This week saw publication of the long-awaited final report of the independent review of gender identity services for children and young people, which was chaired by respected paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass. In the wake of Dr Cass’s findings, Dr Jenny Cunningham explains below what is wrong with the Scottish government’s proposed ban on so-called conversion practices in Scotland. It is astonishing to reflect that if Dr Cass explained to a grandchild what is written in her report, she could end up being arrested for questioning the official ‘affirmative’ approach being pushed by the Scottish government.
Here, I use the editorial space to discuss what we all need to be doing to stop the state-sponsored transgender ‘conversion therapy’ of children attending schools across Scotland.
SUE in the news
Telegraph Drop conversion therapy ban, SNP urged (msn.com)
Times https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/shut-glasgow-gender-clinic-now-urges-childrens-doctor-cz2s5gprt
Following the Cass Review, we need your help
Stuart Waiton is Chair of the Scottish Union for Education.
We need your help to change Scotland and to finally stop transgender ideology harming children.
Last year, SUE produced a pamphlet, Transgender ideology in Scottish schools: What’s wrong with government guidance?, explaining all that is wrong with schools’ promotion of transgender ideology. We distributed printed copies and sent e-copies to every headteacher in Scotland and every MSP. We are going to send them out again, and we’re also going to print tens of thousands of leaflets about issues in schools, and try to get them into the hands of as many parents as possible across the whole of Scotland. We can only do this with your help. We need money, so if you can, please donate anything you can afford – and if you would like to receive some copies of the leaflet to hand around, get in touch. We’ll also send you an e-copy of the pamphlet for you to send to your local schools.
I’m assuming that most readers of our Substack will have heard about the Cass Review by now, and we will be looking at it in more detail over the coming weeks. It’s great, and to her credit, that a genuine expert has come out and challenged the transgender trend and raised serious questions about the clinical and medical practices (or malpractices) that have been taking place. But we can’t rely on experts; after all, it is the professionals and their regulating bodies who have helped create this horrific situation in the first place. Therefore, we will be emailing all our subscribers with a list of possible targets to write to or send pamphlets to – those key groups and individuals who continue to promote and ‘affirm’ children’s ‘trans’ identities – such as the Sandyford Clinic (whose staff continue to prescribe puberty blockers to children). If you’re not already a subscriber, please consider becoming one, because it is ordinary people, when organised and active – and their common sense – that can make the real difference, and we should all be contacting our councillors, our MSPs, and particularly our children’s headteachers, to ask them what they are doing about the harms discussed by Dr Cass.
Despite the confusion and the defensiveness many have felt over this issue, most people instinctively question the idea that there are 100+ genders, or that a girl can become a boy (or vice versa). Many critical voices, such as those at For Women Scotland, SOS (Safeguarding Our Schools) Scotland, ScotPAG and other organisations, have raised what should be seen as important questions, such as, Why, if gender identity is innate, is there a trend in recent years for mainly teenaged girls to ‘transition’? Why is the fact that around a third of children turning up at clinics are autistic not seen as significant? And why is it often the most vulnerable children, those with serious difficulties or who are in care, who are disproportionately transitioning? And, of course, as Cass has confirmed, why does no one appear to consider the reality that by affirming a young child’s identity, what you are doing is actively pushing them down a pathway to elective bodily mutilation, sexual dysfunction, sterility, and a life on drugs?
What Cass’s findings reveal is not only a medical scandal but also a political one. This is no doubt why, as I write, not a single Scottish government minister has muttered one word about her report. The scandal also involves much of the media, who have often remained strangely silent – or worse, acted as mouthpieces for transgender rights activists and ideologues. An example is the BBC, another organisation worth contacting and putting on the spot.
