ANALYSIS: Cass Review Brings Vindication for Cancelled Critics of Trans Ideology

'Father Ted' co-creator Graham Linehan during a Let Women Speak rally in Belfast on April 16, 2023. PA

Comedy writer Graham Linehan is one of several women’s and children’s rights activists who have been vindicated since the Cass Review criticised the NHS for pushing gender-confused children onto inappropriate paths of medical treatment that included drugs and surgery.

Mr. Linehan had lost his career, experienced the breakdown of his marriage, and was cancelled for speaking against transgender ideology being pushed onto children.

However, following the publication of the Cass Review on Wednesday, “Glinner Was Right” has been trending on social media platform X, with supporters of the Irish comedic writer saying that he had finally been vindicated.

Julia Hartley-Brewer asked on Thursday Mr. Linehan if he felt the report, which criticised how children had been let down by inappropriate treatment, had proven him right.

“I never doubted it,” Mr. Linehan told the TalkTV host, predicting that some day, “a lot of people are going to have to come to terms with the fact that they consider themselves intelligent, well informed people, and they believed one of the most stupid ideas that’s ever been put forward: the idea that people can be born in the wrong body.”

“I’ve been talking about this for six years and my anger has come and gone” said the writer as he detailed that after two to three years of discussing the harms trans ideology was doing to children, “no one was listening to me.”

“I went on Newsnight, was interviewed by Sarah Smith, and was treated as if I had gone insane when I was saying exactly the same thing that people are saying now, so my anger is spent,” he said.

The Transgender ‘Lie’

Asked if he thought the loss of his livelihood and the personal costs were worth it, he said: “I am astonished that there’s anyone in the world who can put their career above the safety of children. I would never do that. All I can say is: ‘Thank God this has happened. Thank God for the Cass Report.’ Hopefully, now, these children will be saved from an appalling future of medicalised harm.”

The comedy writer was aware, however, that many who had previously been proponents of easier access to gender treatment for children have now, post-Cass, become more cautious.

“They can’t face it. It’s too big,” Mr. Linehan said, explaining that the “lie” of the existence of transgender children was “too big” for them to confront at the time.

“I think people said to themselves: if this is true, then everyone the media, the BBC, my celebrity friends, everyone is lying to us. And I think that the magnitude of that lie blew people’s minds.

“They couldn’t look at it. They couldn’t accept it, because they knew that if they did, if they absorbed what was happening, they would come over to my side, lose their livelihoods, lose their friends, lose their marriage, and they would be in the same position I’m in,” he said.

The Tide Is Turning

Feminist Julie Bindel said she was “glad the tide is finally turning against this oppressive, toxic dogma” with the publication of the Cass Report.

But her main emotion was “anger,” she wrote in the Daily Mail, for those campaigners like herself, academics, whistleblowers, and others who have faced “constant intimidation, violence, even death threats. Some of us have seen our livelihoods wrecked.”

Ms. Bindel had been no-platformed—a boycott where a person is denied a platform for speak, usually associated with universities—for her views critical of gender ideology and for campaigning for the protection of women’s-only spaces. For 20 years, she has been trying to raise the alarm over the “ideological cult” and that so many children and young people had been “victims of the trans delusion.”

She also suggested that even with the review’s recommendations, little may change because “this quasi-religious movement” had taken control of all of the UK’s “major governmental bodies,” including the NHS.

A trans activist during a protest outside the Ministry of Defence Main Building in Whitehall in London, on Jan. 17, 2023. Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

“Trans cultism” had also “infected almost every school,” she said, relating a story that a woman had contacted her in distress that teachers had allowed her ten-year-old daughter to “transition” at school without the mother’s knowledge.

Ms. Bindel wrote that the mother said her daughter would go to school dressed in a girl’s uniform, but had changed into boy’s clothes on arrival at school, with teachers and classmates calling her by a male name. The child was also allegedly allowed to use the boy’s toilets.

This goes against government school guidance that social transitioning should not be taking place without the parent’s knowledge and that single-sex spaces should be maintained.

‘Cowardly Converts’

Ms. Bindel criticised what she called the Cass Report’s “cowardly converts,” saying those who had remained silent in recent years “won’t be forgotten.”

“I am angry about those who only changed their stance once it becomes unavoidably obvious that they were wrong all along,” she wrote for UnHerd on Thursday, claiming Wes Streeting was one of those figures who now have hailed Cass’s review as “a really important” piece of work, despite earlier backing trans ideology.

“And yet, for all of yesterday’s almost-mea-culpas, it would be delusional to hope that these people will ever genuinely admit their roles in the scandal, let alone their own contributions to the horrendous damage that has been done to children,” she warned.

Mr. Streeting, the shadow health secretary, has since dropped his hardline position on gender, admitting to The Sun that he no longer believes the claim that “trans women” are women.

Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting visits an ambulance station in Braintree, Essex, on May 22, 2023. PA

He acknowledged during Wednesday’s episode of “Never Mind the Ballots”: “I say this with some self criticism and reflection: if you‘d asked me a few years ago, on this topic, I would have said, ’trans men are men, trans women are women. Some people are trans, get over it. Let’s move on. This is all blown out of proportion.’

“And now I sort of sit and reflect and think actually, there are lots of complexities.”

He added that he was ready to take “criticism on the chin” for his past beliefs.

Mr. Streeting had called the Cass Review a “watershed moment for the NHS’s gender identity services,” sharing a statement to X underlying labour’s support for the Cass Review’s “evidence-led recommendations and our determination to put children’s health and wellbeing above the political fray.”

Consequences Will Play Out ‘For Decades’

Canterbury MP Rosie Duffield has likewise been vindicated, after suffering abuse for opposing men who identify as women being allowed to access women-only spaces, such as domestic violence refuges and prisons. Last year, Labour placed Ms. Duffield under investigation for alleged anti-Semitism and transphobia, with the investigation being dropped in January.

She posted to X on Wednesday asking whether Labour would now acknowledge the work of women in the debate, who she said had been “blanked, sidelined, dismissed by male leaders when speaking up and exposing this for years.”

“Perhaps less moral cowardice now? No apologies to those ‘investigated,’ reprimanded, passed over, bullied, deselected,” she said.

Author JK Rowling attends the World Premiere of 'Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Part 2' at Trafalgar Square in London, England, on July 7, 2011. Ian Gavan/Getty Images

JK Rowling, who recently challenged Police Scotland to use the new hate crime law to arrest her for stating biological fact, warned that “mere hours” after the release of the Cass Review, “committed ideologues are doubling down” and trying to discredit the Cass Review, which the author said was not “merely misguided,” but “actively malign.”

“The consequences of this scandal will play out for decades,” Ms. Rowling warned.

“You did all you could to impede and misrepresent research. You tried to bully people out of their jobs for opposing you. Young people have been experimented on, left infertile and in pain.

“The Cass Review may be a watershed moment, but it comes too late for detransitioners who’ve written me heartbreaking letters of regret. Today’s not a triumph, it’s the laying bare of a tragedy,” she added.