In today’s Times, there was a harrowing interview with Dr. Hillary Cass and the danger she’s now in following the publication of her review into the treatment of transgender children and the ‘disinformation’ that’s been circulated about it. Here is an extract:
Following publication of her 388-page report, figures including the Labour MP Dawn Butler repeated claims that Cass had not included 100 transgender studies in it.
Calling the assertion “completely wrong”, Cass said that it was “unforgivable” for people to undermine her report by spreading “straight disinformation”.
The physician, 66, who has spoken about the toxic debate around the issue, also revealed that she had been sent “vile” abusive emails and been given security advice to help keep her safe.
Of her critics, Cass said: “I have been really frustrated by the criticisms, because it is straight disinformation. It is completely inaccurate.
“It started the day before the report came out when an influencer put up a picture of a list of papers that were apparently rejected for not being randomised control trials.
“That list has absolutely nothing to do with either our report or any of the papers.
“If you deliberately try to undermine a report that has looked at the evidence of children’s healthcare, then that’s unforgivable. You are putting children at risk by doing that.”
In the days after the Cass review was published, activists claimed on social media that only two out of 100 studies were included in the report.
Butler told the House of Commons: “There are around 100 studies that have not been included in this Cass report and we need to know why.”
Cass explained that researchers had appraised every single paper, but pulled the results from the ones that were high quality and medium quality, which was 60 out of 103.
Of Butler, she added: “You don’t get up in parliament with an intent to spread misinformation … [but] what I was dismayed about, was the understanding she got [from the report].”
Dawn Butler has form in this area, which is ironic since she was ejected from the House of Commons in 2022 for refusing to withdraw her accusation that Boris Johnson had repeatedly lied in the chamber.
In 2018, the MP for Brent Central repeatedly lied about me, including in the House of Commons. Indeed, I engaged a top libel silk to help me compose a letter to her, threatening her with a libel suit if she repeated these lies, but didn’t send it because I was advised by a libel solicitor, rather dishearteningly, that she might be able to mount a successful defence by claiming I had no reputation left to defame. This was following my cancellation in which I had to step down from five different positions, including my day job, and which led to me setting up the Free Speech Union two years later.
But in light of Ms. Butler’s ‘disinformation’ about the Cass Review, I thought it worth setting out how she lied about me by quoting from parts of the letter.
The most egregious lie she told about me was on Question Time on January 11th, in which she accused me of “talking about eugenics and weeding out disabled people”. Here was my response:
I have never advocated “weeding out disabled people” and I challenge you to cite anything I have ever said or written to provide evidence for that accusation. I found it particularly distressing because I have a disabled brother and I am a patron of Stallcombe House, the residential care home he lives in. The thought of Christopher or anyone who lives or works at Stallcombe seeing you saying this on Question Time – and believing that you were accurately summarising my views – is profoundly upsetting.
You prefaced this completely unwarranted accusation with the phrase “talking about eugenics”. In context, the two charges were obviously intended by you to support each other, and anyone hearing what you said would have inferred that I had written approvingly about “eugenics” in the sense in which it is commonly understood, i.e., the forced sterilisation of the mentally ill, the disabled, young women, minorities, etc. As a classical liberal who believes above everything else in individual rights, I would never advocate anything remotely like that. On the contrary, I believe eugenics, as commonly understood and as practised in the 20th Century in Nazi Germany and elsewhere, is abhorrent. On this subject, our values are completely aligned.
To label me a eugenicist in this sense was on any fair view a gross distortion of what I did write. In a 2015 article for an Australian periodical called Quadrant, I wrote about something I called “progressive eugenics” which was a million miles away from the sort of thing you conjured up for the Question Time audience. In my Quadrant article – which you can read here – I discuss an idea first presented by Julian Savulescu, a professor of philosophy at Oxford, which he summarises as follows:
Imagine you are having in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and you produce four embryos. One is to be implanted. You are told that there is a genetic test for predisposition to scoring well on IQ tests (let’s call this intelligence). If an embryo has gene subtypes (alleles) A, B there is a greater than 50% chance it will score more than 140 if given an ordinary education and upbringing. If it has subtypes C, D there is a much lower chance it will score over 140. Would you test the four embryos for these gene subtypes and use this information in selecting which embryo to implant?
