by Shelley Charlesworth, Transgender Trend
Ideologically-captured local authorities across the UK promote a political, social justice approach towards children experiencing gender-related distress. In this essay Shelley Charlesworth examines the example of Trafford Council to see how their activist agenda is created and maintained.
A seven page report written for Trafford Council’s Children’s and Young People’s Scrutiny Committee is a damning document, showing that activist gender ideas permeate every aspect of the Council’s work, potentially exposing children, especially the most vulnerable, to the harms of gender ideology.
The report is titled Support for LGBTQ+ young people in Trafford
but for ease of comprehension we will refer to it as the LGBTQ+ Report. We’ll shorten the Children’s & Young People’s Scrutiny Committee to simply the Scrutiny Committee.
It’s the work of various teams in the council reporting to the Scrutiny Committee and indicative of the views of those who actually work with and provide services for children in the borough.
The staff teams who authored the LGBTQ+ Report are Public Health, Education, Youth Engagement Services and Commissioning Teams. The process is entirely circular. Those providing the unevidenced background for the Scrutiny Committee are the same groups and charities charged with providing advice and support on the ground.
Citation cartel is a useful term describing the academic practice of citing only work that agrees with your argument in a circular way thus reaching a predetermined conclusion. This is what is happening in Trafford. But unlike most academic work this cartel has real life effects on the lives of children with gender-related distress and their families.
The dangers of a citation cartel were underlined in the Cass Review’s rejection of the treatment guidelines of the World Professional Association of Transgender Health. The final report said: