Update #12 – Press release: Dr Hilary Cass Final Report

I welcome the findings and recommendations in the Final Report of the Cass Review. https://cass.independent-review.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/CassReview_Final.pdf

Like many other women and men, I was smeared as a transphobe for opposing the ideological and dangerous model of healthcare espoused by the network of LGBT+ charities aligned with Stonewall, including Gendered Intelligence, Mermaids, the LGBT Foundation and others.  The attacks to which I was subjected came from those organisations, but also from members of Garden Court Chambers, where I practised as a barrister for nearly 20 years. 

I believe that this conduct was an example of what Dr Cass was referring to at paragraph 2 of her summary: “The surrounding noise and increasingly toxic, ideological and polarised public debate [which] made the work of the Review significantly harder and does nothing to serve the children and young people who may already be subject to significant minority stress”.

The final Cass Report is emphatic: Vulnerable children and adolescents, the majority of them female, have had their often complex mental health needs ignored in a rush to affirm a ‘gender identity’.  This is precisely what I – and others like me – have been saying for several years.  In the crowdfunder I launched for my litigation (and which was deleted by the provider because of its contents) I wrote:

Gender non-conforming children and young people, who would otherwise grow up to be happily LGB, are vulnerable to the new trans activism’s ‘born in the wrong body’ narrative, leading to an explosion in medical and surgical procedures on healthy young bodies, especially female bodies, so as to conform to 1950s gender stereotypes.

… 

the new trans activism is focusing, inexplicably, on young children and declaring them ‘trans’; treating puberty as a disease to be blocked with powerful drugs; delivering our young people into the arms of a multi-million pound industry of big pharmaceutical companies and plastic surgeons. 

The Cass Review has confirmed that our concerns were right.  But by raising them we elicited vitriol on an unimaginable scale from Stonewall and its allies, which continues to this day.  I was discriminated against and victimised by Garden Court Chambers, others were forced from their professions.  This campaign was part of a deliberate strategy which turned children and young people into the foundations upon which their toxic brand of gender identity politics was built. 

This politicisation of mental ill health and gender distress in children and young people, followed by their medicalisation, is the biggest medical scandal that I have ever witnessed.  The Cass Review is not the end of that scandal: we need to understand what happened, why, who is responsible, and how to prevent it from ever happening again.

I add my voice to those calling for a statutory public inquiry into how gender identity became embedded in schools and within the NHS. 

I also call for the immediate removal of any influence of Stonewall and its cohort from our schools, hospitals and public spaces. Never again can we allow such a toxic and dangerous ideology to proliferate in our institutions.

Allison Bailey