Publishing and Cass: A guest post

The author has worked in publishing for more than thirty years

The Cass Review, an independent investigation of gender services for children and young people, commissioned four years ago, has now been published. It concludes that there is no evidence that affirmation and medicalisation of children experiencing unhappiness and trauma around their developing bodies is beneficial to them, and is indeed likely to be harmful.

Cass’s conclusions will be contested by ideologues of course, but as even Stonewall is slightly reverse-ferreting on their previous position, it seems that both government and opposition parties, in England at least, will accept them.

What are the implications of this for book publishing? In the main, publishing companies - and particularly the big five - have gone along with the mantra that trans women are women, trans men are men, and non-binary identities are valid, or have at least made sufficient gestures in that direction to mollify their most vocal activist employees, although one might wonder about the conviction-expedience ratio. The trade press has also largely gone along with the prevailing orthodoxy.

Children’s publishing, in particular, has been completely captured by gender ideology, to the extent that some writers have seen their livelihoods destroyed while their reputations are shredded on social media. Rachel Rooney is the most high-profile victim of this kind of bullying and denigration, her crime being to have published a sweet rhyming picture book for young children, My Body Is Me, encouraging them to love their bodies and marvel at what they can do.

Conversely, there are the books which celebrate ‘trans kids’, and encourage children to believe that feelings of trauma, anxiety, distress and hatred around their bodies are easily fixed by social transition, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and even surgery. As the Cass Review demonstrates, this is a lie. Even more egregiously, these books promote the idea - to children and their parents - that anything other than immediate affirmation of a declared ‘gender identity’ leads to unhappiness, self-harm, suicidal ideation and worse. This is not supported by evidence, and is truly cruel.

These books are not only dangerous, they are full of inaccuracies about equality law, protected characteristics, the reversibility of puberty blockers, and more. But unlike My Body Is Me, they are singled out for praise, shortlisted for prizes and heavily promoted by publishers and retailers.

Now that Cass has demolished the claims that these books enthusiastically disseminate, what do children’s publishers propose to do about them? Do they now need to be revised? It is difficult to see how that could work, given that they are underpinned by a discredited ideology. Will they be withdrawn? Probably not, as long as they are making a healthy contribution to the bottom line.

Those responsible for presenting harmful lies to vulnerable children and anxious parents as easy solutions to a complex problem need to read the Cass Review immediately, and maybe ask themselves if they remain convinced they are on the right side of history.