Left Wing Has Spent Decade ‘Trying to Shut Women up’ For Transgender Ideology, Says UK Health Minister

The UK Labour Party is hypocritical to now endorse the deeply critical Cass report on transgender drugs given it has been “part of the ideology, the culture wars” for the past ten years, a government health minister says.

Dr Hillary Cass published the full, nearly 400-word NHS-ordered report into the state of children’s transgender “services” in the health service on Wednesday in which she made a series of serious criticisms and recommendations. The Left-wing Labour Party — gunning to become the new government at national elections later this year — was quick to say it would adopt all 32 recommendations made by Dr Cass, but present Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Victoria Atkins angrily slammed the rhetoric as hypocritical given — as she claimed — Labour had been part of the problem all along.

The report had shone a light on “bullying” and intimidation in the debate around trans issues in the United Kingdom, with Dr Cass herself saying she’d been attacked for leading the review and said the environment was “exceptionally toxic”. Reflecting this, Atkins said on Thursday morning that Dr Cass had been “incredibly brave” in her work and said “a culture of ideology and dare I say it intimidation ahs been allowed to trump the interests of children and the basis of clinical evidence” in an interview with London broadcaster LBC.

Further speaking to Sky News Thursday morning, Atkins said: “Labour has spent the last ten years trying to shut women up when it comes to this. They have been part of the ideology, the culture wars… creating an atmosphere of intimidation for anyone who dared to question this ideology, so it is a little bit rich of the Labour Party to be lecturing the rest of us now, having been so forthright in their support for this ideology in the past.”

The culture in intimidation that “trumped safety and evidence for the care of children” will now be stopped, Atkins vowed, and said the government has already taken some steps including closing the controversial Tavistock clinic which had been at the centre of the ‘treatment’ controversies, and the NHS has now banned hormone blockers for children and young people. A further government review would now come to understand the “consequences” of the “treatments” given to some 9,000 children who presented as transgender to the Tavistock clinic. Not only would this help understand what had happened and how to stop it from happening again, it was also important so “so we can help and support those young people”, she said.

When asked whether medics who had been involved and who had refused to cooperate with the inquiry should face punishment, Atkins declined to make a decision but said this was a matter for the medical regulators. Nevertheless, she clearly implied a belief that clinicians had done wrong. She said: “I draw myself back to the oath that clinicians take which is to ‘do no harm’ and it seems to me this failure, this refusal by some — not by all — but by some to help the review, I struggle to understand how that is consistent with their professional duties.”

In future, Atkins said, the priority would not be to “affirm” young children as adults claiming to be transgender are, but rather to give them “holistic” treatment, as called for in the Cass report. She said: “Rather than treating these children as a condition, we want to treat them as people, as human beings, look at all of their conditions and try to address some of the complex needs that came out so well in her report.”

Some Labour figures have already moved to distance themselves from previously strongly held positions on the transgender debate in the wake of the Cass report, already emerging as a watershed moment in the United Kingdom. Labour Member of Parliament and would-be health minister Wes Streeting said last night he no longer agrees with his previous position that “trans men are men, trans women are women”, saying he’s now realised “there are lots of complexities”.

Streeting said he’d take criticism “on the chin” but Labour MP Rosie Duffield, who says she has been shunned by her own party for her traditional feminist views on gender in the past, accused Streeting and others of “moral cowardice”. She said in a statement:

To the many women, blanked, sidelined, dismissed by male leaders when speaking up and exposing this for years… [Labour Women’s Declaration, a left-wing feminist group] were refused meetings, banned and blocked from [Labour Party] conferences and campaigns, blocked as candidates.

Despite years of research, connection with experts, meetings for cross-party politicians attended in secret. We will remain unacknowledged by [Labour]… As male leaders take applause, praise and credit for simply listening to an expert, and finally reading the room (the voters), where were the senior ‘sisters’?

Perhaps less moral cowardice now? No apologies to those ‘investigated’, reprimanded, passed over, bullied, deselected.

Feminist author Julie Bindel has also touched on such themes, castigating the “cowardly converts” now saying they agree with the Cass report but who had spent years saying and doing the opposite. As well as Labour’s Streeting and Yvette Cooper, Bindel also had words for PinkNews and its very low-key reporting on the published review, having been a “key cheerleader for puberty blockers for children” for years, she said.