The week that sent trans fanatics into retreat
Aftershocks can occur days or even weeks after an earthquake. So it is, it seems, with the Cass Review.
Five months on from the “Big Bang” moment in April when Dr Hilary Cass’s findings reset the terms of the trans rights debate, some of the most significant reverberations were felt this week.
Cass’s report warned of a “toxic” debate in which parents felt forced to allow their children to change gender, fearing they would otherwise be labelled transphobic. At the time, the findings by Cass, a leading paediatrician, were roundly criticised by trans activists. But now the narrative is changing.
In the space of just a few days it was revealed that the campaigning charity Stonewall – which has long been in the vanguard of trans activism – is to stop promoting its controversial training programme to new schools. Then, the SNP health minister told the Scottish parliament that the Government had accepted Cass’s review and would implement its recommendations. The Good Law Project campaign group also announced it would no longer take trans-related legal cases following high-profile defeats. All this a couple of weeks after the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, decided to uphold the emergency ban on privately accessed puberty blockers for anyone under 18, against vociferous opposition from fellow Labour MPs.
“On the whole, the trajectory seems to be in a sensible direction and the Labour Party moving this way too is huge,” says gender critical philosopher and writer Kathleen Stock. “Even for those sympathetic to the ideas of trans activists it is hard to oppose the Cass Review.”
All in all, it’s been a week of retreat for the trans lobby, which made significant inroads into institutions across education, health, charities and corporations over the past few decades, and a triumphant week for those who campaign against its doctrine. “It feels like the grown-ups are back in the room,” says Maya Forstater, CEO of human rights charity Sex Matters.
Cass, a former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, concluded that puberty blockers – given to children as young as 12 – were “an area of remarkably weak evidence”, where “some practitioners abandoned normal clinical approaches” in their assessment of children with complex mental health issues. The NHS had allowed the prescribing of puberty-blockers to children with gender dysphoria for a decade.
The importance of the Cass Review in the ideological tussle between trans-rights activists and those who believe in the primacy of biological sex can barely be overstated. Only after the publication of this official review did it become more socially acceptable to question the trans-rights doctrine. Suddenly, arguing against the cultish aspects of that movement could be based on four years of painstaking and objective research. Cass went out of her way to be compassionate and understanding about the needs of transgender children and young people, without that sentiment contradicting the medical evidence (or lack of it).
By centering the debate around child welfare, Cass delivered what may be a decisive blow, in that it shifted the emphasis from trans rights, which can seem complex and often conflicted, to the rights of children, which affects so many more people directly. The effect of this has been that institutions which either became unquestioning fellow travellers or those which felt pressured into accepting the ideas of organisations such as Stonewall, have begun to row back.
The review marked a major step in a gradual social and political evolution that followed years of vociferous campaigning by figures including Stock and Forstater, many of whom were labelled by the trans lobby as hateful mavericks, as opposed to sincere campaigners for the rights of women and children.
In July 2022, the Tavistock transgender clinic in London was shut down by the NHS after a review found that it was “not safe” for children. In the same year, Kemi Badenoch, then minister for women and equalities, and Steve Barclay, then health secretary, instructed government departments to purge themselves of Stonewall and its diversity champions scheme, which included guidance on gender-neutral spaces and the use of pronouns.
International sport continues to highlight the concerns of women’s rights in particular, with the Olympics and Paralympics throwing up stories of trans athletes competing against biological women (that the controversy in the women’s boxing was not trans-related highlights the complexities of the debate). The UK council of the British Medical Association, the doctors’ union, has recently faced a revolt from its members over a proposed vote to reject the Cass Review, a move out of step with other senior medical institutions in the UK.
But it is Stonewall’s decision to cease the rollout of its highly controversial gender-issues training programme for teachers that marks a real sea change. In a statement posted on its website at the end of July and spotted by social media users on Monday, the charity said: “Following a strategic review, we’ve taken the decision to stop offering new memberships of our School and College Champions programme. We are proud to have provided training to thousands of teachers across the country over a period of almost 20 years.”
The pace of the change is notable. As recently as January the charity’s annual report stated that 300 schools were still aligned with its “champions” scheme (generating outrage over advice that children should use they/their pronouns and avoid the use of “boys” and “girls”). However at the end of 2023 fresh safeguarding guidelines for schools were introduced by the Conservative government, which risked a clash with Stonewall’s programme. The guidance has been retained by Labour.
