The first paragraphs of the Brooks’ essay don’t quite give the game away :
Hilary Cass is the kind of hero the world needs today. She has entered one of the most toxic debates in our culture: how the medical community should respond to the growing numbers of young people who seek gender transition through medical treatments, including puberty blockers and hormone therapies. This month, after more than three years of research, Cass, a pediatrician, produced a report, commissioned by the National Health Service in England, that is remarkable for its empathy for people on all sides of this issue, for its humility in the face of complex social trends we don’t understand and for its intellectual integrity as we try to figure out which treatments actually work to serve those patients who are in distress. With incredible courage, she shows that careful scholarship can cut through debates that have been marked by vituperation and intimidation and possibly reset them on more rational grounds.
Cass, a past president of Britain’s Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health, is clear about the mission of her report: “This review is not about defining what it means to be trans, nor is it about undermining the validity of trans identities, challenging the right of people to express themselves or rolling back on people’s rights to health care. It is about what the health care approach should be, and how best to help the growing number of children and young people who are looking for support from the N.H.S. in relation to their gender identity.”
…
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/18/opinion/transgender-care-cass-report.html
Should this surprise The Reader? Brooks is smitten by evocatively presented ‘Credentials’ ! I’ve placed in bold font the Brooks anti-left hysteria. Brooks was trained by Wm. F. Buckley Jr. , in sum the ‘left’ is mendacious by nature. Yet ‘Some activists and medical practitioners on the left’ : this defamation defended by a ‘2022 Reuters investigation’ , prefaced by the modifier ‘some’ !
…
Some activists and medical practitioners on the left have come to see the surge in requests for medical transitioning as a piece of the new civil rights issue of our time — offering recognition to people of all gender identities.
…
But a 2022 Reuters investigation found that some American clinics were quite aggressive with treatment: None of the 18 U.S. clinics that Reuters looked at performed long assessments on their patients, and some prescribed puberty blockers on the first visit.
…
Where might The Reader look for another perspective ?
Headline: What the Cass Review Means for Trans Kids in Britain—and Beyond
Sub-headline: A new review of gender-affirming healthcare in England could change the way gender-questioning children and young everywhere people receive care. .
By Natasha Hakimi Zapata
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/cass-review-trans-healthcare-puberty-blockers/
…
Astronomical waiting times are just one of the failures the Cass Review identifies, highlighting that during these limbo periods, children are not offered any sort of support, including mental health services. This is especially egregious considering the NHS’s own Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch told Reuters in 2022 that the “‘incredibly distressing’ wait for gender care ‘created a significant patient safety risk for young people.’” There have been a number of suicides linked to waiting times, including Alice Litman, a 20-year-old who’d first sought gender-affirming care at age 15, and was still on a waiting list for more than 1,000 days when she died.
The review’s publication also comes as the country grapples with a stark rise in anti-trans hate crimes amid what Cass herself labeled the “exceptional” “toxicity of the debate” on trans youth healthcare. While some, like Kamran Abbasi, editor in chief of the The BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal), see the Cass Review as “an opportunity to pause, recalibrate, and place evidence-informed care at the heart of gender medicine,” Amnesty International has warned that it is already being “weaponised by people who revel in spreading disinformation and myths about healthcare for trans young people”. The Scottish author J.K. Rowling has already taken a victory lap on Twitter/X. In an election year, the independent review is also being misused by beleaguered Tories who, like the US right, have resorted to stoking culture wars to distract from dire conditions caused by their policy decisions over nearly 15 years.
It’s not just British anti-trans groups that could “weaponize” it, either. American LBGTQ+ activist and civil rights attorney Alejandra Caraballo has been paying close attention to the Cass Review from across the Atlantic, because the legal expert has identified a disturbing trend in recent years.
“Prominent anti-trans cases in Finland, Sweden, and especially the UK have been cited in US courts,” Caraballo told The Nation. It’s only a matter of time, she believes, before the Cass Review is used in American legal cases looking to further restrict trans rights.
Meanwhile, back in the UK, after years of mounting letdowns, the Cass Review has already transformed the country’s approach to gender dysphoria. It remains to be seen however, when it comes to the well-being of trans children and teens, whether those changes will be for better or for worse.
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/cass-review-trans-healthcare-puberty-blockers/
What is happening is that the Acolytes of The Abrahamic Tradition ,and their Hetero- Traditionalists allies, are in a panic: that the continuing evolution of Human Kind, can now exercise 1it’s’ freedom to choose who and what 2‘it’ aspires to be, outside those hallowed ‘Norms’ ,equal to un-reflective conformity!
‘It’s to lapse into Hegelian pastiche
‘It’s to lapse into Hegelian pastiche