How the Cass Review changed everything

It’s a new festive tradition for me. Sometime in December, an editor will ask, ‘Can I have 800 words on whether next year will be the end of trans?’.

Having spent much of the past decade writing articles explaining the obvious – that men can’t give birth and lesbians don’t have penises – I’ve learned neither to credit our political leaders with common sense, nor to make predictions about their actions. This year, however, feels different.

There have been many false starts before now. In 2015, when boxing promoter Kellie Maloney – a man who admitted to attacking his then wife – was sympathetically interviewed on BBC Woman’s Hour, I dumbly hoped that the audience would be outraged. They weren’t. A few years later, when detransitioner Keira Bell told a court how her healthy breasts had been cut off by NHS surgeons, it felt like the end of gender medicine. Yet the scandal rolled on. And when then Stonewall boss Nancy Kelley referred to lesbians as ‘sexual racists’ for not sleeping with men, it felt inevitable that the LGB would divorce the T. To date, that hasn’t happened.

But as each year has passed, the number of feminists critical of gender ideology, otherwise known as ‘TERFs’, has grown. Maya Forstater’s 2021 landmark legal victory won protection for ‘gender critical’ beliefs in the workplace, and then Elon Musk’s 2022 takeover of Twitter ripped the gag from our mouths on social media. This year, we finally reached gender-critical mass.

Perhaps most significantly, in April, world-renowned paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass published NHS England’s eagerly anticipated review into gender-identity services for children, an investigation that was in part sparked by Keira Bell’s case. It had the effect of a bomb going off at trans HQ.

Cass’s job was a tough one. She had to fight for the data to be released from obstructive NHS trusts, and then weather attacks from the British Medical Association, MPs and dribbling perverted morons on social media (undoubtedly there’s overlap between these groups). The personal abuse she faced was so severe that she couldn’t use public transport in the immediate aftermath of her review’s publication.

The review may have been a bit soggy in places. Cass used concepts and language that were straight out of the Stonewall handbook. She accepted there is such a thing as ‘transgender’ children, when there plainly isn’t. And she also laid the foundations for yet another controversial puberty-blocker experiment. But in the main, the Cass Review was a powerful piece of research. She was absolutely clear that there is no proven benefit to halting children’s development with drugs and that existing research on the treatment of kids confused about their gender is shoddy. She also highlighted the ideological bias in favour of transgenderism that had crept into clinical practice. The shockwaves rocked the political and medical establishments.

UK health secretary Wes Streeting, who was once a member of a Labour Party Facebook group where suspected TERFs were named and shamed, has fully supported the implementation of Cass’s recommendations, making the Conservatives’ emergency ban on puberty blockers permanent. In addition, he has met nurses at the centre of a legal case to secure single-sex changing facilities. He even now admits he was wrong to say ‘transwomen are women’.

As for his boss, by the time Dear Leader Keir Starmer was elected in July, he too had accepted that men don’t have cervixes. Meanwhile, Tory helmswoman Kemi Badenoch made a virtue of standing up for the biological reality of sex in her successful bid for her party’s leadership.

But the Cass Review didn’t just shatter the consensus in British politics – the fallout has been global.

In December, a challenge to Tennessee’s state-wide ban on so-called gender-affirming care for children was heard in the US Supreme Court. When questioned about the Cass Review, Chase Strangio, a trans-activist lawyer representing the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), was forced to acknowledge that ‘there is no evidence in the studies that these treatments [puberty blockers] reduce suicide’. Strangio even added that ‘completed suicides’ among trans-identifying youth are thankfully ‘rare’. This is an astonishing volte-face. For much of the past decade, the ACLU has repeatedly claimed that ‘trans kids’ will kill themselves without access to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.

Lawsuits against clinicians are also stacking up. US detransitioner Clementine Breen recently announced that she is suing one of the world’s preeminent practitioners of ‘transgender medicine’, Dr Johanna Olson-Kennedy. Breen was referred to Olson-Kennedy’s clinic, where she was prescribed puberty blockers at age 12, hormones at 13 and a double mastectomy at 14. Now 20, she believes the sexual abuse she suffered at age six was the real cause of the psychological discomfort she felt with her body. She went for therapy, became reconciled with her sex and stopped taking testosterone.

For all its flaws and occasional fence-sitting, Cass’s work paved the way for these cases.

The trans trend may well finally grind to a halt when the financial risk of drugging and operating on mentally unwell people becomes too high, and insurance companies in the US refuse to cover treatments. But until then, we will see more men beating women in sports (sometimes quite literally), more rapists in women’s prisons, and more lies about trans suicide and ‘genocide’. Those of us who persist in believing that reality is real will grind our teeth, as we’re threatened by activists telling us to ‘be kind’ or else. But make no mistake, we are now finally winning.

The lie of transgenderism is so big, it needs an entire infrastructure to support it – and to bully people into silence and compliance. But thanks to the successes of the past few years, for the first time ever I can write that, yes, 2025 will be the year the trans trend crashes.

Jo Bartosch is a journalist campaigning for the rights of women and girls.