The Future Will Condemn Us For Pandering to Trans Agenda

The Cass Report on Gender Identity Services for Children

(1) The Trans Agenda and Anti-Catholic Bigotry

The title of this article reflects the headline to an article by Eilis O'Hanlon in the Sunday Independent on 7 August 2022. The Trans Agenda is not a subject I have dwelt on (or even mentioned) on this Blog over the years. One reason I write about it now is that the year 2022 is the 25th anniversary of the first occurrence of a topic that has frequently hit the headlines since 1997  and constitutes my central concern i.e. false claims of child abuse against the Catholic Church - especially false allegations of child murder.  

I summarised my quarter century Crusade in Part E 'My Conclusion - Blood Libel Forever?' of article "Deaths of Children in Mother and Baby Care Homes". The following is an extract from that Summary where I recall an optimistic piece I wrote years ago: 

• "[the hysteria] began in 1997 with an allegation that related to the death of a REAL baby - because Blood Libel  was new in Ireland and needed the appearance of credibility
• it  came to an end in 2010 with reference to the unsolved murder of a REAL child - because several claims had been refuted and credibility was again a factor BUT
• between these two dates, anti-clerical Hysteria reigned supreme and journalists thought they could get away with anything including "Murder of the Undead" allegations!

Even THAT cynical analysis now looks too hopeful with allegations that nuns starved babies in the Mother and Baby Homes. The fact that the Report of the Commission on Mother and Baby Homes refuted those claims, won't put a stop to our anti-clerical hysteria, if the history of the last quarter-century is anything to go by."

On a few occasions over the decades, I thought that our Blood Libel hysteria was at an end (and even that I had contributed to its demise!) [NOTE (i)] but it always re-ignited, albeit in slightly different form on each occasion. Today I note that Eilis O'Hanlon, Brenda Power and Gender  Critical Feminists (and others) in Ireland and the UK are on the offensive against the Trans Lobby - and doing well for now! My own experience has taught me to be deeply pessimistic and never to anticipate victory in the struggle against fanaticism and fantasy in our society!

(2) Ireland: Gender Recognition Act, Transgender Equality Network Ireland (TENI) and the HSE

(2.1) In an article in the Sunday Times (Irish edition) on 12 June 2022 "Why Women are Right to Defend Their Terf", Brenda Power wrote:

Under the Gender Recognition Act (2015) all a man needs to do is to make a statutory declaration in front of a solicitor and he's a woman! He can participate in women's sport including boxing. He can use women's toilets and changing rooms. He can be admitted to a woman's prison and and indeed there are two violent biological men in Limerick prison at present, one convicted of rape threats and who must be addressed as she. [(ii)]

The employers' representative group IBEC recently circulated guidance that trans employees must be allowed to use the toilets of their gender identity, not their biological sex, and any objectors should receive "training". It has become "standard practice", IBEC says for staff to include their preferred pronouns - he/him, she/her - in email signatures. ...

The extent to which the Transgender Equality Network Ireland (TENI) is now directing public policy is alarming. It collaborated on IBEC's document, and Niall Muldoon, the Ombudsman for Children, [(iii)] has admitted that his article demanding more access to medical treatment for transgender children was also composed with TENI's guidance. 

According to the HSE, meanwhile, it's "people with cervixes" who get cervical cancer but men get prostate cancer. The Work Life Balance and Miscellaneous Provisions Bill 2022 amends maternity legislation by replacing "woman" with "person". Sara Phillips who chairs TENI, fathered three children before transitioning and sits on the board of the National Women's Council, has admitted to resuming her male identity for a job interview as "I don't believe I'd get a fair shake if I presented myself as female".!

