Early evening summary
Victoria Atkins, the health secretary, has told MPs that the Cass report shows that young people attending gender clinics in recent years received harmful treatment because this was an area “where fashionable cultural values have overtaken evidence, safety and biological reality”. In a statement in the Commons, she also said that confirmed that all adult gender clinics – six of which had refused to take part in Dr Cass’s study – have now agreed to “fully co-operate” and to provide information about the outcome of patients receiving medical treatment to change gender. She said:
All bar one of the adult gender clinics refused to co-operate with this vital research, this is unacceptable, to quote Dr Cass – I’d go even further, I think it is deplorable.
It is a dereliction of their professional duty and so I’m pleased to update the house that following the publication of Dr Cass’s report, I have been informed that all seven clinical leads in adult gender services now intend to fully participate in this important work.
Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, said what the Cass report revealed was a “scandal” – although his explanation of what made it a scandal was not the same as Atkins’. He told MPs:
For the sake of all of those children, young people and now adults, but particularly those being referred into gender identity services today, we have a duty to get this right. What has emerged in the Cass review is a scandal. It is a scandal that children and young people are waiting far too long, often years for care while their wellbeing deteriorates and their childhood slips away.
It is scandalous that medical interventions have been made on the basis of shaky evidence. It is scandalous that despite all this some NHS providers refuse to co-operate with Dr Cass’s review. And perhaps the worst scandal of all is that the toxicity of this discussion means that people have felt silenced and it required investigative journalism to prompt this review taking place.
Victoria Atkins tells MPs Cass report shows how 'fashionable cultural values' led to gender clinic children being harmed
Back in the Commons Rishi Sunak has finished the Iran/Israel statement, and Victoria Atkins, the health secretary, is making a statement the Cass review into gender identity support for young people that was published last week.
In her opening statement, Atkins used much stronger language than Hilary Cass herself did last week when she set out her findings. Atkins that that this was “an area of public policy where fashionable cultural values have overtaken evidence, safety and biological reality” and she declared: “This must now stop.”
Atkins said that since 2009 there has been an enormous increase in the number of children seeking medical help because they were questioning their gender, and more than half were teeenage girls. In 2022 more than 5,000 children and young people were referred to gender identity clinics and almost three quarters were female, she said.
Atkins said this increase was driven by “a number of factors”, but at its heart it was “driven by a myth”. She went on:”
This was myth was that, for children and young people grappling with adolescence, who were questioning their identity, their sexuality or their path in life, that the answer to their questions was inevitably to change gender to solve their questions of unease, discomfort or distress.
And this near uniform prescription was imposed on children and young people with complex needs without full and thoughtful consideration of their wider needs, including, as is set out in the report, conditions such as neurodiversity, experiences such as childhood trauma or experiences of mental health conditions, or indeed discovering who it is that they may one day fall in love with.
Indeed, the response from some of the people who should have protected them, some of the clinicians in charge of their care at the Tavistock clinic, was almost always to put them on an irreversible path, blocking puberty, then the prescription of cross-sex hormones and onto surgery as an adult.
In other words, such professionals were not asking the right questions of themselves or their patients.
Atkins said parents who questioned whether the interventions being offered to their children were the right ones were let down. And she suggested the people most let down were the young people “who have gone through the pain of detransitioning only to find out that the so-called reversible treatments they were offered are not, in fact, reversible”.
Updated