“I think Stonewall’s position in schools is untenable, because what they were telling schools was against the statutory safeguarding guidance,” says Forstater. “The danger is organisations even less accountable than Stonewall will go into schools and give advice against the guidance, so the Government needs to finalise its guidance specifically on gender-questioning children.”
A Stonewall spokesperson said: “Stonewall’s School and College Champions programme continues to serve its existing members – providing vital LGBTQ+ resources and guidance for the classroom. We have proudly supported and trained thousands of teachers to help ensure all young people feel safe, secure and included at school. In addition, we actively campaign with our partners on the importance of inclusivity in education with government.”
As well as giving parents the right to know of discussions about a child’s gender identity, the government guidelines state: “Caution is necessary for children questioning their gender as there remain many unknowns about the impact of social transition and children may well have wider vulnerabilities, including having complex mental health and psychosocial needs, and in some cases additional diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder and/or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.”
Stonewall says its legal guidance firmly adheres to – and has always adhered to – all statutory safeguarding guidance. “Like all charities, Stonewall is fully regulated and operates within those parameters,” the spokesperson said.
In another shift last week, the Good Law Project, run by Jolyon Maugham, the campaigning KC, declared that it would stop taking on pro-trans legal cases. The announcement came after the group lost two high-profile trans-related cases this year, the first challenging the treatment times for trans care in the NHS, and another backing the trans-rights charity Mermaids’ attempt to have the gay-rights charity LGB Alliance removed from the charity register.
A statement on the Good Law Project’s website this week read: “It’s getting harder and harder to win rights for the trans community through the courts and it doesn’t feel right to keep asking the community and its allies to carry on contributing to the enormous costs of this increasingly difficult litigation.”
In all these cases, the ideology has not changed, merely the circumstances that once allowed certain groups to pursue their agenda with impunity. Increasingly, where institutions felt compelled to accept the dogma of trans rights without question, they now feel empowered to resist or be more selective about what suits their culture and staff – they are being, as Telegraph columnist Suzanne Moore calls it, “decontaminated”. The retreat of Stonewall, the Good Law Project and the SNP is expedient rather than belief-based. “You are dealing with a faith regardless of the evidence,” says Moore. “What’s become clear is that these ideas do not represent public opinion. There’s no demand for these policies.”
The two sides will continue to oppose each other without much scope for compromise (something likely to keep gender-questioning children marginalised), it’s just that one side has had the rug pulled from under it by the cold, hard facts of medical science and is struggling to find a new way forward.
The journey of a denuded SNP from advocating trans self-identification to accepting the Cass Report looks very much one of political necessity, since the trans debate contributed to the downfall of the past two First Ministers. After a decade of being thought of as the most effective and canny politician in Britain, Nicola Sturgeon never recovered from the controversies aroused by her Gender Recognition Reform Bill, not least her inability to clarify her position when a man convicted of rape changed gender and was sent to a female prison.
Her successor as First Minister, Humza Yousaf, who nobody thought of as the most effective and canny politician in Britain, was also tainted by his closeness to the Hate Crime and Public Order Act, which led to fears that anyone expressing gender-critical views – including high-profile figures such as JK Rowling – would be criminalised. “If I was an SNP apparatchik who’d gone along with all this I’d be losing sleep over the consequences of their policies in five years’ time,” says Stock.
With Streeting’s firm line on Cass and puberty blockers, the battleground upon which trans-rights groups can prosecute their war is shrinking. This may be contributing to the increasing vehemence of activists, who stress the heightened risks of suicide to trans children. Maugham claimed that the upheld puberty-blocker ban would “kill trans children. My feelings about Wes Streeting are unprintable.” Susie Green, former chief executive of Mermaids, says Streeting has “blood on his hands… How dare Wes Streeting put so many trans kids at risk by continuing this murderous ban.”
This type of language and its basic assertion were branded “unfounded and dangerous” earlier this year in a government review conducted by Prof Louis Appleby, chair of the national suicide prevention strategy advisory group.
“There’s been 30 years of institutional capture that doesn’t just go away with the Cass Review,” says Forstater. “There have been lots of turning points, but it’s more like pulling up bindweeds. You just have to keep at it as it keeps growing back.” As Stonewall says, the gradual retreat is strategic. There has been no Damascene conversion – if anything the events of this week suggest militancy is likely to increase as their opportunities to influence diminish.