 

(2.2) The Tavistock Clinic - "Unquestioned, Unproven, Unsafe"

The Tavistock Clinic, in London named the Gender and Identity Development Service, was launched in the UK in 1989 to help people aged 17 and under struggling with their gender identity. But in 2020, questions about the service were raised after it was rated "inadequate" by inspectors, following concerns raised by whistleblowers. The number of people seeking the clinic's help is 20 times higher than it was a decade ago, jumping from 250 to 5,000 referrals in 2021. [(iv)] 

In 2009 the HSE began referring Irish children to the clinic. The numbers were small but growing and in the decade up to 2021, 234 Irish children, two as young as five, were referred to the clinic for treatment. From 2014, Tavistock began holding satellite clinics in Crumlin Children's Hospital, Dublin. However, the standard of care given to patients by Tavistock was soon called into question by doctors working in the National Gender Service (NGS) in Loughlinstown in south Dublin where adults and teenagers over 16 are treated.

In early 2019, senior clinicians in the NGS warned the HSE and Crumlin that Tavistock’s Irish operation was “unsafe” and should be immediately shut down. Despite this, the HSE continued to use Tavistock even as alarm about its practices grew in the UK.

The Cass Report

According to an article by Mark Tighe in the Sunday Independent on 7 August 2022 "Unquestioned, Unproven, Unsafe"

An interim report in March 2022 by Dr Hillary Cass, a consultant paediatrician commissioned by the UK government to examine Tavistock, found serious failings in how it assessed children and decided which were placed on puberty blockers.

The Cass Report found children attending Tavistock faced a “clinician lottery”. They either would be assessed for a range of psychological and social issues or instead would get a doctor who would see gender incongruence as “immutable”, with the prescription of puberty blockers and hormones the only solution.

Staff felt pressurised to adopt an “unquestioning affirmative approach” to gender — at odds with standard clinical assessment requirements. A lack of documented assessments meant there was missing evidence justifying transition regimes that children were placed on.

This was all flagged in writing in 2019 by Dr Paul Moran, a consultant psychiatrist with the NGS in St Colmcille’s hospital, who along with Donal O’Shea, a consultant endocrinologist, tried to shout “stop”. Dr Moran fears there is an ideological desire in the HSE to continue the Tavistock-type model of care. ..

Having treated former child patients of the Tavistock Irish satellite in the NGS, Dr Moran is predicting significant numbers of patients will regret transitioning or have other adverse outcomes because they were “rushed” onto puberty blockers and hormones.

“We have good evidence from the patients we have seen that it is the wrong approach for most likely the majority,” Dr Moran said. “There are some children who seem to do well, but at the moment there is no way of predicting at the start of treatment who will do well or badly. In cases where we’ve seen them and they’ve been left in a heap we’ve put resources in to try and fix their mental health, their social problems, try and get them back into college, et cetera.”...

Dr Moran and Dr O’Shea attended a meeting with Crumlin hospital management on March 20, 2019, to discuss how patients would graduate from the Tavistock service to the NGS. “We asked basic questions about the service, such as ‘how many patients attended’ and ‘how many letters of referral there were’,” Moran said. “Crumlin management said they had no knowledge about the service. ‘Who approved it?’ They had no idea.”

As more patients aged out of Tavistock’s care and into the NGS age cohort, Dr Moran and his colleagues became aware of the “very poor clinical service for children”. We were coming across children who were clearly unwell and who had none of their underlying mental health problems addressed,” Dr Moran said. “Many of them were not suitable or ready yet to be on hormone treatment. The endocrinologists working in Crumlin recognised that, too.

“They had basically gone over to Tavistock in distress, dropped out of school and started self-harming. They were rushed on to hormones but left sitting at home, not being schooled. Mental health issues were not addressed.

“There was this total focus on blockers and hormones, but the bigger problems that were pressing in their lives were ignored. By the time they got to us they were often a couple of years sitting in their rooms self-harming...

“Tavistock had a very narrow approach, because they didn’t have the clinical skill or the mix of professions, they become a very ideologically driven service. If you ignore the other problems and proceed with medical treatment, it doesn’t just leave problems unaddressed, it generally worsens. A person who’s really having difficulty engaging with life now, when they’re on hormones, unprepared, that can worsen.”...

