Rewrite and translate this title The year in trans politics: Has the gender-critical movement won? to Japanese between 50 and 60 characters. Do not include any introductory or extra text; return only the title in Japanese.

Throughout 2024, trans people around the UK have been trapped in a strange limbo, like the period between finding a lump and learning whether or not it is malignant. No anti-trans legislation has passed through parliament, yet our rights have been greatly eroded and last week’s puberty blocker ban notably codifies differential treatment of trans kids in law.

Our US counterparts are in a similar position as they wait for Trump to take office: knowing that his campaign included a reportedly influential transphobic advert proclaiming “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you”; hoping that transphobia will not be at the top of his to-do list and that the Democratic Party won’t cast aside their human rights as a losing issue.

The British gender critical movement purports to represent a silent majority, but knows it does not command enough support to publicly shred the documents guaranteeing our rights. Instead it has adopted the methods of sadistic pencil-pushers – its true constituency – burying human rights laws in reams of secondary legislation, statutory and non-statutory guidance, grey literature, and fudged equality impact assessments.

Atop this pile of paper rests the Cass Review, a quasi-religious text for the gender critical movement. The Cass report is not a piece of academic literature, subject to debate and criticism from other researchers. It is an arson attack which has become a wildfire, tearing through decades of medical evidence on both sides of the Atlantic. US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito recently cited it in support of Tennessee’s ban on healthcare for trans youth, despite reputable medical organisations unanimous opposition to the ban.

In the UK, where medical organisations have embraced Cass’s findings, expertise is even more easily brushed aside. The ruling class – from politics to the media, healthcare to the courts – has reached a consensus that trans kids do not exist and should not have healthcare. Dissenters from this consensus are ignored if possible, and if not, vilified.

In recent years, trans rights has joined the assortment of policy areas governed by a bipartisan consensus against human dignity: among them policing, immigration, benefits and Palestine. The shift from Conservative to Labour government has brought only promises to enact this fascist agenda more efficiently, with occasional hand-wringing, to show that serious politicians sometimes feel guilty when their policies kill people, but that must not mean those people can be allowed to live.

The Cass Review was a catalyst, allowing British institutions to step up their war on trans rights with a series of bureaucratic tweaks. Breaking down the falsehoods on which each of these changes rest is a mammoth task, but I will focus on a single example that illustrates the wider farce.

In February, Sallie Baxendale, a psychologist, published a terrible academic paper that claimed to look at existing studies on the negative effects of puberty blockers on trans children’s cognition. In reality, most studies surveyed were performed on animals, with only one case study showing that a single trans child scored lower on an IQ test after taking puberty blockers. Baxendale concluded from this lack of evidence that neuropsychologists like her should have consistent access to trans kids to subject to further study.

Despite the flaws in Baxendale’s work – it was rejected by three journals and met with scathing comments from peer reviewers, as she complained in Unherd – Dr Hilary Cass chose to cite it four times in her final report, and determined that puberty blockers should not be prescribed to trans kids outside of an upcoming clinical trial, in part because of “potential risks to neurocognitive development”.

In July, when health secretary Wes Streeting went to court to defend his predecessor’s ‘emergency’ ban, he wrote a thread on X defending this decision. Among his stated reasons for defending the ban was that hormone blockers – when used on trans children – negatively impact their “psychological and brain development”.

In recent years, trans rights has joined the assortment of policy areas governed by a bipartisan consensus against human dignity: among them policing, immigration, benefits and Palestine

Streeting claims to be led by scientific evidence, but his citation of this ‘fact’ demonstrates how the Cass Review has successfully laundered misinformation into the public sphere. Cass must know that Streeting is misrepresenting the evidence, but appears not to care. Last week she offered full-throated support to the ban, furthering speculation that it exists solely to coerce children into submitting their bodies for study.

