Politics: the adults left the room
By Richard North - April 11, 2024
I haven’t read the whole of final report of the “Independent review of gender identity services for children and young people”, otherwise known as the Cass Review, after its author Dr Hilary Cass (pictured).
It’s actually – as its name correctly indicates – a review of specific services provided by the NHS to children and young people and, as such, the 388 page report is far too long to be of interest to observers, like me, who are primarily concerned with the political and social aspects of this issue.
The interesting thing about this review, though, is that Dr Cass tries desperately not to make it a political document but, early in her discussion is forced to address the background, non-medical controversy, and she does so in a way that it effectively frames her report.
“Despite the best intentions of everyone with a stake in this complex issue”, she says emolliently – for some of the players’ motivations are far from well-intentioned – “the toxicity of the debate is exceptional”.
The word “exceptional” is well-chosen – descriptive but largely neutral. But it cannot help but be a massive understatement for one of the most damaging and hard-fought corners of the so-called “culture wars”.
This corner has been characterised by vitriol so powerful that “debate” becomes a misstatement. It’s rather like suggesting that the Ukrainians and Russians are engaged in a debate about the future of Donbass.
Cass, herself, says she has faced “criticism” for engaging with groups and individuals who take a social justice approach and advocate for gender affirmation. She admits to having been equally criticised for involving groups and individuals who have urged more caution.
And, with a gentleness which really does not begin to touch the intensity of the invective that has dominated her work, she tells us that the knowledge and expertise of experienced clinicians who have reached different conclusions about the best approach to care “are sometimes dismissed and invalidated”.
A hint of that intensity, though, is allowed when she concedes that “there are few other areas of healthcare where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views, where people are vilified on social media, and where name-calling echoes the worst bullying behaviour”.
This, she says, “must stop” – a vain hope that is immediately demolished by the reaction to her review. Somewhat naively, she goes on to say that “polarisation and stifling of debate do nothing to help the young people caught in the middle of a stormy social discourse”.
In so doing, she is neglecting the very real tendency of the advocates of extreme medical intervention – in what is increasingly seen as a mental health problem – to supress debate and to round on critics with accusations of “transphobia” and resort to police intervention under the “hate crime” label.
Thus, Cass is not being entirely balanced – I won’t charge her with dishonesty – in asserting that the controversy in the long run will also hamper the research that is essential to finding the best way of supporting young people and helping them to thrive.
But she then diffidently points in the direction of a solution she dare not recommend. Medical treatment, she says, “is an area of remarkably weak evidence, and yet results of studies are exaggerated or misrepresented by people on all sides of the debate to support their viewpoint”.
The reality, she concludes, is that “we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress”. Yet the further reality, that she does not acknowledge, is that medically-engineered gender transitions of children can never be justified.
To an extent, Cass does not need to take that step as she has, in effect, already put a brake on the gender-change movement. “Although young people often express a sense of urgency in their wish to access medical treatments”, she says, “based on personal experience some young adults have suggested that taking time to explore options is preferable”.
She acknowledges that the option to provide masculinising/feminising hormones from the age of 16 is available, recommends “an extremely cautious clinical approach and a strong clinical rationale for providing hormones before the age of 18”.
If implemented, and there is every reason to believe that it will be, this recommendation will stop the obscene process of trying to turn girls into boys and vice-versa, to the detriment of their health and long-term stability.
Nonetheless, the immediate effect of the Cass Review has been to intensify the vitriol, with Twitter acting as the platform for much of the cross-fire. At the centre, in recognition of her past interventions, is J K Rowling, who has responded to the review in favourable terms, complaining that, “mere hours after it was released to the press and public, committed ideologues are doubling down.
These are people, she says, who’ve deemed opponents “far-right” for wanting to know there are proper checks and balances in place before autistic, gay and abused kids – groups that are all overrepresented at gender clinics – are left sterilised, inorgasmic, lifelong patients.
Noting that the review’s conclusions “will have come as a seismic shock to those who’ve hounded and demonised whistleblowers and smeared opponents as bigots and transphobes”, she accuses those who are now trying to discredit Cass’s work as not merely “misguided” but “actively malign”.
Declaring that the trans-gender bandwagon “is hurtling towards a cliff”, she expresses her anger that had been “mounting all day”. Kids, she says, have been irreversibly harmed. But the worst of it is that “thousands are complicit, not just medics, but the celebrity mouthpieces, unquestioning media and cynical corporations”.
“You cheered it on”, she says. “You did all you could to impede and misrepresent research. You tried to bully people out of their jobs for opposing you. Young people have been experimented on, left infertile and in pain”. Rightly, she thus concludes: “The consequences of this scandal will play out for decades”.
With the paper having run several stories and opinion pieces on the review, there is something of Rowling’s views in the Telegraph op-ed, which roundly declares: “We are finally seeing sense on trans issues”. The sub-heading opines: “history may struggle to comprehend what we allowed to happen for fear of being denounced as bigoted. Let the Cass report be the end of it”.
Future generations, the text continues, “will look back with horror on what we have done to some of our young people in the name of transgender ideology”. Teenagers and prepubescent children, it says, have been directed towards life-changing drug treatment or surgery that most did not require and, after a time, some realised they did not want.
“Worse”, the paper says, “the state has been complicit in this scandal, along with ‘progressive’ organisations, politicians, media outlets and schools”, then positioning itself on the side of the “good guys”, saying: “The rest of us have watched on with growing alarm over what was happening, yet most have kept quiet, anxious not to be denounced as bigoted”.
This is a paper which, like the rest of the legacy media have readily conformed with the prevailing madness, describing obviously male rapists, amongst others, as “her” is its news reports, perpetrating the very scandal it now rails against.
“A few brave souls have popped their heads above the parapet”, it concedes, “only to be cancelled, banned, sacked or ostracised”. Solely the most influential like J K Rowling have been able to withstand this tyranny.
Significantly, for the huffing and puffing, the big brave legacy media were not able or willing to withstand this “tyranny”, although The Times seems pretty certain that the Cass review will achieve a broader effect headlining: “Overhaul of adult NHS gender services on the cards”.
The NHS, it seems, has now ordered a separate independent review of services for adults “amid concerns that they have been ‘captured by ideology’ and are rushing hundreds of vulnerable young women on to male sex hormones or into sex-change surgery”.
The battle, though, has only just started and will be played out at an international level as a man, “Katie” Neeves – pretending to be a woman – has been appointed to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, and is actively promoting the “transitioning” of three-year-old.
But, as an indication of the political battles to come in the UK, the Telegraph runs a piece on “Labour infighting” over the issue, voicing complaints by MP Rosie Duffield and Julie Bindel about shadow health secretary Wes Streeting who, as one of Labour’s male leaders, failed to listen to gender-critical women.
In a sense, here, there are echoes of the Pakistani grooming scandals, where the authorities did not act for fear of being branded racist, along with the inertia over the growing power and influence of the Muslim mob, as politicians fight shy of being labelled “Islamophobic”.
Across the board, there is common thread: the adults have left the room to be replaced by timorous wee beasties, afraid of their own shadows. This will have political consequences, and we are indeed seeing only the faltering start of a long climb back to sanity.