The Cass Review: a damning indictment of the NHS
It’s time to put a stop to “gender-affirming” paediatric healthcare.
The review into paediatric gender treatment by Dr Hilary Cass has finally been published. Its conclusions should herald the end of “gender-affirming” care in the United Kingdom, and its impact is likely to reverberate around the world.
The review has shown that 89% of girls and 81% of boys referred to GIDS (Gender Identity Development Service) were either homosexual or bisexual. The NHS has been practising gay conversion therapy in plain sight, and this has happened because politicians have been too ignorant or too afraid to do anything about it.
Cass has explicitly noted how fear of standing up to ideologues has resulted in a situation in which “attempts to improve the evidence base have been thwarted by a lack of cooperation from the adult gender services”. We have long suspected that the “gender-affirming” model of healthcare has persisted because its critics were too intimidated to speak out. This has been confirmed by Cass’s final report.
The report finds that vulnerable young people who should have been supported with therapeutic treatment were fast-tracked onto lifelong medicalisation. The risks of puberty blockers are now clear, and Cass notes that there is no evidence to justify them. Most crucially, we now know that the common assertion that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones reduce the risk of suicide is completely false.
Cass refers to the influence on the NHS of the World Professional Association of Transgender Healthcare (WPATH), and how its guidelines have been found “to lack developmental rigour”. The recent revelations of the “WPATH files”, internal messages and videos from the organisation, have shown that leading practitioners were aware that children could not give “informed consent” to the treatments they were prescribing. In addition, they were also aware that gay or bisexual youth and those with mental health and autistic conditions were disproportionately affected. More details about the WPATH files can be read here.
Given the significance of WPATH’s influence, now confirmed by the Cass Review, it is remarkable that the BBC has yet to report on the WPATH files. Like the NHS, the BBC has been promoting gender identity ideology as though it were uncontested fact. In the light of the Cass Review, surely an investigation into the ideological capture of the BBC should be initiated.
School policy is beyond the remit of the report, but Cass notes that “social transitioning” – that is, adopting preferred names and pronouns – can increase the chances of a child proceeding on a “medical pathway”. It would be prudent for the Department for Education to bear this in mind when drafting future guidelines.
Cass offers an important recommendation for patients aged between 17 and 25. At present. young people who turn 17 are treated as adults and can be prescribed cross-sex hormones without parental consent. Given that the human brain is not fully developed until the age of 25, the risks here are obvious. Cass had recommended that “NHS England should establish follow-through services for 17-25-year-olds at each of the Regional Centres, either by extending the range of the regional children and young people’s service or through linked services, to ensure continuity of care and support at a potentially vulnerable stage in their journey.”
In light of the Cass Review, we now need an urgent investigation into how ideological zealots were able to dominate the NHS and branches of government to the detriment of children. Those charities who once supported gay rights – most notably Stonewall – have been complicit in this scandal which has mostly harmed gay youth. Any government departments and quangos still associated with Stonewall should sever all ties immediately.
Both the Conservatives and the Labour Party ought to ditch their commitment to a ban on “trans conversion therapy” and recognise that this will effectively stymie the therapeutic efforts of medical practitioners to support gender nonconforming children. The proposed ban on “trans conversion therapy” is tantamount to a new form of gay conversion therapy. You can read my thoughts on this subject here.
Above all, there now needs to be a concerted cross-party effort in parliament to identify those responsible for harming so many children and to hold them accountable for their negligence. The NHS should never have been in the business of practising pseudoscientific methods at the behest of activists, and we must ensure that this never happens again.
Download the Cass Review here.
We now have the Cass Report, the WPATH files, a wealth of evidence of the harmful effects of puberty blockers and cross sex hormones, and the damning survey which tracked children with ‘dysphoria’ over an extended period only to find what we already knew….that the vast majority grow out of it. If there are still people pushing this vile ideology in the face of all the evidence, we should consider some kind of prosecution for the harms they are causing to children. For example, the biggest teaching union, the NEU, is advising staff to ignore govt advice and continue socially transitioning children secretly. And not forgetting all the organisations such as Stonewall and the plethora of groups making money by pushing ideological claptrap into schools via so called training materials. And what of all the captured politicians? How many snivelling backtracks are we going to see today? I am angry, we should all be angry. It’s time it was all stopped.
I cancelled my TV licence two years ago. I couldn't, in all conscience, continue to give money to the BBC. It should be held accountable for its derogation of responsibility in promoting this pernicious ideology to children, and in not platforming contrary voices. I find it extraordinary that eloquent and knowledgeable groups like Sex Matters and LGB Alliance are effectively banned by the BBC. For an institution ostensibly obsessed with diversity and inclusion, it practices the opposite when it comes to this subject. I have no faith in the BBC investigating itself, and Ofcom is a joke.