‘hateful’ for an LGB charity to warn about ideologically-driven, unevidenced medical experiments on young people, most of whom are lesbian, gay or bisexual.

“There’s a much more profound issue at play, however, which is a culture where even senior politicians condemn their opponents as ‘hateful’ with zero evidence and zero engagement. It’s also one of the chief reasons this unprecedented medical scandal has been allowed to continue for so long.

“This year, LGB Alliance will once again apply to exhibit at Labour conference. We hope, in the light of Cass, we will finally be granted the opportunity to attend and engage in civilised and rational discussion.”

We shall see. Labour still has a long way to go on this. Labour politicians previously have been falling over themselves to follow Starmer down the trans rabbit hole.

Health Secretary Victoria Atkins:

“Labour has spent the last 10 years trying to shut women up when it comes to this. They have been part of the ideology, the culture wars, creating an atmosphere of intimidation for anyone who dared to question this ideology.

“So it is a little bit rich of the Labour Party to be lecturing the rest of us now, having been so forthright in their support for this ideology in the past.”

She's right. See Rosie Duffield.