Written by Wanda Skowronska
May 31st, 2024
Lawyers do not generally fare well in the Gospels. After all, we recall the most memorable attack on them, uttered by Christ:
Woe to you lawyers also! For you load people with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not touch the burdens with one of your fingers. Woe to you! For you build the tombs of the prophets whom your fathers killed. (Luke 11: 46-54)
Recently, however, lawyers have been distinguishing themselves in some surprising ways as regards the ideological assault on our society known as the ‘transgender agenda’. In a 2022 article published in Medscape UK we read the headline: ‘1000 Families to Sue Tavistock Gender Service’.[i] It turns out that the UK’s only children’s gender identity development service (known as GIDS), run by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, is being sued by at least a thousand families who allege that their children were rushed into surgery and taking life-changing puberty blocking drugs without adequate information. And for the process of suing, they need lawyers. This article quotes lawyer Tom Goodhead, global managing partner of Pogust Goodhead, as saying:
Children and young adolescents were rushed into treatment without the appropriate therapy and involvement of the right clinicians, meaning that they were misdiagnosed.
Who would have thought it would come to this? While this is no grand turnaround in attitude to the transgender agenda, it is an indication that suffering seeks a voice and some lawyers are happy to provide that voice. They are listening to these children, now older, facing permanent physical and psychological damage. Legal cases against victims of abortion, or victims of other agendas, do not fare as well. But these victims are visible and audible as to the longer-term effects of the ‘procedures’ they were advised to go ahead with.
Even the left-leaning Guardian has reported on this trouble in paradise in 2022. It said that according to an NHS study, 10 years ago there were just under 250 referrals, most of them boys, to the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), run by the Tavistock and Portman NHS foundation trust in London. [ii] In 2020, however, there were more than 5,000, which was twice the number in the previous year. And the largest group, about two-thirds, now consisted of “birth-registered females first presenting in adolescence with gender-related distress”, the report said.[iii] It acknowledges that children aged 13 and under, nor older adolescents, would be competent to give consent to the administration of puberty blockers.
Some American psychiatrists, psychologists and paediatricians, such as Paul McHugh, Dr Fitzgibbon and Professor Michelle Cretella, have been strident for decades, in their critique of intrusive damaging procedures on young and older persons. Formerly chief of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Hospital, McHugh worked on the original sex-change project set up there in 1965 – until he rethought it all. He alarmed his professional peers by quoting results from long-term research on the consequences of sex-change:
Most shockingly, their [i.e.,‘the transgenders’] suicide mortality rose almost 20-fold above the comparable non-transgender population. This disturbing result has, as yet no explanation but probably reflects the growing sense of isolation reported by the aging transgendered after surgery. The high suicide rate certainly challenges the surgery prescription.[iv]
Of course, this ‘disturbing result’ is difficult to find online. It is fortunate McHugh could publish his observations at all in the Wall St Journal. For a long time, Australian paediatrician, John Whitehall, professor at the University of Western Sydney had also warned his peers, stating:
While proponents argue for massive intervention, scientific studies prove that the vast majority of transgender children will grow out of it through puberty if parents do little more than gently watch and wait. Studies vary but from 70 to 97.8 per cent of gender-dysphoric male and 50 to 88 per cent of gender-dysphoric female children have been reported to “desist” prior to the onset of puberty.[v]
Now in Australia, it has gone further. On June 14, 2023, the Australian Health Editor, Natasha Robinson, reported that the peak psychiatry college the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP) had become the first medical body in the country to acknowledge shifting international evidence on transgender healthcare. This body officially declined to endorse gender-affirming care as the key intervention for children who believe they may consider they are transgender. They cite, of all things, a lack of evidence for the medical pathway.[vi] This report produced a kind of legal ‘nuclear fission’ into the transgender agenda. It acknowledged the plight of detransitioners, who had reported mental and physical harm due to this medical transition. The lawyers took note. And the medical professionals from the RANZCP took note too. They went even further, stating the unthinkable; ‘defining sex as a biological characteristic’, pointing out this statement is in opposition to the notion put forward by trans activists “that sex is a concept related to identity rather than a binary state”. It added that it is not known how many individuals who detransition experience regret in the longer term. There is at the very least a need for more research.
As well as the Tavistock clinic being sued by many of its transgender clients, a Missouri clinic has stopped prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minors for the purpose of gender transition. An NBC news report on Sept 13, 2023, explained that this is due to a new state law which the clinic says “creates unsustainable liability” for health care workers.[vii] Those helpful lawyers again! And recently the majority-Republican South Carolina General Assembly passed a bill, by an overwhelming 27-8 vote on May 2, 2024, banning sex-change surgeries and treatments on minors. It also bars public school officials from withholding information from parents regarding their children’s perception of their gender.[viii]
It is clear that the psychiatric and medical professionals are split and there is no ‘consensus’ view on the longer-term effects of surgery and puberty blockers. One can imagine lawyers listening very sympathetically to their detransitioned clients calling for justice. And we can understand the medical professionals being electrified with shock, at the thought of legal action against them. And insurance companies realising there is a problem, wanting to raise professional indemnity premiums which are already high enough. There we have it, and for once we can thank the lawyers, for listening to the voice of suffering and chiselling some significant cracks into the modern-day ideological walls of Jericho.