Dr Moran  believes that the Cass Report is a watershed moment. "The international consensus is rolling back against specialist hormone treatment for children before puberty", he said. While puberty blockers were previously described as 'reversable', he said the emerging evidence is that administering them to children hitting puberty can have detrimental effects on bone growth and brain development.....     ALSO

Dr. Moran said it is ""really hard for a kid to say 'stop' when there has been such massive investment in what they want, by their family, by their doctor, by their school, by their peers." He said the idea of regret or people changing their minds is seen as "taboo" by some transgender activist groups. Patients tell him they are made feel unwelcome if they bring it up. "There's such cultural taboo about regret that people feel shame if they say there're not happy because they're left out of the community," he said.

He also voices concern that some HSE-funded groups have coached patients to "get their stories straight" before being assessed so they have the best chance lof being prescribed hormones. "They are being told to deny mental health problems and particularly any history of suicide attempts when they come for assessments," Dr Moran said. .....

Much of the surge [in patient numbers on a waiting list] has been caused by a huge increase in autistic people presenting. Dr Moran said that while roughly 20pc of their cases involved autistic people five years ago, it is now approaching 90pc .... Dr Moran is now concerned the HSE will repeat the mistakes of its Tavistock alliance. ..."The HSE seems wedded to to this idea of specialist, hormone-based care for children, which is unsafe. It may be developed safely in the future but right now, as we don't have evidence for the safety of these treatments." 

 

 (2.3) "The Future Will Condemn Us"

Eilis O Hanlon's article "The Future Will Condemn Us for Pandering to the Trans Agenda" is also in Sunday Independent on 7 August 2022. She asks why Government Ministers and the media are silent on the questions over children sent to a dangerous medical clinic abroad. After all when people look back at scandals from the past involving the abuse of children by church and state,  they always ask  How was this allowed to happen? And  reassure themselves it could never happen today, because the citizens of our caring and compassionate society, having learned from the mistakes of the past, would now speak out against it! Nothing of the kind!

Critics had warned for years that the treatments the [Tavistock] clinic performed on children who expressed doubts or unease about their gender were driven by ideological fervour rather than medical ethics and good practice, but they were either ignored or condemned as “transphobic”.

The recent Cass Report vindicated every one of their misgivings. Despite that, there has been virtual silence in Ireland about what happened to Irish children sent to this hellish place. TDs aren’t raising the issue. The media is largely silent.

In marked contrast, an inspection report by the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) that showed dozens of children in foster care in north Dublin were overdue a visit by child and family agency Tusla was given the full interrogative treatment on RTÉ’s News At One last week, despite the fact that, thankfully, “there was no child at immediate risk in any of the cases discussed”.

Why has there not been similar concern about children who were actively put in harm’s way by being referred to the Tavistock clinic? Why are no questions being asked of Irish authorities who approved this egregious trade? ....

Trans activist groups funded by the taxpayer have been given free rein to go into schools to proselytise, weaponising spurious statistics about the risk of suicide among gender-confused young people, the upshot of which is to poison children’s minds against their own bodies. Teachers and parents say more and more children are presenting as trans after being exposed to such propaganda online, where activists proliferate. Professionals who bravely resist this pressure by reassuring children that there is nothing wrong with their bodies are mendaciously accused of advocating “conversion therapy” when it is the activists themselves who are urging children to reject their bodies.....

The publicly funded Transgender Equality Network Ireland (TENI) even offers what it calls “gender identity skills training” for health workers, using self-styled “national and international experts”, paid for by the HSE’s Social Inclusion Division, meaning the State is pushing models of care known to be widely discredited. TENI makes no bones about what it wants to see. It explicitly urges the “abolishment of the medical/diagnostic model” of treatment, to be replaced by “the right to our own bodies”. The problem is that it wants the right to influence how children think about their bodies, too, while continuing to state as if it was a fact that puberty blockers are reversible — a highly irresponsible assertion two years after Irish doctors officially stopped making any such claims. 

