There’s a superb piece in Dazed by Sasha Baker, who explains how a vocal minority of religious and social conservatives has managed to dismantle trans healthcare and human rights in the UK without a single law being passed or revoked.

The British gender critical movement purports to represent a silent majority, but knows it does not command enough support to publicly shred the documents guaranteeing our rights. Instead it has adopted the methods of sadistic pencil-pushers – its true constituency – burying human rights laws in reams of secondary legislation, statutory and non-statutory guidance, grey literature, and fudged equality impact assessments.

As the article notes, a key part of that is the Cass scandal: a supposedly clinical review that was created and staffed in order to achieve a pre-determined political outcome, and which – despite repeated claims to the contrary in the press – found no evidence whatsoever that puberty blockers are dangerous or that their use should be curtailed.

You’ll read a lot about “evidence” in connection with the Cass scandal. Here’s one of the crucial bits of so-called evidence on which Cass leaned heavily.

In February, Sallie Baxendale, a psychologist, published a terrible academic paper that claimed to look at existing studies on the negative effects of puberty blockers on trans children’s cognition. In reality, most studies surveyed were performed on animals, with only one case study showing that a single trans child scored lower on an IQ test after taking puberty blockers… it was rejected by three journals and met with scathing comments from peer reviewers [but] Dr Hilary Cass chose to cite it four times in her final report, and determined that puberty blockers should not be prescribed to trans kids outside of an upcoming clinical trial, in part because of “potential risks to neurocognitive development”.

What we’re seeing on a frankly frightening scale is the very opposite of evidence-based policy; the policies are decided first, and the evidence cherry-picked, distorted or manufactured to support them. This will not end with us.