When the final report of the Cass Review was published on April 10th 2024, many of us hoped this would be a turning point. After the scandal that led to the closure of the Tavistock GIDS clinic, at last it seemed that children and young people with gender-related distress would finally receive the high quality, evidence-based care they need and deserve.
At the time her report was published, Dr. Hilary Cass noted that “some professional organisations have ducked their responsibility in ensuring that everyone working in this field treated these young people as they would any other”. She called on these organisations to “come together to provide leadership and guidance” to ensure that the report’s recommendations could be implemented.
It is three months on from the review’s publication. How have the professional therapeutic organisations responded? Are they providing the required leadership and guidance?
Let’s look first of all at the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP). To date, this organisation, with over 50,000 members, has produced no public or in-house response to the Cass Review – not on its website, not in emails to members, nor in its journal Therapy Today. It has, though, continued to review several books on gender identity and refused to remove a blog by a school counsellor who advocates gender affirming care.
One of BACP’s members wrote to a senior manager in the organisation asking why it had not responded to the review. She was told that the findings of the Cass Review were “primarily about medical pathways and interventions” and that its members “have no role in either”. Where counselling was mentioned in the report, the BACP claimed that “the focus is on provision of fertility counselling, delivered by NHS professionals trained in this area”.
These statements are simply not true. As the Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender points out in its summary of the report: “Psycho-social support is recommended as the first line of treatment.”
Why is a major professional therapeutic organisation, whose membership comprises counsellors and psychotherapists, so dismissive of a report that recommends psycho-social support as the first line of treatment? Its members provide psychotherapeutic support. This is their job. It’s as though the BACP has turned its back on Dr. Cass’s Review with a shrug and said, “nothing to see here”.
Worse than this, as mentioned above, the BACP continues to produce content promoting gender ideology. James Esses recently revealed in his Substack that the BACP’s latest edition of its quarterly magazine for practitioners who work with children, titled ‘Children, Young People, and Families’, appears to be “nothing more than a manual in trans ideological indoctrination”.
While the BACP is failing miserably to respond to the Cass Review, is the British Psychological Society (BPS), with more than 65,000 members, doing any better? On the day that the Cass Review final report was published, it was greeted by the BPS’s President-Elect with a glowing commendation. In a responsepublished on the BPS website he called it a “thorough and sensitive review”. There was praise for Dr. Cass and agreement with her call to end the “deeply concerning public bullying and vilification of professionals working in this challenging area”.
While the President-Elect was gushing about the Cass Review, the Chair of the BPS Sexualities section, Dr. Rob Agnew, took a different stance. He announced on his social media account that its publication was a “bad day for trans youth”. This is a man who described the NHS’s decision to stop prescribing puberty blockers to children and young people as “bigotry” and likened gender critical therapists to “misogynists” and “incels”. You can read more about the Chair of BPS Sexualities Section on the Save Mental Health website where “Dr. P” gives an insightful and frank commentary.
The post Will Labour Protect Gender-Confused Children From the Trans Ideologues? The Signs Aren’t Looking Good appeared first on David Icke.