The press release last Thursday from the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls didn’t make the mainstream news in New Zealand but it really should have. The startling title of Reem Alsalem’s statement — “Implementation of ‘Cass report’ key to protecting girls from serious harm” — should have made news editors around the country sit up instantly and take notice.
After all, New Zealand clinicians prescribe puberty blockers to gender-distressed young people at more than 10 times the rate of Britain — as University of Otago emeritus professor Charlotte Paul told Sean Plunket recently (and North & South magazine last November). And most of the hundreds of young people in New Zealand aged 12 to 17 who are taking puberty blockers are girls.
You might imagine that such enthusiastic dispensing would make the findings by English paediatric consultant Dr Hilary Cass highly newsworthy here but our legacy media doesn’t seem to be particularly interested. Perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising given they have for years vilified critics of the “affirmative” treatment of gender-distressed young people as transphobes while insisting the “science is settled”. Unfortunately for them, Cass has decisively unsettled that belief.
In her report — commissioned by England’s National Health Service (NHS) and published on April 10 — she advised that such powerful medical treatments need to be supported by strong evidence, and so far such a firm underpinning is lacking: “The reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress.” The existing evidence for prescribing gender medicine, she said, is built on “shaky foundations”.
Among her criticisms, she expressed concern about the inadequate assessment of mental health co-morbidities, including autism, which are often overlooked in those being steered into gender-treatment programmes.
As a result, Cass recommended that use of puberty blockers be heavily restricted.
In its summary of the review, the NHS said: “The rationale for early puberty suppression remains unclear, with weak evidence regarding the impact on gender dysphoria, mental or psychosocial health. The effect on cognitive and psychosexual development remains unknown… For most young people, a medical pathway will not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress.”
NHS England has stopped prescribing puberty blockers as a “routine treatment” to children and other young people seeking to change gender.
Cass’s findings have spurred extensive media coverage in the UK and in other countries. The question now is just how long New Zealand’s legacy media can go on mostly ignoring the growing alarm over prescribing puberty blockers to both sexes given they may be exposed to serious risks — including infertility, weakened bones, impaired brain maturation and loss of sexual pleasure.
Alsalem described the “findings and recommendations” of Cass’s review as “seminal” and remarked pointedly that “its implications go beyond the United Kingdom”. The Special Rapporteur, who is Jordanian, will be very aware of the defence transgender activists outside Britain are deploying — namely that the effects on young people who are treated with blockers and then masculinising / feminising cross-sex hormones may vary depending on where the treatments are administered and in what context. That is to say, the problems identified in Cass’s four-year study are specific to Britain and cannot be easily extrapolated to other regions.
Thus, Dr Julia de Bres, a Massey University sociolinguist, wrote in The Spinoff: “This [Cass] report emerges from a very different health context than Aotearoa… Based on claimed ‘weak evidence’ of effectiveness, the Cass Report recommends ‘extreme caution’ in prescribing puberty blockers to trans young people. This advice runs counter to… the experiences of trans young people and their families in Aotearoa.”
Jennifer Shields, the president of the Professional Association for Transgender Healthcare Aotearoa (PATHA), has declared that the Cass Review “lacks relevance in an Aotearoa context”.
It’s very difficult to see Alsalem having any time for these arguments. She sees the “gender-affirming” model of readily treating distressed children with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones as a universal human rights issue as well as a medical issue:
“While the Cass Review may not have framed its conclusions and findings explicitly in human rights language, it has — in my view — very clearly shown the devastating consequences that policies on gender treatments have had on human rights of children, including girls. These policies have breached fundamental principles, such as the need to uphold the best interest of the child in all decisions that affect their lives, and the right of children to the highest attainable standards of health.”
While some activists are trying to dismiss the findings of the Cass Review as unreliable — and preposterously claiming she has already walked back some of them — the majority of the mainstream media are preferring to lie low and ignore her conclusions as best they can. However, when RNZ’s Ruth Hill produced an article last week that focused on the mother of a trans child defending puberty blockers, no fewer than four media organisations — Newshub, 1News, NZ Herald, and Newstalk ZB — quickly pounced on it and republished it. (So much you might think for journalists’ argument that more news sites means the proliferation of different voices so vital for democracy.)
