The chief executive of a transgender charity has said she is “deeply upset” at how her comments have been interpreted at an event to mark Transgender Day of Remembrance at Belfast City Hall.
Rev Dr Linda Ballard, the head of Focus: The Identity Trust, a charitable group aimed at supporting transgender people and their families, was criticised after she said she supported parts of a report which makes recommendations on how gender services for children and young people should operate.
The chaplain’s remarks reportedly led to some people walking out of the event, which was held on Wednesday and was described by Belfast City Council as “an annual observance on November 20 that honours the memory of the transgender people whose lives were lost in acts of anti-transgender violence.”
During a speech at the event, Dr Ballard referred to the Cass Review, which culminated in a landmark report led by Dr Hillary Cass which claimed the “toxicity” of the debate around gender meant professionals were “afraid” to openly discuss their views.
The report found there was “no good evidence” on the effectiveness of puberty blockers and their safety for use by children. The review was praised by several groups including the Equality and Human Rights Commission, but others such as TransActual criticised it as “bad science”.
Writing on The Trans Agenda website, Lee Hurley, who attended the event, said “the entire room gasped” when the former minister of First Dunmurry Non-subscribing Presbyterian Church expressed support for the Cass Report.
They added that some people walked out “and it was impossible to blame them as Ballard denied a grieving community a rare moment of collective dignity and healing”.
In a lengthy statement to the Belfast Telegraph, Dr Ballard, who is from Bangor and is the mother of a transgender child, said she was “deeply upset” at how her comments were interpreted and said she supported the Cass Review for “strategic reasons”.
“I was invited to Wednesday’s event as a parent of a transgender child to reflect on my own experiences,” she said.
“I began by briefly outlining some of these experiences and went on to say why I fully and unequivocally support the provision of puberty blockers in all cases where this is the appropriate treatment for young people. I went on to say that I support the Cass Report for strategic reasons.”
She added that her opinion on the Cass Review is not “entirely dissimilar to that being taken forward by LGBT groups Stonewall and Mermaids”.
“I stated that I wondered if, instead of rejecting the Cass Report, it might be more effective, cautiously and with reservations, to welcome it, if this might this give us stronger grounds for rejecting some of the ways in which it is being used?
“Might it give us a better framework for demanding accountability and moving things forward? Might it even provide us with a platform from which to develop a sensitive and well thought out programme of public education that might help to depolarise a debate that I am not alone in believing to be increasingly toxic.”
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She also said she was aware of comments by Dr Hillary Cass in an interview with the BBC acknowledging that it was not clear which puberty blockers helped young people seeking transgender healthcare “in a constructive capacity … but my question is ‘why not’? Why don’t we know which ones?”
“I added that we can welcome this acknowledgement of the constructive capacity of hormone treatments and encourage positive outcomes from this authoritative statement of fact, but my question is why not? Why don’t we know which ones?
“It’s a generation since my child experienced growing up as a transgender individual, more than a decade since, in my understanding, medical authorities in the Netherlands could endorse the effectiveness of this treatment, more than a century since Magnus Hirshfeld’s work was conducted in Berlin.
“Transgender identity may be a minority concern, but I urged our medical professionals and our policy developers at all levels to ensure that this minority is respected.
“This includes listening to, respecting and acting on the experiences of all gender diverse individuals, including young transgender individuals, and making space to hear and act on the words of their parents.”