The Cass review should end the maternity world's capitulation to gender ideology

Children and young people are being harmed by the actions of leading birth and breastfeeding organisations

I just got off the phone with a woman who I’ve never met, but who reached out to me for support having experienced some toxic bullying in the world of maternity. To me, it was a familiar tale. I ran the Positive Birth Movement for nearly a decade and, whilst people found it difficult to bring me down because I was not linked to any official body, boy did they try. And eventually, after they’d tried to smear me for everything from drinking Nestlé coffee on a train to sharing images of white women wearing promotional tops, they finally got their golden chance when I began to show signs of the ultimate heresy: questioning gender ideology.

The story is well documented, and you can read it here. What’s perhaps more extraordinary than my personal tale though, is the way that so many birth, breastfeeding and menstruating organisations have fallen hook, line and sinker for gender ideology, erasing women from their literature and social media posts on a daily basis and continuing to attack and shame anyone who asks perfectly reasonable questions. The woman I’ve been on the phone to, for example, was put under enormous pressure to change the name of her ‘With Woman Movement’, because a certain faction of the UK maternity world felt this name was not ‘inclusive’. The pressure was so great that she initially sought legal advice, and - for this and several other reasons - has now walked away from the organisation she started.

Tomorrow the Cass Review into the treatment of children who believe themselves to be transgender will be published. It’s expected that the review will challenge the existing dogma of the ‘trans child’, instead suggesting that gender identity is something fluid in children which should be approached holistically. Putting children on an untested medical pathway towards transition, is something that should be avoided, Cass will say, particularly given that the children being referred often have other interconnected issues such as autism, a history of abuse, and complex family backgrounds. It’s thought that the review will recommend no young person attends an adult gender clinic before the age of 25 (this is the age at which most experts agree we reach full maturity).

It’s always astonishing to me that almost all UK maternity and breastfeeding organisations are so in thrall to gender ideology. Raising the slightest objection to it gets you ‘cancelled’, to the extent that, as in my case, in spite of being the author of two birth books and having single handedly run a grassroots, global organisation to improve birth for nearly a decade, in many circles I am no longer to even be spoken of. It would be easy to see how I was treated and assume I had done something absolutely disgraceful, that I was a truly awful person - why would a woman be completely shut out and ostracised in this way otherwise? But in fact, all that I did was show a ‘whiff of heresy’: the slightest hint that I was not 100% convinced by the ‘affirmation model’ of care for gender confused children, the tiniest bit of questioning of phrases like ‘assigned female at birth’, the mildest hint of objection to the use of terms like ‘birthing people’ in certain contexts. This heresy was enough to justify my public destruction, not by trans rights activists, but by midwives, doulas, breastfeeding counsellors and their organisations.

Gender ideology means so much to these organisations that they would rather throw good women under the bus than be seen to question it. And, in doing so, they throw a generation of girls under the bus, too. We know that at the Tavistock, the number of girls referred went up 5000 per cent in the seven years between 2010 and 2017. Under the ‘affirmation’ approach that is now finally being scrutinised and questioned by Cass and others, teenage girls and younger are unconditionally ‘affirmed’ in their ‘trans identity’, given new names and pronouns, taught that they were ‘born in the wrong body’, have their puberty chemically ‘blocked’, and are unquestioningly celebrated and supported in their desire for breast binders, ‘packers’ (fake penises to wear in their underwear), and eventually, mastectomies and cross sex hormones which will see their voices deepen and facial hair grow irreversibly. Their fertility, sexual function and ability to breastfeed will be damaged, as well us other long term health consequences that are yet to be fully understood such as lower bone density.

Isn’t it curious that maternity and breastfeeding organisations would support this?

And not just support it, but celebrate it.

Many birth and breastfeeding organisations are very holistic and natural in their approach - for example, I have often heard professionals from this field question why newborn babies would need Vitamin K injections, or why so many women would not be able to breastfeed or give birth without intervention, arguing that ‘Mother Nature would not get it wrong’. Yes these same organisations seem to support the idea that not only would ‘Mother Nature’ get it spectacularly wrong in causing a person to be ‘born in the wrong body’, but that the only solution to this would come in the form of the kind of extreme medical interventions that make an epidural look as fluffy as a kitten.

The Practicing Midwife, Birthrights, The Association of Breastfeeding Mothers, La Leche League, Doula UK, Make Birth Better, the Maternity Voices Partnership, the Secret Community for Midwives in the Making, AIMS Ireland, countless other smaller organisations, as well as prominent speakers and authors, continue to promote gender ideology without question. A group called The Queer Birth Club have cashed in on the madness of the past few years, selling online ‘LGBT competency’ courses to many of these groups as well as to several NHS trusts and the NCT. In this screenshot of one of their posts from 2021 they claim to have had 500 people book on their three hour zoom courses which at the time were £75 each = £37500 in just 6 months.

Their courses are still running and now cost £90 per person. Some examples of their promotional material:

Even the Royal College of Midwives and the Royal College of Obstetricians have a joint ‘inclusivity statement’ in which they refer to, “people whose gender identity does not align with the sex they were assigned at birth.”. Whilst this is not as ‘extreme’ as the Queer Birth Club, it is nevertheless part and parcel of the same ideological capture: sex is not ‘assigned’ at birth, it is innate and established at conception. The idea of it being ‘assigned’ has been created only to support the dogma that a person’s sex is arbitrary and can therefore be ‘got wrong’ by the doctor who ‘assigns’ it. It’s just another side of the same ‘birthing people ain’t all women’ dogma.

With the publication of the Cass review, it’s time all these organisations grew up. We all know that the world is a wonderful mix of people who make different life choices and who should all feel cared for and supported. But being non-judgemental of an adult when you meet them face to face is not the same as a wholesale liturgical acceptance of an ideology that is damaging to the very sex you were set up to serve. Women’s organisations advocating the idea that a person can choose which sex they want to be and change it easily, perhaps think they are just being supportive and kind to trans identifying adults. But their actions are directly related to the teen girls in their bedrooms right now, flattening down their breasts with binders, hoping they can have them surgically removed one day, and believing that when they do so, this will make them male. Maternity, breastfeeding and women’s health organisations need to urgently consider whether they really want to continue to take part in this medical scandal or whether enough young people have already been harmed.

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Telegraph: Children allowed to ‘socially transition’ face grave psychological risks, review concludes.

Suzanne Moore: Trans children have been lied to by adults – the Cass report may now see the legal dam break

Telegraph: Children must not be rushed to change gender, report warns

Times: Cass report into gender services expected to recommend that young people be barred from using adult clinics until they are 25

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