The Cass Review

Where is the line to be drawn between a gentle approach that might bring some liberal centrists over the line, and being an appeaser to an ideology that seeks to sterilise children?

It’s been a vindicating month for those of us who oppose sex-changing medical procedures for children. First, came the publication of leaked WPATH discussions, in which members of the organisation that somehow insinuated itself into a position of authority on child sex changes, openly discussed among themselves how they were kinda making it up as they went along. This, after their guidelines for transing children were accepted as the blue ribbon standard of care by large medical, psychological and governmental bodies across the world. 

Then, this week, came the long-awaited review of the NHS care for “trans youth” by Dr. Hillary Cass. Four years in the making, this lengthy report essentially confirms what TERF’s have been saying for years: there is little evidence that “gender medicine” helps children and young people who claim trans identities. In particular, the review found that only two sets of widely adopted guidelines in youth gender care had any foundational rigour — a Finnish set published in 2020 and a Swedish set published in 2022. The Cass review stated “The World Professional Association of Transgender Healthcare (WPATH) has been highly influential in directing international practice, although its guidelines were found by the University of York appraisal process to lack developmental rigour.”

Basically, all of the claims of the trans lobby were found to be without merit. 

Many celebrated this as a watershed moment. And as soon as the report was released, welcome real-life changes were announced in how English children suffering from these mental health issues are to be treated going forward. England’s health regulator announced it would be following the Cass report’s recommendations and enforcing a ban on prescribing under-18’s puberty blockers in the private medical sector as well — meaning families won’t be able to pay doctors to prescribe puberty blockers that they can no longer get on the public health system.

There is much to applaud about the Cass review. But for some people who have spent the last several years warning about the malevolent nature of trans ideology, it did not go nearly far enough. How can we accommodate even the phrase “gender identity” as though it were a real thing, as opposed to a euphemism for a mental health crisis brought on by engineered social contagion and shadowy non-profits? 

Photo by Thomas Park on Unsplash

This question is the second most important part of the trans debate — the first is ensuring the safety and sanity of children and young people by eradicating the sinister lie that humans can be born in the wrong body, and castration and mastectomies can ever heal you if have that condition. Where is the line to be drawn between a gentle approach that might bring some liberal centrists over the line, and being a weak appeaser to an ideology that seeks to sterilise children? 

I have been consuming the content of most of the major gender-critical activists for several years now. All of them agree that children cannot be born in the wrong body, and telling tomboyish girls and effeminate boys they are, in fact, the opposite sex is a shockingly sexist and terribly harmful thing to do. They all think that no men should ever be housed in women’s prisons or compete in female sports teams. However,  the more liberal of the GC’s think that adult men who have sex changes later in life, or who want to present themselves as females in the world, are merely exercising their rights as adults to live as they please. In recent months, those liberals have come under heavy fire from more hard-line GC’s — as I wrote about back in February.

The Cass review brought this fault line back into the public eye. Kellie Jay Keen, queen of the hardliners, did an interesting video on the report in which she vented her frustrations. In particular, she took issue with a lot of the language, like the term “gender incongruence” — her position being that the only reason kids have “gender incongruence” in the first place is because of brainwashing that is occurring in schools and on social media. “Oh, fuck off,” she said. “There’s no such thing!”

I agree with her. I took exception to Cass including the possibility that some kids might benefit from sex change surgeries, when she wrote that for some “young people [for whom] a medical pathway is clinically indicated.” 

In what circumstances should medical professionals ever abet young people who are considering chopping off their genitals?

I do struggle, however, with the hard-liner vs liberal debate, because even though I myself have more hard-line positions, I can see some merit in a gentler, more inclusive approach. In an exchange of messages about the Cass report I had on Instagram with the brilliant detransitioner Leigh Janet Marshall, she wrote something that I think has a lot of merit. Referring to people in the squishy middle, Marshall wrote: “I think shame causes people to find more comfort in lies than communion with humanity. Public shaming is not working.”

And yet. When it comes to sexually deviant adults and the harm they are doing to children — what, other than public shaming is to be done?

Another leader of the hard-line element, Jennifer Bilek, wrote on Twitter:  “They’ll be plenty more atrocities on the horizon as long as people keep claiming adults can do as they please, instead of calling for ethical restraints on physicians and surgeons.” 

Actually, even this does not go far enough.There already are ethical restraints on doctors, they have not worked. So what has caused this cataclysmic failure? Acute permissiveness. The fallacy that we can just do whatever we adults want with our bodies, and that it is solely our business.

Adults in the grip of sexually deviant tendencies need to accept the fact that they cannot have their desires fulfilled all of the time; that it causes great harm to wider society that those desires are catered to to the extent they currently are; and that what personally gratifies them should not be validated by wider society. 

Basically, to be very blunt, perverts need to get back in their box and stay there. Their quest for wider acceptance has damaged untold numbers of children and young people who were swimming in waters contaminated by the acceptance of perversions, and thus came to regard them as simple lifestyle choices.

To the liberals who say that adults are free to do what they want — I accept this, but only up to a point. Because what this crime against children has shown us is that what adults are allowed to do, will end up being what children emulate. There is absolutely no place for exposing children to fetishes and other advanced sexual practices via a society that is too tolerant of them.

The harms have now become tangible in the increased numbers of children both claiming a trans identity — many of whom are girls who have been traumatised by early exposure to porn in our sex-addled world — and just having mental breakdowns and being unable to function as prior generations have done for millennia. 

I retain sympathy for the liberals of the gender critical movement, and I certainly think they are trying their best to keep up what they see is the good fight, of all adults getting what they want within the bounds of the law. I even think there is some tactical value to their position. I just don’t believe, fundamentally, that they are correct.