In a few years’ time we will find it extraordinary that a section of the adult professional population, including MPs protested at the recent announcement by Health Secretary Wes Streeting that puberty blockers were going to be banned indefinitely.
They think they know better than the evidence of a four year research project culminating in the Cass Review and the many clinicians who left the Tavistock Clinic GIDS before it was closed down, having witnessed first-hand the weak criteria on which these drugs were prescribed to youngsters.
But then so do the LGBT lobby groups that have been advising both public and private sector on LGBT issues for years. Both Stonewall and Mermaids have come out against Streeting’s decision. They want kids to have access to life changing hormones.
Many people knew a decade ago that there was no evidence to support the use of puberty blockers, that almost 100% of those prescribed them went on to use cross sex hormones (so not a pause activists and clinicians have always used as a justification) and that more than 85% of all these children will desist once they have gone through puberty. The majority of these youngsters are gay or lesbian – 70% are female – and as many as a third are autistic but such has been the indoctrination in schools and the NHS that feelings of body dysphoria and other mental health issues have been interpreted exclusively through the lens of gender identity.
Unfortunately for the kids the solution they are told will reduce their physical and emotional distress, puberty blockers, leads them onto a medical path that has life changing consequences, including sexual dysfunction, infertility, permanently changed bodies etc etc. No matter, the chorus of progressives said (and still say) it was imperative that these children be given the drugs they needed. A fabricated myth that if they weren’t given them they would commit suicide is still being shamelessly used to force parents to consent to their use.
Such an extreme ideology and its practice requires support from key institutions in society to gain credibility and traction. The global lobby keen to get gender identity embedded into national legal systems particularly targeted education, law and government. Its method was to avoid political debate and ride on the wave of human rights and early adoption of gender identity by global human rights organisations like Amnesty International has been key to its success. After all who wants to be against human rights?
Legal, corporate and government organisations embraced the ideas, keen to show their progressive credentials and helped by having the EHRC as well as the CIPD as promoters of the ideology for several years. Just like any pernicious ideology, those who didn’t agree publicly were cast out, shamed, blackballed and expelled meaning that the vast majority of people put their heads down and said nothing. It has been nothing less than authoritarian in its implementation.
In September 2020 Over 100 companies, including Aviva, BP, CITI, Disney, Expedia, Microsoft and Sky signed a letter in support of trans rights saying ‘trans rights are human rights’. It didn’t say which rights trans people currently do not have only that they are ‘under threat’, widely understood by many as meaning feminists have challenged the demand that biological males identifying as women use single sex spaces and participate in female sports.
For gender identity to be accepted as something innate it must be there from birth and not developed in adulthood. So the indoctrination of children was vital. They needed to be told that they had a gender identity and also that it may be different from their biological sex. This ideology was cleverly introduced into schools by newly formed LGBT groups under the guise of anti-bullying and PSHE training. The report “Only adults? Good practices in legal gender recognition for youth” funded by Dentons law firm and Thomson Reuters Foundation outlines an international strategy for advocating legal transition in youth and is illuminating. The activist role of these two large companies in the whole child transition debacle should be well publicised and condemned.
The corporate sector must take their share of responsibility for this shameful episode. It was targeted by Stonewall an organisation which had already earned a good reputation for its work in LGB issues and added the T in 2015 unchallenged. Keen to expand their ESG activities and demonstrate wider stakeholder responsibility than increasing profits for shareholders, business’s enthusiastic participation in this wider LGBT campaign gave activist groups and their ideology validation, credibility and money. Private and public sector organisations alike participated enthusiastically in the Stonewall Workplace Equality Index and the Stonewall Champions Scheme and applied whatever policies they were told would give them high marks. Stonewall has also had an active Schools Champions Scheme for many years and has undertaken training in many schools, including primary schools.
Some corporates including Starbucks and Wagamama have implemented special campaigns to support controversial charity Mermaids which specialises in ‘helping’ children in their quest for transition. The following companies were quoted on the Mermaids website as being supporters of the charity –Lloyds, Barclays, Tesco, Aon, BP, BCLP, P&G and Unilever. One wonders just how much due diligence was done before committing funds and their names to such a dubious activity.
History may tell why professional adults and the organisations they work for went along with this harmful propaganda for so long. I have often wondered if it had had more of an impact on boys and men a challenge may have come sooner. It took grass roots feminist organisations as well as courageous individual women years to counter this ideology and the practices and policies that it spawned for which they were abused, marginalised or cancelled.
What we are seeing now is backtracking by some, a retelling of history or a quiet dropping of pronouns by others. Businesses are seeing the way the wind is blowing (as does Streeting, a former Stonewall employee) and many have already withdrawn from Stonewall schemes. I doubt there will any further corporate support for Mermaids.
All the HR and DEI professionals that supported and promoted the focus on transgenderism in diversity but shut out any dissenting voices should learn a lesson. Suppressing debate under the guise of inclusion is wrong. And in this case it is children who have been damaged the most.