Craig Young reflects on the UK’s contradictory reforms—advancing abortion and euthanasia rights while backsliding on trans issues, and warns NZ not to follow suit.
The United Kingdom has always struck me as a country of contradictions—but perhaps that’s just part of its evolving character. Lately, I’ve been observing a curious blend of progressive reform and regressive backlash, especially when it comes to social change. And while the UK seems to be advancing in some areas, it’s taking alarming steps backwards in others, most notably, transgender rights.
When I last wrote about “Blue Labour,” a faction of the UK Labour Party favouring social conservatism, I wondered whether this ideological drift would hinder reforms like abortion and assisted dying. Surprisingly, it hasn’t. Despite several prosecutions of women for using mifepristone without conviction, the UK House of Commons recently moved to decriminalise abortion up to 24 weeks. Soon after, it voted to decriminalise assisted dying as well.
Though both bills still require approval from the House of Lords, I doubt they’ll be blocked. In these areas, the UK has now caught up with Commonwealth peers like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, all of which have made similar reforms in recent years. Naturally, the UK Christian Right—and their overseas counterparts—responded with predictable outrage.
So why, in a nation making progress on reproductive and end-of-life autonomy, is transgender rights the outlier?
I believe the answer lies with the Cass Review, a deeply flawed document that has become the foundation of policy regressions. Its claim that there’s “no reliable evidence” supporting puberty blockers for trans youth has gone largely unchallenged in public discourse. I’m dismayed by the UK government’s failure—and that of many media outlets—to rigorously interrogate the methodology and the growing dissent from within paediatrics, developmental psychology, and endocrinology.
This has handed undue legitimacy to gender-critical activists and policy-makers, much as the 1956 Wolfenden Report once shaped limited and discriminatory reform of gay male sexuality in the UK. That report paved the way for the Sexual Offences Act 1967, which decriminalised some forms of gay sex but retained inequality in the age of consent, prohibited military service, and permitted police persecution of gay men in public spaces.
By contrast, jurisdictions like New Zealand moved on much faster. Our 1986 Homosexual Law Reform Act established equal age of consent, followed by anti-discrimination protections in 1993 and the dismantling of military and employment bans. Australia and Canada also outpaced the UK on this front. Eventually, even Tony Blair’s government caught up.
The Cass Review is the new Wolfenden Report—an artefact already out of step with evolving global medical standards. It shouldn’t be shaping transgender health policy. Thankfully, I’ve seen no indication that New Zealand Labour or the Australian Labor Party plan to follow the UK’s example on this front. That’s reassuring.
I remain hopeful that the UK, just as it eventually did on abortion and gay rights, will recognise its mistake and correct course on transgender rights. Until then, I’m glad to be in a country that—at least for now—seems more committed to evidence and equity.
