Ruth Dudley Edwards: Cass Review lays bare the dangerous insanity of gender ideology

And that I have great admiration and affection for trans people who cope with a condition they did not seek but have the grace not to demand that others change their beliefs and their very language to validate their desire.

But I have become horrified over the past decade at the indoctrination of hundreds of thousands of young people with the crazy and dangerous insanity of gender ideology by the stupid, craven, mendacious, cruel, selfish, greedy (choose any combination) people who facilitated the promulgation of a message just to benefit their careers. Or of course, the mindless and ignorant who automatically follow the herd.

The guilty are not just the dreadful misogynistic trans ideologues who with vicious abuse, threats of violence and no-platforming seek to terrorise their critics into silence, destroy their careers and take away from women not only hard-won rights but the very language that defines their sex.

We must not forget the irresponsible medics who took at face value the self-identification as trans of mentally disturbed children and youngsters and set them on a dangerous, painful and life-changing path of hormones, drugs and even surgery.

But there are tens of thousands more of the guilty, for innumerable colluders joined the fashionable herd without demurring when, for instance, the NHS began replacing “mother” and “breastfeeding” with “gestational parent “ and “chest-feeding” .

“Worse than the ravings of the militants,” recently said the outspoken Kemi Badenoch (who held onto her job as Women and Equality when she became Business Secretary in order to have a platform to fight transmania) “was the cowardice of those in positions of influence. How many university administrators, media editors, police officers and politicians preferred to keep quiet for fear of becoming the next target or in the hope of maintaining their progressive credentials.”

Yes, indeed. Government and public services have been ideologically captured.

What sort of lunatics, for instance, voted for gender recognition laws that ended up removing women’s safe spaces in the name of progress and put jailed women in mortal danger from rapists who had self-identified as women?

How could a whole generation of schoolgirls have been rendered humiliated and frightened by having their toilets open to boys?

How could any politician or retailer think it reasonable to let a man with a beard and an armful of frocks into a female changing room just because he says it’s his right?

Why did lesbians who refused to sleep with anyone with a penis find themselves assailed as bigots?

And what kind of brainwashed parents gives their three-year-old a book called An ABC of Equality that includes “L is for LGBTQIA, a short description of a range of identities to describe lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, intersex, asexual. It’s okay to be whoever you want to be. Find the words that make you, you.”

For the antidote, I warmly recommend Transsexual Apostate: My Journey Back to Reality by scientist Dr Debbie Hayton.

She has been a doughty commentator in the few media organs with the courage to publish heretics. Here she describes why she has written a brutally honest and most illuminating memoir about why and how she transitioned surgically and then realised she still wasn’t a woman – (https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/03/31/take-it-from-a-transsexual-transwomen-are-not-women/).

She refuses “to agree with the mad fiction they are trying to force on society that a trans woman is every bit a woman and should be treated like one when it comes to public amenities, prisons, sport and so on. It’s a fallacy, and a dangerous one.

“The basic biological fact — and I speak as a science teacher — is that we cannot change the sex we were born with.”

Establishment insomnia can only get worse.