Children’s Ombudsman Niall Muldoon was even forced to acknowledge last year that a piece he wrote for [the Sunday Independent] about the issue was “done in collaboration” with TENI, as well as the LGBTQ+ youth charity BeLongTo. BeLongTo also states that meetings of “trans, non-binary and questioning young people” are held weekly in the Children’s Ombudsman’s Office.

Ministers urgently need to address these concerns. A trawl of the Government’s own website fails to find a single press release published on the closure of the Tavistock clinic, despite the fact hundreds of vulnerable Irish children went through the system.....Everyone who looks at this honestly knows full well that, if this involved any other failure of care by the State, it would be everywhere on the news in Ireland, as the cervical cancer scandal was. Instead, because it’s about patients who identify as trans, there is an awkward and fearful silence from politicians and the media alike.

 

(3) WHY are Politicians, the HSE and RTÉ so Fearful of ideologically Driven Trans Organisations?

In a follow-up article on 14 August Eilis O'Hanlon attempts to answer that question. 

Regarding RTE and the HSE:   RTE initially chose to ignore the Sunday Independent story about clinical psychiatrist Paul Moran’s warnings to the HSE over Tavistock. Then, when shamed into covering the story a day late, the national broadcaster put out a report on Morning Ireland which did not even feature Moran’s voice, despite having interviewed him. Dr Siobhán Ní Bhriain, the HSE’s national lead for integrated care, was asked if the HSE had listened to Moran’s concerns.

“We did of course take them on board... but we satisfied ourselves that the evidence wasn’t there to support what we were hearing,” she said. This assertion was not scrutinised by Morning Ireland. Neither was Ní Bhriain’s statement that, as the HSE continues to send children to a discredited clinic, “we will monitor it extremely closely”. As per Eilis O'Hanlon "It goes beyond belief that RTÉ would allow such statements in relation to any other reported scandal to go unchallenged."

The RTE reporter even declared at one point that puberty blockers “work by putting a pause on puberty while a young person thinks about their gender identity” BUT according to Dr Hilary Cass, author of the report which led to Tavistock’s closure, “there has been very little research” on the effect of puberty blockers on “neurocognitive development”.

It was left to [national independent radio] Newstalk Breakfast to allow Dr Paul Moran to speak at length. He made it clear that representations by him to the HSE went unanswered.

“We went as far as sending them an audit of children outlining the problems, and this was never addressed or discussed with us,” he said. “Further, when we did meet Crumlin, the concerns we raised were omitted from the minutes — so the idea that they’ve been taking on board concerns and found no evidence is shocking.”

Regarding current Tanaiste [Deputy PM] Leo Varadkar: When the Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU) recently updated its policy to say that female contact rugby was only for those born female, he waded in within hours to urge the IRFU to consider “the voice of those most affected” — by which it’s clear he meant those born male.

In 2015, Varadkar’s first full year as Minister for Health, 15 children were referred to Tavistock. After he became Taoiseach [Prime Minister] in 2017, with Simon Harris as Minister for Health, referrals rose to 36. The following year they went up again, to 49. As per Eilis O'Hanlon: "Even if neither man knew every detail about what went on while they were in office, they must now be concerned — yet neither has felt the need to comment. No politician has." 

The Transgender Equality Network Ireland (TENI), which goes into schools and teaches children controversial gender theories, remains a source for government and media.

Ollie Bell is a self-described “non-binary socialist feminist activist” from Dublin. As per Eilis O'Hanlon "On Bell’s public profile on Twitter there is a link to a page on the internet giving advice on where to buy and administer DIY hormone treatment. Bell sits on the board of TENI. Even though it’s been reported that the HSE is concerned about TENI’s online activities, nothing has yet been done to rein them in."