Increasingly, evidence – real evidence rather than the advocacy research often used by the Scottish government to justify policies based on transgender ideology – shows that a wait-and-see approach (as opposed to the official line of affirming identities) allows children who claim to be the opposite sex to become comfortable with their unaltered bodies and to often grow up to be gay or lesbian rather than ‘trans’. Indeed, at the first event I ever spoke at on this issue, in Glasgow, it was clear that the lesbians in attendance were horrified at what was happening because they could see that ordinary lesbian girls, now confused by transgender rights activists and their ideology, were being converted into ‘trans kids’. If there is a conversion therapy scandal, this is surely it!
Parents have come to us distraught at the role their schools and the psychiatric and psychological professions were playing in pushing their children down this path. Some have left educational institutions and now homeschool. Others have been targeted by the police for expressing their concerns online. Many are now insisting that their primary-aged children be exempted from attending RSHP lessons that promote transgender ideology to their kids.
But parents should not be left isolated and anxious by the behaviour of schools. This is another serious scandal. They should not have to find their young child being socially elevated and celebrated by transgender rights activists in the LGBT clubs being set up in their schools. Indeed, as Sam Cowie has argued, it is a scandal that Time for Inclusive Education (TIE) and LGBT Youth Scotland are actively working in schools to promote transgenderism. The LGB is largely irrelevant to these organisations, who should be called out and thrown out of schools for being transgender ideologues.
Activist headteachers, including the one at James Gillespie High School in Edinburgh, should also be called out. As should the librarians and library associations who have turned their public services into rainbow (read ‘trans’) spaces. Unions, like the teacher’s union the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS), need to be challenged about their dogmatic promotion of transgender ideology. And with all the above, it is worth asking, what has this got to do with being a union, a librarian, and especially, an educator?
SUE will be working tirelessly to get transgender ideology out of schools. We will be working with many other people, such as Carolyn Brown and Maggie Mellon, to ensure that Sandyford is closed, or at the very least, stops giving kids puberty blockers. We all need to be telling headteachers that LGBT Youth Scotland is not a ‘caring’ or ‘progressive’ organisation. Such ideologically driven organisations need to be thrown out of schools, schools need to stop affirming transgender identities, and we all need to get involved with this and to help make sure that the Cass Review has not been written in vain.
If you want to help, or think we can help you, get in touch: info@scottishunionforeducation.co.uk.
Consultation on Ending Conversion Practices in Scotland
Dr Jenny Cunningham is a retired paediatrician who worked in Glasgow for thirty years.
A new law is being proposed in Scotland to make ‘conversion therapy’, and more broadly ‘conversion practices’, a criminal offence. This potential law is a draconian proposal, shaped by transgender ideology, that has used a consultation process designed to obfuscate the real dangers for parents, healthcare professionals, children and young people.
The first three questions in the consultation [1] were:
Do you support our approach to defining conversion practices which focuses on behaviour motivated by the intention to change or suppress a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity?
Do you think that legislation should cover acts or courses of behaviour intended to ‘suppress’ another person’s sexual orientation or gender identity?
Do you support or not support an approach which uses a package of both criminal and civil measures to address conversion practices in legislation?
This immediate focus on legislation to criminalise conversion practices assumes the case has been made that such practices are significant in Scotland and that their nature is clear. However, the consultation document does not establish that conversion practices are common. It fails to provide credible evidence of their prevalence. In fact, the only evidence referenced is the UK government’s National LGBT Survey (2017), the respondents to which were entirely self-selecting. This type of survey involves non-random selection of respondents and has no control group. Hence it cannot be used to generalise to the whole LGBT community. Four out of a total of 152 questions concerned ‘conversion therapy’, a term that was poorly and ambiguously defined. Therefore, no statistical conclusions could possibly be drawn from this survey, which is exactly what the consultation document does. Illegitimately, it claims the survey shows that 2% of Scottish respondents had experienced conversion therapy and that 5% had been offered it. Reference is made to evidence from the Australian state of Victoria, which depended on a very small qualitative study (15 interviews) and used the same percentages from the UK’s National LGBT Survey to back it up – for a totally different Australian population! The consultation uses testimonies from people with so-called ‘lived experience’ as qualitative evidence regarding conversion practices. Like findings based on self-selected surveys, those from testimonies cannot be generalised to the wider LGBTQ+ community and do not substantiate the prevalence or nature of conversion practices in Scotland.
