by Lauren Smith, spiked
Vast sums of taxpayer cash are still being funnelled into NGOs promoting dangerous medical misinformation to kids.
It’s easy to feel like the trans lobby has been on the retreat for a while now. In the past few years, gender ideology in the UK has taken blow after blow.
But an upcoming report suggests this narrative is far too comforting. ‘Breaking the Blob: A study and antidote to British ungovernability’ is produced by new data-based think-tank Cambridge Circus Research. The paper examines how NGOs, charities and legal campaigners work together to shape public policy, often in defiance of what voters have asked for. The report’s section on the trans lobby shows how this machine operates in practice.
t first glance, that might seem hard to square with the past couple of years, which have delivered one public defeat after another to the trans movement. Most recently, the Supreme Court ruled last year that, under UK equality law, a woman must be defined by biological sex, and not so-called gender identity. The ruling (at least in theory) forced public bodies, employers and service providers to treat sex-based rights as real and enforceable. In practice, it made it far harder for institutions to claim that gender identity should override women-only spaces.
A year before that, in 2024, came Dr Hilary Cass’s final review into the NHS’s treatment of gender-nonconforming kids. Anyone who has been following the trans debate will be familiar with the deeply concerning conclusions of her report – namely, that puberty blockers carry unknown, long-term risks and have not been shown to reliably improve children’s mental-health outcomes or gender-related distress. Cass’s 2022 interim report even prompted NHS England to close the Tavistock and Portman’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) – then England’s only specialist NHS gender clinic for children – and replace it with a network of smaller regional services.