Cass is not the only senior clinician willing to manipulate data for political ends. The review of suicides connected to Gender Identity Development Services [GIDS], led by Louis Appleby, was similarly dishonest, disputing the Good Law Project’s claim that at least 16 young people on the GIDS waiting list have died (largely by suicide) since 2020, compared to one death in the seven years prior. Appleby, analysing data of patients who have been seen by GIDS, rather than those on the waiting list, asserts: “the data does not support the claim”, trying to smooth over the fact that his data and the Good Law Project’s cover different populations.

Last week, Caroline Littmann, the mother of Alice Littmann, who died by suicide in 2022 after almost three years waiting for gender-affirming care, received confirmation from the Department of Health and Social Care that her daughter’s death had been excluded from Appleby’s analysis. Alice Littmann’s life and death, along with the lives and deaths of 15 other trans young people, were erased so the government could pretend that it is not knowingly killing trans kids.

While healthcare for trans youth is the site of the most immediate anti-trans state violence, those of us unfortunate enough to keep tabs on the institutional war on trans people writ large know that there are countless other harmful measures in the pipeline.

Several pieces of guidance for schools were issued for consultation under the previous Conservative government. Despite repeated questioning, education secretary Bridget Philipson has refused to say whether she intends to ban schools from teaching about gender identity, encourage teachers to out trans pupils to their parents, and advise that primary schools should never refer to trans children with the correct pronouns. None of this is law – and some of it would have no legal weight even if formally adopted – but it remains on the government website for bad actors to cite.

Meanwhile, adult trans healthcare is also under fire. Following the Cass Review and a statement from the Royal College of GPs, which stopped just short of counselling its members against treating trans patients, hundreds of GPs refused to continue prescribing hormones to their existing trans patients.

A Cass-style review of adult transition care has already commenced. Its terms remain unknown, but it is led by Dr David Levy, an oncologist who lacks any experience with trans healthcare and whom NHS England selected with no consideration of other candidates – just like Cass.

Finally, the UK Supreme Court last month heard a case brought by anti-trans group For Women Scotland, which argues that trans women should be legally treated as men in all contexts. Though legal experts believe the court will rule against the group, a ruling in its favour would leave trans people unprotected by the Equality Act, which guards against discrimination in work, housing, healthcare and many other settings.

The near-absolute anti-trans consensus within the British establishment means we cannot rely on the law to protect us. Jolyon Maugham, who leads the Good Law Project, recently explained on Bluesky that the organisation stopped funding trans-related strategic litigation, after it “hired the best lawyers, fought cases they indicated we should win, spent vast sums of money, and lost because (I believe, with reason) the judiciary (as a monolith) sits inside a transphobic hegemony.π I understand why many trans people are angry at Maugham, but appeals to authority are pointless when authority is impervious to both the truth and your humanity.

I won’t blame any trans person for despairing in the face of a violent establishment, but transphobes know how flimsy their arguments are, and that is why they try to suppress our voices

Watching Streeting’s faux-pained expression last week as he weaponised his gay identity to remove healthcare from trans kids, whose appeals he ignored, I am reminded of Jean-Paul Sartre’s words about antisemitism: “Never believe that antisemites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies,” he writes. “They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

We must accept this is a game to them. I won’t blame any trans person for despairing in the face of a violent establishment that seems almost intent on hunting us for sport (no doubt we would be banned from participating) but I take heart in the knowledge that transphobes know how flimsy their arguments are, and that is why they try to suppress our voices.

The formation of Trans Kids Deserve Better – the one positive event in trans politics this year – has made it much harder for politicians to ventriloquise trans youth. The activist group’s visibility and creativity have inspired many trans people, adults and children alike, to keep fighting, and have shown their cohort to be thoughtful, determined and resourceful, rebuffing attempts to portray them as confused and easily led.

I met members of the group in August, during their occupucation of the Department for Education. To hear them articulate how they have found community among themselves, and how they draw from the history of queer activism around the AIDS crisis and Section 28, was a reminder that LGBTQ+ rights have never been gifted by the state, but always taken.

Occupying the pavement in front of Wes Streeting’s office this week, they wrote on a giant cardboard coffin a declaration that the government will never eliminate trans children: “We will live out of spite”.

Throughout 2024, trans people around the UK have been trapped in a strange limbo, like the period between finding a lump and learning whether or not it is malignant. No anti-trans legislation has passed through parliament, yet our rights have been greatly eroded and last week’s puberty blocker ban notably codifies differential treatment of trans kids in law.

Our US counterparts are in a similar position as they wait for Trump to take office: knowing that his campaign included a reportedly influential transphobic advert proclaiming “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you”; hoping that transphobia will not be at the top of his to-do list and that the Democratic Party won’t cast aside their human rights as a losing issue.

The British gender critical movement purports to represent a silent majority, but knows it does not command enough support to publicly shred the documents guaranteeing our rights. Instead it has adopted the methods of sadistic pencil-pushers – its true constituency – burying human rights laws in reams of secondary legislation, statutory and non-statutory guidance, grey literature, and fudged equality impact assessments.

Atop this pile of paper rests the Cass Review, a quasi-religious text for the gender critical movement. The Cass report is not a piece of academic literature, subject to debate and criticism from other researchers. It is an arson attack which has become a wildfire, tearing through decades of medical evidence on both sides of the Atlantic. US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito recently cited it in support of Tennessee’s ban on healthcare for trans youth, despite reputable medical organisations unanimous opposition to the ban.

In the UK, where medical organisations have embraced Cass’s findings, expertise is even more easily brushed aside. The ruling class – from politics to the media, healthcare to the courts – has reached a consensus that trans kids do not exist and should not have healthcare. Dissenters from this consensus are ignored if possible, and if not, vilified.

In recent years, trans rights has joined the assortment of policy areas governed by a bipartisan consensus against human dignity: among them policing, immigration, benefits and Palestine. The shift from Conservative to Labour government has brought only promises to enact this fascist agenda more efficiently, with occasional hand-wringing, to show that serious politicians sometimes feel guilty when their policies kill people, but that must not mean those people can be allowed to live.

The Cass Review was a catalyst, allowing British institutions to step up their war on trans rights with a series of bureaucratic tweaks. Breaking down the falsehoods on which each of these changes rest is a mammoth task, but I will focus on a single example that illustrates the wider farce.

In February, Sallie Baxendale, a psychologist, published a terrible academic paper that claimed to look at existing studies on the negative effects of puberty blockers on trans children’s cognition. In reality, most studies surveyed were performed on animals, with only one case study showing that a single trans child scored lower on an IQ test after taking puberty blockers. Baxendale concluded from this lack of evidence that neuropsychologists like her should have consistent access to trans kids to subject to further study.

Despite the flaws in Baxendale’s work – it was rejected by three journals and met with scathing comments from peer reviewers, as she complained in Unherd – Dr Hilary Cass chose to cite it four times in her final report, and determined that puberty blockers should not be prescribed to trans kids outside of an upcoming clinical trial, in part because of “potential risks to neurocognitive development”.

In July, when health secretary Wes Streeting went to court to defend his predecessor’s ‘emergency’ ban, he wrote a thread on X defending this decision. Among his stated reasons for defending the ban was that hormone blockers – when used on trans children – negatively impact their “psychological and brain development”.

In recent years, trans rights has joined the assortment of policy areas governed by a bipartisan consensus against human dignity: among them policing, immigration, benefits and Palestine

Streeting claims to be led by scientific evidence, but his citation of this ‘fact’ demonstrates how the Cass Review has successfully laundered misinformation into the public sphere. Cass must know that Streeting is misrepresenting the evidence, but appears not to care. Last week she offered full-throated support to the ban, furthering speculation that it exists solely to coerce children into submitting their bodies for study.