The article’s heading announced: “Criticism of puberty blockers misguided, trans girl’s mother says”, but the impact of the article was — intentionally or otherwise — quietly subversive of what seems to be the usual media endorsement. It might have been accurately tagged, “Enough rope…”
The mother recounted that her son had started puberty blockers at 10 and oestrogen medication at 14, and that both she and her child — now supposedly her daughter — accepted she / he would quite likely be rendered sterile.
Hill reported: “The teenager was offered an option for fertility preservation, which would require her to stop using puberty blockers and go far enough through puberty to allow for the process. But that was not an option she wished to take.”
The mother said she had no personal sadness about that. “She may well become a parent one day. The fact they won’t be her biological children will not make them any less her kids.”
This astonishing calculation of the welfare of the child — who by any reasonable assessment is far too young to make such a momentous decision about their fertility — shocked many readers.
Where most public sentiment lies on the issue of gender policy was revealed when the results of a Curia poll commissioned by Family First were released last week.
A summary of the findings — excluding those who preferred not to express an opinion — shows:
You might imagine that such enthusiastic dispensing would make the findings by English paediatric consultant Dr Hilary Cass highly newsworthy here but our legacy media doesn’t seem to be particularly interested. Perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising given they have for years vilified critics of the “affirmative” treatment of gender-distressed young people as transphobes while insisting the “science is settled”. Unfortunately for them, Cass has decisively unsettled that belief.
In her report — commissioned by England’s National Health Service (NHS) and published on April 10 — she advised that such powerful medical treatments need to be supported by strong evidence, and so far such a firm underpinning is lacking: “The reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress.” The existing evidence for prescribing gender medicine, she said, is built on “shaky foundations”.
Among her criticisms, she expressed concern about the inadequate assessment of mental health co-morbidities, including autism, which are often overlooked in those being steered into gender-treatment programmes.
As a result, Cass recommended that use of puberty blockers be heavily restricted.
In its summary of the review, the NHS said: “The rationale for early puberty suppression remains unclear, with weak evidence regarding the impact on gender dysphoria, mental or psychosocial health. The effect on cognitive and psychosexual development remains unknown… For most young people, a medical pathway will not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress.”
NHS England has stopped prescribing puberty blockers as a “routine treatment” to children and other young people seeking to change gender.
Cass’s findings have spurred extensive media coverage in the UK and in other countries. The question now is just how long New Zealand’s legacy media can go on mostly ignoring the growing alarm over prescribing puberty blockers to both sexes given they may be exposed to serious risks — including infertility, weakened bones, impaired brain maturation and loss of sexual pleasure.
Alsalem described the “findings and recommendations” of Cass’s review as “seminal” and remarked pointedly that “its implications go beyond the United Kingdom”. The Special Rapporteur, who is Jordanian, will be very aware of the defence transgender activists outside Britain are deploying — namely that the effects on young people who are treated with blockers and then masculinising / feminising cross-sex hormones may vary depending on where the treatments are administered and in what context. That is to say, the problems identified in Cass’s four-year study are specific to Britain and cannot be easily extrapolated to other regions.
Thus, Dr Julia de Bres, a Massey University sociolinguist, wrote in The Spinoff: “This [Cass] report emerges from a very different health context than Aotearoa… Based on claimed ‘weak evidence’ of effectiveness, the Cass Report recommends ‘extreme caution’ in prescribing puberty blockers to trans young people. This advice runs counter to… the experiences of trans young people and their families in Aotearoa.”
Jennifer Shields, the president of the Professional Association for Transgender Healthcare Aotearoa (PATHA), has declared that the Cass Review “lacks relevance in an Aotearoa context”.
It’s very difficult to see Alsalem having any time for these arguments. She sees the “gender-affirming” model of readily treating distressed children with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones as a universal human rights issue as well as a medical issue:
“While the Cass Review may not have framed its conclusions and findings explicitly in human rights language, it has — in my view — very clearly shown the devastating consequences that policies on gender treatments have had on human rights of children, including girls. These policies have breached fundamental principles, such as the need to uphold the best interest of the child in all decisions that affect their lives, and the right of children to the highest attainable standards of health.”
