Update from Maya
Lobby day on 10th March to protest about the puberty-blocker trial. Photo: Belinda Jiao
Following For Women Scotland’s latest legal win, this week the Scottish Government finally accepted that forcing female prisoners to share accommodation with transgender males was unlawful and indefensible, and Scottish women’s prisons are once more women-only.
But meanwhile the government in Westminster has published a “conversion practices” bill for England and Wales that threatens parents with jail if they don’t affirm a child who declares a transgender identity. We also heard this week that the puberty-blocker trial is moving again (subject to legal challenge).
The previous week we had met Olivia Bailey, the minister who is leading on this topic, and told her both in person and in writing afterwards that the proposed law would harm those it sets out to protect. She said that there would be safeguards to protect exploratory therapy. But the bill only conceives of exploration based on the idea that some people are “born in the wrong body”, and that the way to resolve that is to try to live as the opposite sex, perhaps with extreme medical intervention, and certainly without consideration that other people have rights.
Like many of you, I am deeply disappointed that Baroness Cass is supporting the puberty-blocker trial. It’s hard to overstate the importance and influence of the review she led, which laid bare the scandal of the lack of evidence underpinning “gender-affirmative” treatment. But the report had limitations, most seriously – as we said at the time – its failure to tackle the school-to-clinic pipeline and its endorsement of the idea of a puberty-blocker trial.
We met Baroness Cass twice when she was undertaking her review, and we said to her what we said to Olivia Bailey last week, and will keep saying: transitioning children is not consistent with safeguarding or preparing them for a healthy adult life in a world which recognises that sex is real and immutable.
For 15 years the NHS has subjected children to ideologically driven, evidence-free treatment based on the belief that others can be forced to accept them as the opposite sex. This was a promise doctors had no business making.
It is completely unethical to damage the health of more children in pursuit of this fantasy, or to expose parents, teachers and others to threats of investigation and even jail for resisting it.
Neither the puberty-blocker trial nor the conversion-therapy bill makes any sense. They are solutions looking for a problem. What they are trying to solve is the conundrum that adult transsexualism requires others to engage in extreme societal accommodation. The Supreme Court has already said No to that.
The puberty-blocker trial is going to court, and the conversion-therapy bill is going to Parliament (for pre-legislative scrutiny). We will be working in both arenas to attack the indefensible.
Find out more
Baroness Cass is wrong about the puberty-blocker trial
Draft conversion-practices bill threatens parents with jail time
Media coverage
In The Telegraph (Daniel Martin) and GB News (Alice Tomlinson), Maya was quoted as saying that this is a dangerous proposal which will harm the people it purports to protect, and that it is reckless for the government to push on with this when it’s well known that many young people who adopt a transgender identity as children or teenagers grow up to be gay instead.
Sex, gender and free speech on campus
Trans ideology in British universities
In this week’s episode, Helen Joyce and Fiona McAnena discuss the current climate of free speech and gender ideology within British universities.
Helen reflects on her recent talk to students at Durham Union – you can read her account of the event on her Substack.
Read our recent report, Getting back on track, which explains how the legislative framework can enable and protect sport at a university level.
In other news
The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is moving ahead with the widely condemned puberty-blocker trial following an unsuccessful legal challenge. It was covered in the Daily Mail (Shaun Wooller), The Times (Eleanor Hayward), The Sun (Sam Blanchard) and The Telegraph (Laura Donnelly). Helen was quoted as saying that gender ideology has broken yet another institution, as the MHRA’s mission is supposedly to “put patients first” in everything it does, yet it is signing off on a trial that does the opposite.
Later in the week, Baroness Cass backed the puberty-blocker trial in an interview with BBC News in which she said the trial will help “reduce harm”. The Telegraph (Michael Searles) quoted Maya as saying that it was grossly irresponsible of Cass to put children at grave risk by making misleading and unevidenced remarks in support of a trial of puberty blockers.
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