We haven’t yet developed the “genetic test” referred to by Savulescu and it is possible that we may never do so because: (a) intelligence may not be genetically-based; and (b) even if it is, we may never discover all the subs-sets and combinations of genes associated with it. But what if it is and we do? In my Quadrant article, I discuss an obvious risk associated with the technology described by Savulescu, namely, that if it is ever invented, the first people to take advantage of it will be the rich so they can give their children an even greater advantage than they currently enjoy. In short, it will make inequality even worse. Believe it or not Dawn, I share your desire to reduce the current level of inequality in our society.
My somewhat tentative solution to this problem, as set out in the article, was that this technology, if it comes on stream, should be banned for everyone except the very poor. I wasn’t proposing sterilisation of the poor or some fiendish form of genetic engineering or anything like that. Just a form of IVF that would be available on the NHS to the least well off, should they wish to take advantage of it. Not mandatory, just an option, a way of giving their children a head start. I was thinking about how to reduce the risk that this new technology will exacerbate existing levels of inequality – how it could be used to reduce inequality.
I described my proposal as “a form of egalitarianism”, which is why I labelled it “progressive eugenics”. While I was hoping to provoke debate on this subject, I certainly was not inviting people to take the word out of context and use it against me in order to smear me as a Nazi eugenicist. On any view I am not a eugenicist in the sense you implied on Question Time.
If you think I am mischaracterising my article to make it appear somehow more morally acceptable than it was, do not take my word for it. Read this summary of my argument by Iain Brassington, who writes a bioethics blog for the Journal of Medical Ethics. After marvelling at all the people who’ve called me a “eugenicist”, he points out that what I’m suggesting “is in many ways, fairly unremarkable”:
What’s notable from a bioethicist’s perspective is just how familiar the arguments being presented here are. It’s hard to read Young’s article without thinking of a good chunk of the work on genetic screening, and on enhancement, that’s been done over the past few years… it’s pretty standard stuff in seminar discussions about screening; and nor is there anything that is obviously morally beyond the pale.
I think you will accept, if you take the trouble to read my article and this commentary on it, that what I was proposing was very different from what is commonly understood by “eugenics”. Yet you chose on Question Time to refer to me “talking about eugenics” in a context that was bound to convey that false impression, which you consolidated with the outrageous claim that I had talked about “weeding out disabled people”.
On the same edition of Question Time, she went on to accuse me of being opposed to the education of disabled children in mainstream schools. This is what I had to say about that:
In addition to your claim that I have talked about “weeding out disabled people”, you also said on Question Time that I had complained “that schools have ramps so that disabled people can get an education”.
I assume this is a reference to an article I wrote in the Spectator on June 30th 2012 in which I referred to the word “inclusive” as “ghastly”. Your words – again – contained an element of what can only have been deliberate embroidery. I never complained that schools have ramps “so that disabled people can get an education” – that was your interpolation. I did not refer to “wheelchair ramps” as “ghastly” in that article and the most important point of all is that I am not and have never been an opponent of educating children with disabilities in mainstream schools. All four of the schools I have been involved in setting up have proper wheelchair access and I would not have wished it any other way. Indeed, because my Spectator article was being misinterpreted in that way, I added a clarification at the foot of the column on January 2nd. It read (in part): “Some people have misunderstood what I was trying to say in this column. I’m using ‘inclusive’ in the broad sense to mean a dumbed down, one-size-fits-all curriculum, rather than the narrow sense of providing equal access to mainstream education for people with disabilities. I’ve absolutely nothing against inclusion in that sense.” If you are going to sit in public judgement on people in the way that you did, is it not fair and reasonable to judge people by their actions as well as their words, and indeed by all of their words, rather than just seizing selectively on those that serve your purpose?
