Don’t diss Dr Cass

Her trans report could launch the biggest child abuse scandal since Cleveland

Keep out of the hands of GIDS

It is hard not to sympathise with the many women academics, like the philosopher Dr Kathleen Stock, who have been cancelled, hounded out of their jobs and generally abused for their refusal to accept the dogma that “transwomen are women”. They are understandably jubilant. But like demobilised combatants they can’t quite believe that the war is over. However, bar the shouting, I think it is. Time to assess the casualties.

First Stonewall. If ever a slogan backfired it was the LGBT charity’s declaration that “transwomen are women”. Transwomen are obviously not women in a literal, biological sense. They are men who have decided that they feel like women and want to alter their bodies by drugs and surgery to match physiology to feelings. This is now clear to all - and, of course, always has been to anyone who isn’t a trans ideologue.

Following the Cass Report, some LGBT spokespeople are now trying to say that “of course we never meant it literally…that was just right wing culture warriors exaggerating”. That just won’t wash. The hard fact is that they mostly did mean it literally and worse they actively sought to suppress anyone who disagreed or just wanted to be clear about what the slogan actually meant.

Even now, trans advocates like the former head of Stonewall, Baroness Hunt, are insisting that there must be “no debate” about it. “Transwomen ARE women”, she insists, full stop. Hoisting by your own petard never came more elevated. The very attempt to suppress debate on TWAW meant that most people drew their own conclusions: namely that LGBT advocates had departed from reality by claiming that women can have penises and become rapists - a proposition that is demonstrably absurd.

Ninety nine point nine percent of the population witness biological reality every day. It is only the hyper-educated elites in certain universities who claim, like the Berkeley philosopher, Judith Butler, that “sex is a social construct” and that anyone who denies that humans can change sex is a bigot and “a fascist”. Publicly-funded institutions that have been actively entertaining this quasi-religious dogma, and who failed to support academics and others who challenged it, have also discredited themselves.

We will not forget how women like the mature student, Lisa Keogh, who suffered a two month disciplinary investigation for hate speech by Abertay University because she had said in a debate that “women have vaginas”. Then there was Edinburgh University’s failure to support the former Rector, Ann Henderson, who suffered intolerable abuse for refusing to say that transwomen are women in her Rectorial address. Nor did the university authorities initially support women who wanted to show the film “Adult Human Female” and were prevented from doing so by aggressive campus activists. Trans activism and the intellectual suppression of debate about it, has been enthusiastically supported and promoted by the academic’s union the UCU - something which almost beggars belief.

The “progressive” left, along with virtue-signalling politicians from most parties, has also suffered massive collateral damage. Some of us will never trust them again. Labour politicians parroted and still parrot the TWAW dogma. In 2019, the Labour Equalities spokeswomen, Dawn Butler, told a BBC interviewer that “babies aren’t born with a sex” She was paraphrasing the extraordinary claim that babies are “assigned” a sex when they emerge from the womb - presumably by transphobic midwives. This bizarre terminology became widely used in the NHS, which also sought euphemisms like “people with cervixes” to avoid saying the demonised words “woman” or “mother”.

The left became entranced with the vaguely post-structuralist conceit that everything “binary” is somehow oppressive and reactionary - most obviously biological sex. Yet everything is in a sense binary: it is how we make sense of the world, by differentiation. Even supposedly non-binary people are binary to the extent that they reject “heteronormativity” and human biology. Gays are binary through being not straight.

The NHS, police, schools, the civil service the media - all were under the TWAW non-binary spell to varying degrees. Police: recording hate incidents against people challenging or ridiculing it. Schools: supporting “social transitioning” in the classroom. Bureaucrats in government agencies and corporations urging employees and clients to use “pronouns” to avoid “misgendering” trans people - in other words requiring staff to genuflect to this religious belief that people can be born in the wrong body.

The collective delusion that transwomen are women has been enforced by institutions and individuals like lobbyists and politicians. They will have to answer for their conduct in due course. But as I said at the beginning of this piece, it is understandable that many of the victims and many of the victors of this particular culture war can’t quite believe it is over.

Dr Stock for example is clearly disappointed at the moderate tone of Dr Hillary Cass’s report on gender identity services for young people. She wanted denunciation not conciliation. Why humour these people, she wonders by suggesting that some children might conceivably benefit from a discredited “medicalised pathway”. If it leads to cross-sex hormones, breast-binding and even surgery, why not tell it like it is?

“It is as if a modern-day medic had been tasked with reviewing the efficacy of trepanning” says Dr Stock in an article for Unherd:

“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’”.

You can understand Stock’s exasperation, but I think it is mistaken. It is the very conciliatory and moderate tone of the Cass Report that ensures it will be read - and read carefully. It makes it all the harder to dismiss with the customary accusations of transphobia, bad faith and partisan intent. But gender critical women can be sure that she doesn’t hold anything back. It is all there: How children and young people were led onto a pathway to perdition with no follow up and inadequate or non existent research into the consequences of taking puberty blockers.

Dr Cass rather elegantly condemned the “affirmative gender model” by deploying the kind of New Agey terms that progressives love, like “holistic”. Cass demonstrates the essential cruelty of colluding with a child’s delusion that they are the wrong sex instead of looking “holistically” at other possible reason for their distress, such as depression, body image problems or autism. I mean, anyone reading that will be shocked that this is what gender clinics with their myopic trans-vision had been doing for the last 20 years.

The Report has already led to a remarkable change in tone in the media. Just read Sunday’s editorial in the Observer: “children were catastrophically failed by the medical profession”. It doesn’t beat about the bush. The BBC has cast aside the rainbow and given unslanted accounts of Cass. This is the state broadcaster that famously ran an educational video claiming that there are “100 genders”. These are key organs favoured by “progressives”. Many institutions and HR departments are looking to cover their backs against what is to come when law suits start flying and judicial inquiries start looking for people to blame.

The focus of retribution will be the gender medical services and in particular the NHS, which seems largely unaware of what is about to hit them: probably biggest child care scandal since Cleveland in 1988. It’s all there in Cass.