The authors of the consultation document admit that the heinous conversion therapy practices directed against homosexuals in the past are all illegal in the UK. Therefore, behaviours that have the intention of changing or suppressing sexual orientation or gender identity are defined as services providing ‘talk therapies’ and coercive behaviours that cause physical or psychological harm. Coercive behaviours referred to in the consultation include violent, threatening or intimidating behaviour or frightening, humiliating, degrading or punishing the victim (section 104). There is no evidence provided that this type of coercive behaviour is being practised or of who is practising it. People with ‘lived experience’ cannot provide any kind of generalisable or quantitative evidence. Most of the illustrative examples (sections 104, 105 and 112) include behaviours that are already illegal in terms of a number of UK laws.
The term ‘talk therapies’ appears to refer to therapy or counselling provided largely by religious organisations (e.g. Christian Concern’s Core Issues Trust) with the aim of helping adults reconcile their religious beliefs with their sexuality. No evidence is provided that these are harmful practices.
Then there is the therapy provided by NHS gender identity services. The 15 members of the Scottish government’s Ending Conversion Practices Expert Advisory Group, whose report underpins the consultation document and who are all transgender rights activists or advocates, agreed that the only form of gender identity therapy that is acceptable (and excluded from criminalisation) is ‘affirmative’ gender treatment. The consultation document does not use the term affirmative but means this: therapy in which healthcare professionals accept a child or young person’s self-definition of their gender identity and proceed to realise that identity through gender ‘transition’ or ‘realignment’. This approach involves the use of experimental hormone treatments (puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones) and surgical procedures such as mastectomies, castration and modifications of sex organs.
The consultation tries to reassure parents and healthcare professionals that ‘non-directive and ethical guidance and support’ for children and adolescents will not be criminalised provided that it ‘does not direct them to a particular pre-determined sexual orientation or gender identity that is considered “preferable”’ (sections 45 and 46). But this is precisely what caring parents have to attempt to do in order to convince their children that they cannot ‘be born in the wrong body’ and cannot change sex. They must attempt to protect them from ‘gender-affirmative’ treatments, which carry very significant health risks – including the risk of infertility, sexual dysfunction and loss of sexual pleasure, along with the complications associated with radical surgical procedures – and which would commit them to lifelong medical treatment. Similarly, there are healthcare professionals who want to steer children and young people away from gender-affirmative treatment towards ‘watchful waiting’ and proper assessment of their associated mental health conditions, autism, or social problems such as abuse and family breakdown (any of which may be the cause of their expression of gender incongruence). Both parents and clinicians are aware of the evidence that young people allowed to mature, without gender identity interventions, will in 80% of cases come to terms with their bodies and sexuality (be it homosexuality, heterosexuality or bisexuality). It is abhorrent that many children and adolescents going through or on the waiting list for gender ‘reassignment’ are in fact gay, lesbian or bisexual – this is the really harmful ‘conversion practice’.
The consultation document asserts that conversion practices are ‘inherently harmful’ but refers only to hearsay reports from people who have ‘experienced conversion practices’ and ‘have reported severe mental health consequences’ (sections 35 and 36). ‘Research from Australia’ (section 37) is said to outline a number of harms that can result from conversion practices; however, in the link to this research, no references are provided, so it is not possible to evaluate the quality or applicability of the research. No Scottish or even UK research is provided. Thus, whereas the evidence of harm resulting from conversion practices in Scotland is risible, the harms of gender-affirmative treatments are increasingly well evidenced; eee, for example, the recently published Independent review of gender identity services for children and young people by Dame Hilary Cass.[2] Yet the consultation endorses the gender-affirmative model. This is made more alarming by the fact that the national gender identity service for children and young people in Scotland, the Sandyford Clinic in Glasgow, follows a gender-affirmative approach informed by the (now-discredited) World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) guidelines.
