It is now 19 days since the Cass Review’s Final Report was published – a report that has huge implications for the treatment of highly vulnerable children and adolescents. We are deeply concerned that most of the adolescents affected are same sex attracted and may be suffering long-term harms from treatments that are based on faith, not evidence, or from not having access to any professional support at all. All children and adolescents who are gender questioning or suffering from gender dysphoria need and deserve evidence-based support and treatment. Gender non-conforming children, who are most likely to grow up same sex attracted, are particularly vulnerable. We welcome the report, and we call on our party’s leadership to disregard the continuing efforts to discredit Dr Cass and her Report, and to commit to endorsing the Report’s findings and recommendations in full.
We welcome the party's recently released revision of its definition of transphobia. Although parts of the revised definition continue to be deeply flawed, there are significant improvements from the highly illiberal original, some of which was in direct conflict with equality law. We're pleased that the revised definition reaffirms that it is utterly unacceptable for a member of the party to harass trans people or to create a hostile environment for them, but now recognises that holding and expressing gender critical beliefs is protected in law, and is permissible provided that this does not “harass or discriminate against trans people, nor create an environment which is hostile or discriminatory to trans people.” However, significant difficulties with the definition remain, particularly in its unwillingness to engage with the possibility that the party’s understanding of “the nature or effect of a policy or practice” may be flawed and should be open to challenge, especially where that challenge is evidence-based. We’ll wait to see whether the definition as applied continues to foster an environment that is hostile and discriminatory towards people holding gender critical beliefs. In the meanwhile, if you're one of the many LGB people who've left in despair, please consider coming back to help us to bring party policy back in line with biological reality and to defend the rights of same-sex attracted people.