BUT the dangers of placing children on puberty blockers and other hormonal treatment are becoming increasingly clear. Sweden has outlawed their use completely for under 18s, citing a “lack of quality evidence”. They believe the risks of the treatment “outweigh the benefits at present”. According to Paul Moran, these gender-affirming clinics are also being closed in France and Finland. Yet Crumlin remains ideologically committed to this form of care. “They’re very influenced by activist groups,” he says.

(4) CONCLUSION: Will Fight-Back against Trans Agenda be Successful?

I stated in the Introduction that on a number of occasions over the past 25 years, I thought my own Crusade against the fanatics who accused Catholic clergy and religious of killing children was successful. Not only was I incorrect but the insanity - once largely confined to Ireland - has spread to other countries - most recently Canada. [(v)]

I am encouraged that, in the aftermath of the Cass Report, some heavy hitters in the Media and among Doctors and Feminists have spoken out against what Dr Paul Moran believes is an ideological desire in the HSE to continue the Tavistock-type model of care. They have certainly been more successful than I or other activists have been in bringing their issue to the attention of the public and putting their opponents on the back foot. I am still dubious that this is going to end well!

I note that our national broadcaster RTE is doing its best to ignore the Trans issue - as is our "newspaper of record" the Irish Times. The vast majority of our politicians have remained silent - apparently too scared to criticise the Trans Lobby - while our Tanaiste [Deputy PM soon to be PM] Leo Varadkar spoke out against the Irish Rugby Football Union when it declared that female rugby is solely for those born female. How long will the Sunday Independent et al continue to publish critical articles about Tavistock and TENI if everyone else is either silent about their follies or actively supporting them and denouncing the critics?

Returning to my own subject (False Allegations of Child Abuse and Child Killing), I note that Irish Catholic nuns were major targets of this hysteria. The original Blood Libel was directed against the Sisters of Mercy 25 years ago and recent ones targeted the nuns who ran Mother and Baby Homes - especially the Bon Secours Sisters of Tuam. All such claims were discredited (not least by the Final Report of the Committee of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes) [(vi)] but the media, politicians and "Victims" just shifted gear and attacked the nuns on a different front. I suspect something similar will happen here. Also NO feminists - including the current gender-critical ones - spoke up for the women who were defamed over the past quarter century!

 

NOTES:

(i) I may have contributed to the demise of the "Murder of the Undead" allegations i.e. claims that the Christian Brothers killed boys - during periods when no boy died of ANY cause. On the other hand, our anti-clerics may have figured out - by themselves - that it's unwise to make idiot accusations that can be easily refuted!

(ii) See article in Irish Examiner dated 4th August 2021 "Transgender Women in Limerick jail Locked in Cells for up to 23 hours" . It begins: 

Two transgender women in Limerick Prison are locked in their cells for up to 23 hours a day, with one of the inmates describing her isolation as “mental torture” and the other saying it was “worse than hell”. 

Their plight is highlighted in a report by the Inspector of Prisons, who said the two prisoners live an “extremely isolated existence”. In a report, the inspector said the women are largely confined to their cells under a prison rule which allows inmates to be put on a restricted regime either for their own safety or that of other prisoners....

(iii) The website of our Ombudsman for Children indicates that its values include: 

"Independent — our independence is important so we can say the things that need to be said and hold public organisations to account."

Are there any circumstances that would cause our Ombudsman to criticise TENI ?  

(iv) See NHS to Close Tavistock Child Gender Identity Clinic - BBC News, 28 July 2022

(v) See in particular Part A of Blog article Blood Libel in Canada - Church Burning and Graves of Indigenous Children at former Residential Schools

(vi) See Part A of Blog article Deaths of Children in Mother and Baby Care Homes (did they die of starvation?) and the extract concerning 'Marasmus' from Chapter 33 of the Final Report of the Commission