Although those were the two most defamatory things she said about me on Question Time, she also repeated a lie she’d told in the House of Commons:
You claimed that I had talked about dressing up as a woman and “going to gay clubs” and “molesting lesbians”. I assume this is a reference to an article I wrote for GQ in 2000 entitled ‘I was a lesbian for a night’. At no point in that article did I talk about “molesting” anyone. Rather, it was an example of ‘stunt journalism’, carried out in 1998 for a magazine I worked for in New York called Gear (although Gear never published the piece), in which a hair-and-make-up team transformed me into an “attractive” woman so I could then go to a succession of lesbian bars to try to pick up a lipstick lesbian. In the article, I said my plan was “to make out with them on the dance floor”, not “molest” them. The idea behind the piece was that I would obviously fail because no woman in her right mind would mistake me for a woman – it was the sort of self-deprecating article in which I ended up falling flat on my face that was my stock-in-trade at the time. It was supposed to be a humorous piece, not a serious account of an attempt on my part to seduce gay women, let alone “molest” them. Yet in the House of Commons, you cited this article as evidence of my “history of homophobia and misogyny”, a phrase that also appeared in a letter co-authored by you and Angela Rayner MP and circulated to the media on Friday January 5th. It was no such thing. […]
On Question Time you also made a point of saying that my “unacceptable” behaviour was not “historic”, but recent. In support of this, you alleged that “just over 12 months ago” a “brave” woman placed a sexual harassment policy on my desk at my place of work, underlining certain sections in red pen, and that my response to this was to hire a strippergram to come to the office on Take Your Daughters to Work Day. That was a repetition of a similar claim you made in the House of Commons, although on that occasion you said this incident had occurred 13 months ago.
I can only assume this is a reference to an episode I wrote about in my memoir How to Lose Friends & Alienate People (2001) that dates back to my first day of work at Vanity Fair in New York 1995 – 23 years ago, not 12 or 13 months ago. After being given an induction tour of the building, which contained several fashion magazines, including Vogue, the tour guide said, “If you get lost you can always consult the model in the lobby.” I replied, “Oh really. Which one?” The following day I found the memo on my desk. The underlined bit read as follows: “A joke considered amusing by one may be offensive to another.” To be clear, it was not in response to an incident of sexual harassment, but to an inappropriate joke. And it was placed there by an amused male colleague, not a female co-worker.
I suspect that you were relying on a version of this story I told in the Spectator on 3rd December 2016 which you quoted from in the House of Commons. In addition to the story about the sexual harassment memo, I make reference in that article to the fact that I hired a strippergram to surprise a male colleague on what turned out to be Take Your Daughters to Work Day when I worked at Vanity Fair in the mid-1990s – another story that first appeared in How to Lose Friends & Alienate People. But hiring the strippergram wasn’t a response to finding the sexual harassment memo on my desk – the two episodes occurred at least six months apart – and nor was it presented as such in the Spectator article. In that article, I make it clear that both these incidents occurred “in the mid-1990s”, not “just over 12 months ago”. In addition, I did not know it was Take Your Daughters to Work Day when I hired the strippergram – it was another story I told against myself in which I ended up as the butt of the joke. But yet again – and you surely agree that there is quite a pattern building up here – you have taken something that I wrote about (many years ago) and distorted it beyond recognition.
I am neither a misogynist nor a homophobe. In my 30-year-career as a journalist and editor I have employed hundreds of women and have never once been accused of sexual harassment or discrimination or been taken to an employment tribunal or anything of that kind. Nor have I ever been accused of homophobia by an employee or a colleague.
As I say, I never sent this letter and, as far as I’m aware, Dawn Butler has never repeated any of these lies about me. But given that she has now been caught out spreading ‘disinformation’ about the Cass Review in the House of Commons, I thought it worth pointing out that this isn’t a one-off.
Given that she has repeatedly misled the House of Commons, will she now resign, as she called on Boris to do in 2022 for exactly the same sin?
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