‘We do not propose to include a defence of consent in relation to the new criminal offence’ (that is, behaviour motivated by the intention to change or suppress a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity) (section 134).
‘We do not believe that it should be possible to consent to a harmful practice’ (section 137).
It is the height of hypocrisy to argue that a person (an adult or a young person) cannot consent to unsubstantiated conversion practices and yet claim that it is fine for children and young people to consent to harmful, life-changing affirmative gender reassignment. Equally egregious is to make opposition to gender transitioning from caring parents and ethical healthcare professionals a new criminal offence (with a prison sentence up to seven years in jail and/or an unlimited fine), and to make them subject to the terms of a civil protection order (Part 13: A New Civil Order Relating to Conversion Practices).
These arguments, among others, were made in response to the Scottish government’s consultation. It remains to be seen whether they make any difference. It is more than concerning that such punitive measures could be put into legislation on the basis of so flimsy a case. And it is reprehensible that the government continues to endorse gender-affirmative treatments at the cost of real harm to children and young people in Scotland.
References
1. Ending conversion practices in Scotland: consultation. 9 January 2024. https://www.gov.scot/publications/ending-conversion-practices-scotland-scottish-government-consultation/.
2. The Cass Review: Independent review of gender identity services for children and young people. April 2024. https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/.
News round-up
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.
https://archive.is/kwHAL Sian Griffiths, Why do schools let children choose pronouns at four, ask parents. Families hope an NHS report this week will signal a return to evidence-based medicine for under-18s — next they want an inquiry 06/04/24
https://substack.com/home/post/p-143420462?source=queue Sarah Phillimore, Medical Transition for Children - Where Are We Now?
The Final Report of the Cass Review was published on 10th April 2024 and the landscape has shifted back to protecting children and gathering evidence. How did we get here? And where are we going now? 10/04/24
https://archive.is/jl0Hk Gabriel McKay, Think tank says free University in Scotland should be re-examined 10/04/24
https://substack.com/home/post/p-143478389?source=queue Joanna Williams, After The Cass Review: What Next? Protecting children from gender ideologues 11/04/24
https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/transgender-debate-cass-report-means-scottish-politicians-can-no-longer-scream-bigot-at-parents-concerned-about-puberty-blockers-susan-dalgety-4589002 Susan Dalgety, Transgender debate: Cass report means Scottish politicians can no longer scream 'bigot' at parents concerned about puberty blockers. SNP and Green ministers don't seem to know what to say in response to the Cass Review of NHS gender services in England 12/04/24
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/never-forget-the-politicians-who-got-gender-politics-wrong/ Patrick O’Flynn, Never forget the politicians who pushed gender politics 12/04/24
https://substack.com/home/post/p-143482608?source=queue Frank Furedi, Woke Is Not The Problem – It Is The Symptom Of Something Far Worse It is the disturbing trend towards decivilization that should concern us 13/04/24
https://www.psychotherapy.org.uk/news/ukcp-update-on-conversion-therapy/ Official Statement, UKCP update on conversion therapy. 05/04/24https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/health/2024/04/the-cass-review-into-childrens-gender-care-should-shame-us-all Hannah Barnes, The Cass review into children’s gender care should shame us all. Why was the prescription of puberty blockers to distressed children allowed to continue for so long? 10/04/23
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/health/2024/04/the-cass-review-into-childrens-gender-care-should-shame-us-all Hannah Barnes, The Cass review into children’s gender care should shame us all. Why was the prescription of puberty blockers to distressed children allowed to continue for so long? 10/04/23
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/14/hilary-cass-review-gender-trans-young-people-children-nhs-evidence Sonia Sodha, Thanks to Cass, evidence not ideology will be used to guide children seeking gender advice 14/04/24
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Excellent writing this week. Go Team SUE!