After years of heated, even violent, debates in Great Britain on the subject of transgender people, a report signed by a renowned pediatrician raised awareness among the entire British political class and helped to rehabilitate the positions of feminists like JK Rowling. Written by Dr. Hilary Cass, the nearly 400-page document lifts the veil on questionable medical practices carried out on children and adolescents suffering from gender dysphoria, and denounced for years by former patients and their families.
In 2009, fewer than 50 children consulted the public health service specializing in sexual identity disorders, the famous GIDS. (Gender Identity Development Service). In 2015, there were fifteen times more; and by 2021, the figure had increased a hundredfold. However, in 2010, under pressure from transgender activists, the GIDS decided to lower the age at which hormone blockers could be prescribed to children from 15 to 10 years.
Ten years later, a Sky News investigation revealed that 35 child psychiatrists had resigned from the service within a few years and that radical hormone treatments were being prescribed after just two appointments with young patients. A former employee, who became a whistleblower, revealed the lack of psychological care for children “while many young patients have suffered trauma who would first of all deserve talking therapy”. When some child psychiatrists questioned the prescription of hormone blockers, “colleagues accused them of being transphobic.”
Need to identify possible sources of discomfort
The report by Dr Hilary Cass, former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics, is the first to look at the issue of medical treatment for gender dysphoria and the state of research in this area. This specialist believes that gender dysphoria can be indicative of mental disorders and be associated with anorexia, depression but also autism. It is therefore appropriate to identify the source of the discomfort before any medical intervention with irreversible effects.
The Cass report not only created an electric shock among British political leaders, freeing up speech for all those who avoided the subject for fear of being called transphobic, but also rehabilitated the positions of many British feminists, victims of threats for years and intimidation campaigns on social media from trans activists.
Among these feminists, the editorialists of Guardian Suzanne Moore and Hadley Freeman, or even the academic and philosopher Kathleen Stock, who were forced to resign for having, in essence, publicly considered that biology is a reality from which we cannot escape. In other words, if gender is a social construction, sex is an unavoidable biological reality. A position also defended by author JK Rowling, the creator of Harry Potter. But trans activists consider this type of comments transphobic. For them, these feminists are TERFs (Trans-exclusionary radical feminist)radical feminists excluding trans people and, as such, must be fought and defeated.
Climate of censorship
Example among others, from the 2010s, Suzanne Moore, star columnist for the left-wing newspaper The Guardian, sees her articles gradually censored as soon as she mentions the subject of transgender people. And when, in 2020, she questions how women and trans women athletes can really compete fairly in the same category, a transgender colleague resigns in protest and leads 338 daily employees to sign a letter denouncing the transphobia of Suzanne Moore. Threatened with death on social networks, the journalist ends up throwing in the towel and resigning. How can we continue to debate in such a climate of censorship, she asks. “To summarize,” she said, “I believe that we cannot escape biology, that spaces reserved for women must be preserved, that considering ourselves a woman even though we were born a man is a feeling that must be respected. but does not constitute a reality, and that children should not receive treatment with hormone blockers.”
JK Rowling, above all, defends the existence of spaces reserved for women, in particular women victims of domestic violence, and denounces that trans women who have committed crimes find themselves serving their sentences in women’s prisons. From the end of the 2010s, she also protested against the “erasure of women” in the brochures of the British health service. In order to be more inclusive and not offend transgender people, the NHS refers in its leaflets to “people who menstruate” or “people who give birth to children”. JK Rowling quips on Twitter: “I’m sure there used to be a term for people who have periods. Help me. Fammes? Fommes? Fimmes?” Behind the irony, she wants to remind us that biology is a reality that no ideology can erase.
When the Nigerian feminist writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, visiting London in 2017, declared: “a trans woman is a trans woman”, her opinion earned her, in her words, real “social censorship”. For trans activists, she should have said that a trans woman is a real woman. “I do not recognize myself in jargon and even less in this academic linguistic orthodoxy that people would like me to use and which only aims to close off any debate,” she explained later.
Time will tell whether Keir Starmer, likely future British Prime Minister in a few months, will go so far as to restore order in British universities, whose transgender associations regularly prevent contradictory debates on the subject. Meanwhile, the Labor Party, which has often leaned towards trans activists, has announced that it will follow all of Dr Cass’s recommendations once in power. A sign that this report has already set the record straight across the Channel.
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