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October 17, 2024 - 10:00am
It’s as if the Cass Report never happened. Six months on, an NHS trust is advertising for a clinical psychologist who will offer support to young people “on the gender affirming medical pathway”. That’s exactly what Cass warned against, pointing out that no one knows which children will persist with a trans identity as they get older. The risks involved in prescribing cross-sex hormones to young people who will almost certainly change their minds are obvious.
Not to Nottinghamshire NHS Healthcare Trust, it seems. The job advertised involves working with children as young as 11 who are waiting for or have already been prescribed puberty blockers by the NHS, a treatment for which Cass found no clinical evidence. Even more astonishingly, the job specification insists that the successful applicant should “practice in a gender affirming manner in line with WPATH SOC 8”.
The uninitiated may not immediately realise how big a red flag that is. The impenetrable initials stand for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and version 8 of its treatment recommendations. It was widely regarded as the leading authority on the subject until earlier this year, when leaked files revealed that ideology had long ago trumped best practice.
The files demonstrate that the organisation “is neither scientific nor advocating for ethical medical care”, according to a highly critical report. It claims that WPATH is a proselytising organisation which promotes dubious medical practices, “including hormonal and surgical experimentation on minors and vulnerable adults”.
Back in April, Health Secretary Wes Streeting said he wanted the Cass Review to be a “watershed moment” for NHS gender services. “We just can’t have this free-for-all when people decide when they are or aren’t going to cooperate with an NHS England review,” he said.
Yet that seems to be what’s happening if an NHS trust thinks it’s acceptable to publish a word salad of fashionable terms, clearly belonging to an era that predates Cass. The job advert also has a section on the trust’s “Equality and Diversity principles”, a phrase that strikes fear into anyone who believes in genuine equality — the old-fashioned kind that doesn’t prioritise airy-fairy notions about gender over everything else, that is.
You might think that doctors, of all people, should have been more resistant to pseudo-science, given its capacity to do permanent damage to vulnerable patients. But that’s to underestimate the influence of a determined bunch of “queer theorists” and trans activists. They were quietly working away, characterising nonsensical ideas as progressive, long before most of us had even begun to grasp what was going on.
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SubscribeUnfortunately I think this is overly-optimistic from Joan Smith. This is a forever war.
Just as “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance”, so will be the price of defending vulnerable children and women’s rights from the insanity of the trans idealogues.
If you think the transgender madness is really passing you’re a more optimistic person than I.
Of course a socialist state bureaucracy is going to enthuse about modern Californian transhumanism. Modern socialism is nothing but identity politics.