While some activists are trying to dismiss the findings of the Cass Review as unreliable — and preposterously claiming she has already walked back some of them — the majority of the mainstream media are preferring to lie low and ignore her conclusions as best they can. However, when RNZ’s Ruth Hill produced an article last week that focused on the mother of a trans child defending puberty blockers, no fewer than four media organisations — Newshub, 1News, NZ Herald, and Newstalk ZB — quickly pounced on it and republished it. (So much you might think for journalists’ argument that more news sites means the proliferation of different voices so vital for democracy.)
The article’s heading announced: “Criticism of puberty blockers misguided, trans girl’s mother says”, but the impact of the article was — intentionally or otherwise — quietly subversive of what seems to be the usual media endorsement. It might have been accurately tagged, “Enough rope…”
The mother recounted that her son had started puberty blockers at 10 and oestrogen medication at 14, and that both she and her child — now supposedly her daughter — accepted she / he would quite likely be rendered sterile.
Hill reported: “The teenager was offered an option for fertility preservation, which would require her to stop using puberty blockers and go far enough through puberty to allow for the process. But that was not an option she wished to take.”
The mother said she had no personal sadness about that. “She may well become a parent one day. The fact they won’t be her biological children will not make them any less her kids.”
This astonishing calculation of the welfare of the child — who by any reasonable assessment is far too young to make such a momentous decision about their fertility — shocked many readers.
Where most public sentiment lies on the issue of gender policy was revealed when the results of a Curia poll commissioned by Family First were released last week.
A summary of the findings — excluding those who preferred not to express an opinion — shows:
* 69% oppose gender ideology in primary schools, just 15% support;
* 62% support ban on puberty blockers for children, only 19% opposed;
* 53% support ban on gender affirmation treatment (puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones & surgery for minors under 18), 24% opposed;
* 53% want primary focus on mental health treatment, 10% want focus on blockers/hormones;
* 68% oppose taxpayers funding gender-change surgery or hormone treatment, 16% support.
Again, predictably, the results of this survey are yet to find their way onto the pages of our major newspapers or broadcast bulletins
Graham Adams is an Auckland-based freelance editor, journalist and columnist. This article was originally published by ThePlatform.kiwi and is published here with kind permission.
6 comments:
Once again, if any more proof were needed, the MSM in NZ is completely out of step with the population and is obsessed with following the woke, progressive socialist line.
Hopefully another nail in the coffin for our MSM who deserve to go bust.
What on earth gives a sociolinguist the clinical ability to critique the Cass report? How can medical science which has been used in context across the globe suddenly no longer be contextual in New Zealand? That is an outrageous absurdity bordinging on stupidity!
The president of the PATHA would of course have the opposing view that the Cass report "lacks relevance” because that is her pathway and absolute in her ideology.
The demonstrative opposition by these people to seek truth in medical science and for the MSM to oppose the report by obfuscation shows how clearly they are in support of not supporting vulnerable children whose needs may not be from prescribed chemicals that were developed as a form of medical castration for sex offenders.
It disturbs me that these people think they are 'right' when science and demonstrative medical evidence says they are wrong but they continue without pause a crusade for their ideology. They are Melanie Phillips describes as idelogical absolutes, that is they and only they can be 'correct thinkers'
The MSM should hold its collective head in shame for their part in this 'story'.
They clearly define their own demise by being totally partisan on an issue that is clearly needing better understanding more conversation and is quite clearly in the public interest.
It will not be a sad day when these people are finally found out by the reasoned common sense, critical thinking majority.
We almost certainly already have tragic detransition stories in NZ like Chloe Cole, Keira Bell and others overseas but because of how brutal NZ media is on anyone that doesn't stick with the accepted narrative they are too afraid to tell their story publicly.
They are not fighting a rearguard action. They are completely in control of all of the key positions of power in this country in regards to policy making and activity.
People need to wake up. This isn’t just the work of a bunch of activists. This is eugenics. They don’t want your children reproducing and this is yet another way that they can prevent that from happening.
All part of the bigger picture of denigration of women.
Why are girls not taught to be proud of their bodies as opposed to scared of them or freaked out by them. And why are boys not taught that women's bodies are amazing . After all, we are all born of a woman's body. Wow!!!!
The mother of a son on puberty blockers since age 10 will never be convinced that she is wrong. She has her whole being invested in changing her child’s sexuality and will never admit she may have harmed the child. Hardly a disinterested observer.
We won’t let kids drink, smoke or have sex but somehow they are mature enough to decide what sex they are.
Peter Ellis must be spinning in his grave.
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