Cass is not the only senior clinician willing to manipulate data for political ends. The review of suicides connected to Gender Identity Development Services [GIDS], led by Louis Appleby, was similarly dishonest, disputing the Good Law Project’s claim that at least 16 young people on the GIDS waiting list have died (largely by suicide) since 2020, compared to one death in the seven years prior. Appleby, analysing data of patients who have been seen by GIDS, rather than those on the waiting list, asserts: “the data does not support the claim”, trying to smooth over the fact that his data and the Good Law Project’s cover different populations.

Last week, Caroline Littmann, the mother of Alice Littmann, who died by suicide in 2022 after almost three years waiting for gender-affirming care, received confirmation from the Department of Health and Social Care that her daughter’s death had been excluded from Appleby’s analysis. Alice Littmann’s life and death, along with the lives and deaths of 15 other trans young people, were erased so the government could pretend that it is not knowingly killing trans kids.

While healthcare for trans youth is the site of the most immediate anti-trans state violence, those of us unfortunate enough to keep tabs on the institutional war on trans people writ large know that there are countless other harmful measures in the pipeline.

Several pieces of guidance for schools were issued for consultation under the previous Conservative government. Despite repeated questioning, education secretary Bridget Philipson has refused to say whether she intends to ban schools from teaching about gender identity, encourage teachers to out trans pupils to their parents, and advise that primary schools should never refer to trans children with the correct pronouns. None of this is law – and some of it would have no legal weight even if formally adopted – but it remains on the government website for bad actors to cite.

Meanwhile, adult trans healthcare is also under fire. Following the Cass Review and a statement from the Royal College of GPs, which stopped just short of counselling its members against treating trans patients, hundreds of GPs refused to continue prescribing hormones to their existing trans patients.

A Cass-style review of adult transition care has already commenced. Its terms remain unknown, but it is led by Dr David Levy, an oncologist who lacks any experience with trans healthcare and whom NHS England selected with no consideration of other candidates – just like Cass.

Finally, the UK Supreme Court last month heard a case brought by anti-trans group For Women Scotland, which argues that trans women should be legally treated as men in all contexts. Though legal experts believe the court will rule against the group, a ruling in its favour would leave trans people unprotected by the Equality Act, which guards against discrimination in work, housing, healthcare and many other settings.

The near-absolute anti-trans consensus within the British establishment means we cannot rely on the law to protect us. Jolyon Maugham, who leads the Good Law Project, recently explained on Bluesky that the organisation stopped funding trans-related strategic litigation, after it “hired the best lawyers, fought cases they indicated we should win, spent vast sums of money, and lost because (I believe, with reason) the judiciary (as a monolith) sits inside a transphobic hegemony.π I understand why many trans people are angry at Maugham, but appeals to authority are pointless when authority is impervious to both the truth and your humanity.

I won’t blame any trans person for despairing in the face of a violent establishment, but transphobes know how flimsy their arguments are, and that is why they try to suppress our voices

Watching Streeting’s faux-pained expression last week as he weaponised his gay identity to remove healthcare from trans kids, whose appeals he ignored, I am reminded of Jean-Paul Sartre’s words about antisemitism: “Never believe that antisemites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies,” he writes. “They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

We must accept this is a game to them. I won’t blame any trans person for despairing in the face of a violent establishment that seems almost intent on hunting us for sport (no doubt we would be banned from participating) but I take heart in the knowledge that transphobes know how flimsy their arguments are, and that is why they try to suppress our voices.

The formation of Trans Kids Deserve Better – the one positive event in trans politics this year – has made it much harder for politicians to ventriloquise trans youth. The activist group’s visibility and creativity have inspired many trans people, adults and children alike, to keep fighting, and have shown their cohort to be thoughtful, determined and resourceful, rebuffing attempts to portray them as confused and easily led.

I met members of the group in August, during their occupucation of the Department for Education. To hear them articulate how they have found community among themselves, and how they draw from the history of queer activism around the AIDS crisis and Section 28, was a reminder that LGBTQ+ rights have never been gifted by the state, but always taken.

Occupying the pavement in front of Wes Streeting’s office this week, they wrote on a giant cardboard coffin a declaration that the government will never eliminate trans children: “We will live out of spite”.