Just over two hours before Parliament closed for the election, the Tories rushed through an emergency statutory instrument to ban the private prescription of puberty blockers for under-18s. The reason for the ban, and for the rush? The health secretary says it is “essential to make the order with immediate effect to avoid serious danger to health”.
This medicine is so dangerous that the government is not banning, and does not propose to ban, NHS or private prescriptions for cisgender kids.
One of the ways in which the Tories have tried to rig the electoral system is by introducing mandatory voter ID. Without it, you can’t vote. Here’s how to get ID if you don’t already have any.
The ongoing wrecking spree by Hilary Cass continues, but it’s getting significant pushback from medical experts. As Erin Reed reports, “both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society have categorically rejected the review as a justification for bans on care and have challenged many of its alleged findings.”
Every time Cass speaks to the press things get worse: she’s now suggesting that trans healthcare shouldn’t be measured in satisfaction or regret rates (which are exceptionally high and exceptionally low respectively compared to other forms of healthcare) but in factors such as “employment”, which suggests that she’s either completely unaware of or couldn’t care less about the discrimination that means one in three UK employers say that – despite it being illegal – they would refuse to hire trans people. And more details of the people in her review board are starting to emerge; many have links with pseudoscientific anti-trans organisations. Cass herself met with people from Ron DeSantis’s anti-trans administration and appears to have lied about it.
As the Endocrine Society says in a strongly worded statement:
“We stand firm in our support of gender-affirming care. Transgender and gender-diverse people deserve access to needed and often life-saving medical care. NHS England’s recent report, the Cass Review, does not contain any new research that would contradict the recommendations made in our Clinical Practice Guideline on gender-affirming care… Medical evidence, not politics, should inform treatment decisions.”
Lee Hurley of Trans Writes has been tracking trans-related articles in the UK press: The Guardian, The Observer, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph, The Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday and Private Eye.
In the 23 days since 16 April there have been 126 articles about trans people in those publications.
121 of them were negative.
5 were neutral.
0 were written by trans people.
In Utah this week, the Republican administration introduced a snitch line, an online form for bigots to report any cases of trans or non-binary people using the single-sex facilities appropriate to their gender.
It’s easy to point at this as an example of US right-wing bigotry, but for anyone thinking such vicious idiocy couldn’t happen here: on the very same day the UK Equalities Minister, Kemi Badenoch, introduced a snitch line, an online form for bigots to report organisations offering “bad guidance” about letting trans people use the single-sex spaces appropriate to their gender.
I’ve been loath to post about the current cavalcade of cruelties the Tories are heaping on trans people right now, but I wanted to point out something about the proposed NHS guidance that would force trans women out of single-sex wards: it’s illegal under multiple laws, especially for trans women who have gender recognition certificates. Not for the first time, the party of law and order is attempting to undermine the law by issuing guidelines encouraging organisations to practice illegal discrimination.
The Guardian has published a thoughtful article by playwright Jonathan Cash about the 1999 bombing of the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho, which he was injured in. The bomb was planted by a far-right sympathiser, a man who believed that gay men should be put to death. If you’re going to read the whole piece, which is very powerful, be aware that it contains some horrific details of victims’ injuries.
Cash’s article includes some sections that The Guardian’s own writers, and their peers in other publications, should think about.
The bombing campaign heralded a change in attitude from some of the UK’s most popular newspapers. Until then, the words “poofs” and “queers” were used in editorials, even in front-page headlines, especially since the advent of the HIV pandemic. Similarly hateful words were used to describe people from other minority groups. These words, in print, encouraged constant, casual discrimination and affected the way that LGBTQIA+ people and ethnic minorities were talked about and treated.
As far as I am concerned, every single journalist, editor and newspaper proprietor who contributed to these attitudes in print is complicit in the deaths of three people who were standing just feet away from me, and the life-changing injuries of many others, both physical and psychological.
…If you don’t call out derogatory words about people who are somehow regarded as different, hate is normalised and you’re complicit.
In the UK we’ve already seen two trans girls stabbed, one fatally, and anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes – and anti-trans hate crimes specifically – are soaring. Too many writers’ words are contributing to an increasingly violent climate.
One of the reasons that Jimmy Savile got away with his abuse for so long was the UK’s libel laws. Savile was highly litigious, and would send his very expensive lawyers after any publication that so much as considered reporting allegations about him.
The fact that the allegations were true was irrelevant. Savile was rich, and that means he could use the law as a weapon. And he did, from the 1960s until his death in 2011. For five decades he used his money to stop people telling the truth about who and what he was.
