Cass report

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

It rarely pays to be ahead of your time

Following the release of the Cass report deprecating NHS ‘gender-affirming care’ for minors as reliant on rubbish medical research, the number of comment pieces disparaging the cult of transgenderism has exploded. Such columns would never have been published even a couple of years ago. Finally, pushing disturbed children and adolescents into damaging and sometimes gruesome treatment in the service of adult fanaticism is starting to look, um – iffy. For outliers who’ve been frantically signalling, ‘Hey! Maybe a society that’s mutilating its own kids has lost its way!’ this watershed should constitute satisfying vindication. It does. That’s the good news.

Rod Liddle

Why the Cass report won’t change a thing

The Liberal Democrat candidate in the Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland constituency recently released a video clip of herself sitting in a car and saying just the following: ‘As a Liberal Democrat, I believe that women can have a penis.’ When I’m feeling depressed or under the weather, I play this clip to myself over and over and it never fails to put me in a better frame of mind. It is less the bovine stupidity of the message that amuses than the fact that Jemma Joy – yes, yes, I know – felt the need to recite it, as if there were people out there determined to believe that she thought that women couldn’t have penises and might victimise her for this heresy.