The Cass report lays bare what we all knew about the trans brainwashing cult
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Not long ago, I was told by a surgeon that a team at his hospital was performing mastectomies on young women who were transitioning. My first thought was for all those women with breast cancer who were having that devastating surgery to potentially save their life. What would they make of younger females opting for “top surgery”, a jarringly jaunty term for such a brutal procedure? My second thought was, what the hell is the NHS doing performing (and presumably paying for) all those operations when there is a queue of millions for essential surgery?
We know for a fact that more and more girls are claiming that their bodies and sense of self don’t align so they opt to be trans men. Taking large amounts of testosterone both lowers the voice and encourages the growth of body hair, including on the face. Famously, it also bestows a temporary sense of euphoria, perhaps because well-behaved girls suddenly have more of those vroom-vroom “boy” chemicals coursing through their veins. (I applied a dab or two of testosterone gel during the menopause and it temporarily turned me into Dick Dastardly from Wacky Races; thank God for oestrogen!) The removal of surplus-to-requirements boobs completes the new manly look.
I find this horribly upsetting, as I’m sure do many of you. Why do tomboys have to become infertile “men” when, in generations past, they usually ditched the dungarees and grew up to be marvellous wives and mothers? When did this sudden urge come upon thousands of young women to cry, like Lady Macbeth, “Unsex me here!” before proceeding to what looks, to the rest of us at least, like mutilation? It is a question that is part medicine, part metaphysics, part modern morality play.
In September 2020, the consultant paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass was asked to conduct a review into how the NHS should care for children and adolescents who are either questioning their gender identity or experiencing gender incongruence (a mismatch between body and sex at birth). In part, the review was a response to a huge increase in the number of referrals to the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) run by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. There was certainly cause for alarm. In 2011-12, there were just under 250 referrals to the service; in 2021-22 this had risen to more than 5,000.
In particular, there had been a disproportionate increase in girls experiencing gender dysphoria and seeking specialist attention where, historically, it had almost always been little boys who expressed dissatisfaction with their sex.
Gids had moved from a therapy model to a service that controversially referred children for the prescribing of puberty blockers to delay the onset of adult masculine and feminine characteristics. Supposedly, this gave them time to pause and work out who they were and whether they really wanted to change gender. In practice, that early intervention invariably led to more hormone treatment and surgery.
In February 2022, Dr Cass published an interim report whose recommendations had a seismic impact. It led to the closure of Gids, which was criticised for the lack of data collection on what happened to children and young people who were prescribed hormones. Her findings also led to NHS England deciding last month to stop prescribing puberty blockers to children because there was “not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of puberty-suppressing hormones, or to make the treatment available at this time”.
It was, by any standards, an extraordinary admission. You could almost hear the lawyers going: kerching! Undertested medicine, linked to impaired cognitive development and leading to long-term bone frailty, had been given to children because, as critics like me saw it, a bunch of social-justice cranks had taken up trans as their cause du jour and indoctrinated impressionable youngsters without caring what the costs were. In the future, this will be regarded as one of the most egregious acts of medical malpractice of all time, of that I am convinced.
‘This must stop’
Today, Hilary Cass’s final report is published. Once again, there is an insistence on evidence-based care to protect children, as well as a new emphasis on the over-representation of youngsters with mental health problems, with autism or autism spectrum traits as well as eating disorders and tics, among those claiming to experience gender dysphoria. Might the trans epidemic be rooted in generational mental health problems, given rocket boosters by social media, rather than any startling new desire to become the opposite sex? She suggests that it may well be.
Dr Cass raises an eyebrow at the widespread adoption of “affirmative care”, which basically means going along with whatever the child claims they are regardless of family problems, bullying or other potential trauma. More sinisterly, it means therapists and even parents are not supposed to query a confused adolescent’s choice. In fact, they are told to celebrate it, although hearing from your 15-year-old daughter Jessica that she’s now Jonah and she’ll kill herself if you don’t ditch her “dead name” and address her by the correct pronouns is not generally music to the ears of most mothers and fathers.
“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 must stop,” Dr Cass says firmly.
Little hope of that if a Labour government legislates for a ban on trans conversion therapy. That would make the broader, rational conversation Dr Cass tries to encourage impossible. She admits her review “stepped into an arena where there were strong and widely divergent opinions unsupported by adequate evidence. The surrounding noise and increasingly toxic, ideological and polarised public debate has made the work of the Review significantly harder and does nothing to serve the children and young people who may already be subject to significant minority stress.”
Conflicting views about the “correct” clinical approach has “made some clinicians fearful of working with gender-questioning young people,” Dr Cass observes. Yes, but what she doesn’t mention is people like James Esses, who was training to be a psychotherapist and was thrown off his university course because he believed that biological sex was binary and immutable and that children should not be taught otherwise. “Nor do I believe that children should be unequivocally affirmed down a path of potentially irreversible medical transitioning,” Esses wrote in The Spectator.
Undoubtedly, Hilary Cass is walking through a minefield and she does well to defuse some of the more explosive issues, insisting her review is “not about defining what it means to be trans, nor is it about undermining the validity of trans identities”. The fundamental problem is that what she is dealing with is not a healthcare issue. It is a cult that effectively brainwashes lonely, awkward or bewildered children, separating them from their loved ones and promising them they’ll be their “best self” if only they cut off their breasts and grow a beard.
Towards the end, Dr Cass apologises to the teenagers who have effectively been kidnapped by trans ideology (although she would never put it that way and I doubt she even thinks it). “Others of you have said you just want access to puberty blockers and hormones as quickly as possible, and may be upset that I am not recommending this. I have been very mindful that you may be disappointed. However, what I want to be sure about is that you are getting the best combination of treatments, and this means putting in place a research programme to look at all possible options, and to work out which ones give the best results. There are some important reasons for this decision. Firstly, you must have the same standards of care as everyone else in the NHS, and that means basing treatments on good evidence. I have been disappointed by the lack of evidence on the long-term impact of taking hormones from an early age; research has let us all down, most importantly you. However, we cannot expect you to make life-changing decisions in a vacuum without being able to weigh their risks and benefits now and in the long term, and we have to build the evidence base with good studies going forward.”
In conclusion, Hilary Cass is saying quite firmly that as a society we cannot and will not do as the trans ideologues demand. Children and adolescents will not be given life-altering drugs and surgery without proof that it will leave them happier and healthier than before. If a young woman is depressed and anxious, we don’t believe that, in the majority of cases, a double mastectomy is the route to recovery. In its quiet, scientific way, this is a vital and revolutionary document.
