Spiked: Why was gender ideology allowed to run amok for so long?

[RethinkingLife]

These cruel goings-on in the NHS have been an open secret for literally decades. And yet only today, with Cass’s report, is it being properly digested. Mental-health nurse Susan Evans, then working in the now-shuttered Tavistock clinic, first blew the whistle in 2004, after learning that a 16-year-old had been referred for hormone treatment after just four appointments.
2004! Back then, Julie Bindel was still writing for the Guardian, Graham Linehan could still walk unarmed through Muswell Hill and JK Rowling was still a beloved luvvie children’s author, whose ‘controversy’ section of her Wikipedia page related mainly to the Harry Potter book-burnings staged by the religious right. And yet it has taken 20 years – and the demonisation of these three gender-critical warriors and countless more – for the truth to become socially acceptable.
This all shows that woke ideology is the water our elites swim in. It shows that, for our supposed betters, virtue-signalling and being on ‘the right side of history’ has replaced genuine virtue and rational thought. Indeed, they preferred to strike poses against some dreamt-up ‘transphobic’ backlash than think for 30 seconds about what it is they were supporting – which turned out to be the reckless sterilisation of kids who, left to their own devices, would have grown up to be gay. They were the real reactionaries all along.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/10/why-was-gender-ideology-allowed-to-run-amok-for-so-long/

What a good article.

We're about to find out whether the great and the good can transform themselves to centre children's safety and wellbeing again - or whether they're to compromised by their allegiance to the gender borg.

No mention at all of one of the biggest shifts: activists and commercial medicine lobbyists in America getting coverage of 'gender affirming care' into American private health insurance in IIRC 2015. 'Woke elites' is a nicely vague bogeyman. Cold hard cash is a bit too near the bone perhaps.

There's a meme that goes "Aliens. It's always aliens".

If you replace "Aliens" with "money", it still works ...

It's funny though, even at this late stage there are people all over the internet who just will not accept that this is a bad thing.

No idea why Stephanie, but your post prompted me to look up how lobotomies ended.
Found this interesting bbc article from 2011:
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-15629160

That is fascinating. I didn't actually know what a lobotomy involved. Gruesome stuff.

angry, spiteful hate mobs encouraged by pressure groups who infiltrated schools and every last corner of society to brainwash the masses into making it a received wisdom that any questioning is wrong. So gender critical= hate. Trans activism= noble. This is exactly how cults work. Terrifying dogma becomes commonplace.

Under the mental health act 1983, a woman can be detained for believing that she is the virgin Mary, if she also poses a threat to herself or others. A man who believes he is a woman called Mary is lauded and very unlikely to find himself being assessed under the mental health act, regardless of any threat.

Decent piece (via Bread):

At the heart of Hilary Cass’s review of gender identity services in the NHS is a concern for the welfare of “children and young people”… Her stated ambition is to ensure that those experiencing gender dysphoria receive a high standard of care. This will be disputed, of course, by people and lobbying groups angered by her recommendations, but it is a theme running through the review. Cass, a past president of the UK’s Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, seeks to provide better care for children and adolescents on one of the defining issues of our age. Her conclusion is alarming for anybody who genuinely cares for child welfare: gender medicine is “built on shaky foundations”…
…
One emerging criticism of the Cass review is that it set the methodological bar too high for research to be included in its analysis and discarded too many studies on the basis of quality. In fact, the reality is different: studies in gender medicine fall woefully short in terms of methodological rigour; the methodological bar for gender medicine studies was set too low, generating research findings that are therefore hard to interpret. The methodological quality of research matters because a drug efficacy study in humans with an inappropriate or no control group is a potential breach of research ethics. Offering treatments without an adequate understanding of benefits and harms is unethical. All of this matters even more when the treatments are not trivial; puberty blockers and hormone therapies are major, life altering interventions. Yet this inconclusive and unacceptable evidence base was used to inform influential clinical guidelines, such as those of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which themselves were cascaded into the development of subsequent guidelines internationally…

Abbasi K. The Cass review: an opportunity to unite behind evidence informed care in gender medicine BMJ 2024; 385 :q837 doi:10.1136/bmj.q837

https://www.bmj.com/content/385/bmj.q837

Here's another very powerful piece from Alex Massey - journalist at the Times. Very emotional:

https://alexmassie.substack.com/p/the-vindication-of-britains-feminists

This paragraph was very sobering: "Ninety percent of natal girls and 80 percent of boys referred in 2012 reported being same-sex attracted or bisexual. One clinician recalls families who said, “Thank god my child is trans and not gay or lesbian”. Some of the children agreed: “I had kids telling me, ‘When I hear the word lesbian, I cringe. I want to die’” one doctor tells Barnes. “Initially, some of them had identified as lesbian. And some of them had experienced a lots of homophobia and then started identifying as trans. It was almost like a stepping stone.” Another doctor concurs: “In my view, I think there were gay children who were being pushed down another path”."

It's horrific that gay kids were being sterilised and potentially having their lives cut short. And when the gay doctors resigned from the Tavistock because they had concerns about homophobic parents 'transing the gay away' they were told they were taking things too 'personally'.