There has been a lot of talk about trans suicide recently, especially as it pertains to transgender youth, after Wes Streeting announced he would pursue making Victoria Atkins’ ban on puberty blocking medication permanent. This has prompted a bizarre response from the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) in an attempt to deflect from trans suicides.
To quickly recap and get us to this bizarre attempt to deflect from trans suicides; The Cass Review is a Tory led review into healthcare provided to trans youth and its efficacy. In short; The Review claims to not have found substantial enough evidence to continue the use of puberty blockers within the NHS. The private healthcare sector was absolutely no where within its scope.
Private healthcare options for trans people have sharply risen in line with the lengths of the waiting list to access NHS services. Huge backlogs that will take years to clear at current pace created a market where providers can easily charge patients high prices to access treatments quicker in the private healthcare sector. Before Parliament dissolved ahead of the General Election Victoria Atkins invoked emergency powers to ban private providers from doing this for 3 months.
The ban was due to end in September, however Wes Streeting has said that he is looking into making the ban permanent citing the Cass Review as his justification. Cass, again, does not have private practice within its scope at all and makes no real recommendations or comments about the existence of private practice across its 400 pages. It is, under no circumstances, a justification for the ban that currently exists and which Streeting plans to extend.
The Good Law Project’s Jolyon Maugham took to Twitter in order to plead with the government about these issues. Citing whistleblowers from the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDs) which Cass’ Review was actually focused on; Maugham claims that following a previous ban on puberty blockers there was a sharp rise in suicides amongst trans youth and the extension of this ban poses much the same risk. In total Maugham points to 16 suicides, some of under 18s, that have happened since the UK’s media and political landscape became as transphobic as it is.
The Government have approached its resident expert in suicide; Professor Louis Appleby, in what appears to be an attempt to bury this story just as the parents of those trans kids have had to bury their children. In his bizarre attempt to deflect from trans suicides Appleby extensively looks at some of the evidence and concludes there was only 12 suicides – 6 of which were under 18, no sharp rise after the initial puberty blocker ban and no way to tell if the 12 he could find were related to attacks on trans healthcare such as puberty blocker bans or not.
In his conclusion he calls out Good Law Project by name and suggests they have been irresponsible for reporting on suicide in this way, suggesting it could lead to copycats. Though I don’t think the Good Law Project have either 12 or 16 bodies at their feet and feel like he should probably be directing these comments towards those that do; ie The British Government and press.
Many commentators have been quick to point out flaws in Appleby’s approach. Chief amongst which is that he’s using a very limited dataset to draw these conclusions. It appears as though he is only looking at those who had been seen by GIDs and not at the much larger group of people waiting to be seen by GIDs. Its in this much larger group where we know there’s huge risk from tragic stories like Alice Litman and Jayden Lowe – both who died by suicide while on waiting lists for gender affirming care.
Throughout the report Appleby attempts to suggest that trans people and allies are wrong for thinking that puberty blockers would solve issues of suicidality writing; “There is a need to move away from the perception that puberty-blocking drugs are the main marker of non-judgemental acceptance in this area of health care.” By which he seems to mean that the objective fact that the UK has been on the warpath against trans youth, including things like pointlessly banning puberty blocking medication repeatedly, should not be viewed as having impacted these youths decisions to die by suicide.
He belittles and diminishes this whole issue down to access to medication as if that’s the whole problem and not everything that has led up to those medications being inaccessible in the first place. Trans people aren’t hopping off our mortal coil because they didn’t get access to medication one time and nobody in or around our community has suggested this is the case to my knowledge. No. Trans suicides are, As Appleby pointed out, as complex as any other suicide and have multiple contributing factors.
But you either have to be ignorant beyond belief or otherwise complicit in these deaths to try and tell me that the rise of transphobia in the British mainstream has nothing to do with it. We have seen nearly a decade of attacks on these youth from the highest offices in government, from every mainstream media org and the UK’s most famous children’s author. No fucking shit its going to have affected the kids – they are watching all of this happen with just as much despair as I or any other decent human being.
In short; Appleby’s report doesn’t substantively engage with the arguments put forwards, ie that this Labour government continuing the Tory legacy of torturing queer kids will harm those kids. It outright refuses to even acknowledge that the removal of puberty blockers is and always has been politically motivated rather than led by healthcare experts and instead suggests moving away from “the perception” that blocking access to this medication constitutes a “rejection” of trans youth.
Appleby’s report does little more than attempt to cover up for a government who are once again pursuing actions against trans youth that will cause them harm and has, objectively, already done so. That’s the 6 foot deep bottom line of Appleby’s report; dead kids but not as many as Maugham claimed and we, people who speak to these kids and their families every day, should be more responsible with how we report on these matters.
As always, trans people and allies talking about the needless pain and suffering inflicted upon us is far more of an inconvenience for cisgender society than the fact that we are burying our dead because of it. The message we’re being sent by Appleby and this report is; “let us hurt you and be quiet about it”.
No. Go fuck yourself.