As Meirion Jones explained in The Guardian, The Sun wanted to expose him in 2008 and had multiple signed affidavits from his victims, but – yet again – did not publish. “They would be facing the best QCs money could buy, representing a man who could potentially call Prince Charles, Margaret Thatcher, the heads of charities, the head of the BBC and the pope as character witnesses. The best guess of the lawyers was that a libel action could cost a million pounds… this wasn’t the first or last time that Savile escaped because of our libel laws, which rewarded his deliberate targeting of vulnerable victims. Off the record, journalists have told me of multiple attempts to blow the whistle on Savile from the 1960s onwards that failed because newspapers could not afford the legal risks involved.”
When even The Sun can’t afford to be taken to court, imagine the chilling effect on smaller publishers and individuals. In Britain, the rich can silence the truth by threatening legal action – action that, even if the defendant were successful, would financially ruin them. As a result, the truth about some famous people will not emerge until they die.
This kind of bullying is known as a SLAPP – a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation – and the UK government describes SLAPP actions as “an abuse of the legal process, where the primary objective is to harass, intimidate and financially and psychologically exhaust one’s opponent via improper means”. The Law Society says that “Unlike genuine defamation claims – which typically arise out of an attempt to protect or repair the claimant’s damaged reputation – SLAPPs go further, aiming to prevent lawful investigations and discussions about matters of public interest.”
SLAPPs are legal in the UK, and they – or the threat of them – remain one of the favourite bullying tactics of oligarchs, super-rich individuals who can afford to abuse the legal system. But they have limited reach, which is why you’ll typically find them used only against UK residents who can’t afford to go to court. The oligarchs who use SLAPPs and SLAPP threats rarely, if ever, go after people with money, and they can’t stop people in other countries from telling the truth about who or what they are.
This post isn’t about Jimmy Savile.
The Cass review is a lengthy document and it’ll take time for detailed criticisms to emerge, but there’s already plenty of evidence to indicate that the worst fears of trans people and allies were correct. The review team included people vocally opposed to trans healthcare, applied different standards of evidence to trans-supportive and trans-antagonistic studies, is happy to accept anecdote and hearsay provided it is not trans-supportive, and appears to advocate conversion therapy and demand that doctors be involved in social transition, which is not a medical matter.
the Cass Review final report seems to assume, as an unspoken starting point, that growing up to be a trans person is a bad thing, and the rest of the conclusions follow from that assumption.
…We have previously identified a number of professionals involved in both the Cass Review and the NHS Gender Dysphoria Working Group which helped commission the review who are involved either in lobbying efforts against trans affirmative healthcare, or who have actively promoted conversion therapy.
In the US, the people who want to ban abortion will tell you that they don’t want to ban abortion; they just want to put some protections around some of it. This is a lie.
Also in the US, the people who want to ban healthcare for all trans people – who, not coincidentally, are usually people who want to ban abortion – will tell you that they don’t want to ban healthcare for all trans healthcare; they just want to protect children. This too is a lie.
We know these lies are lies because the people telling them admit it. For example in January, US Republican legislators discussed the importance of disguising their “endgame”, which was to ban all healthcare for trans adults. It was important to focus initially only on trans kids, the legislators said, because “what we know legislatively is we have to take small bites.”
As one of the legislators said:
we have to be looking at the endgame simultaneously, maybe even using that to move the window to say that this isn’t just wrong 0-18, it’s wrong for everyone and we shouldn’t be allowing that to happen.
This is how you ban people’s healthcare: slowly, and with small bites.
Here in the UK, we’re told that nobody wants to ban trans adults’ healthcare. This is a lie.
In the wake of the Cass review into teen healthcare, a review that prioritised anti-trans junk science and anti-trans activists over actual science and medical expertise, it has now been announced that there will be a review into the provision of trans healthcare for adults. If it too prioritises anti-trans junk science and anti-trans activists, then like the Cass review it will conclude that trans healthcare – which after years of underfunding and now political attacks is barely functioning, with people dying on waiting lists that in some cases are now decades long – needs to be restricted too, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
This is dangerous not just for trans people, but for everybody. Because the Cass review now has people openly discussing a ban on trans healthcare for anyone under 25 to “protect children”, even though 18 to 25 year olds are adults, on the spurious (and untrue) grounds that brains are not fully developed until then. In effect, the claim is that you cannot consent to healthcare until you’re 25.
So far, this is only being discussed in relation to trans people. But if we establish the precedent that under-25s do not have bodily autonomy, women’s reproductive rights are next.
That’s the endgame.