Summary
The article "Are politicians trying to undermine the Cass Review - A Response" argues that the Cass Review was politically motivated and not transparent, and it was criticised by health professionals worldwide.
Are politicians trying to undermine the Cass Review – A Response
Opinion by Steph Richards
On January 23rd, 2025, Hannah Barnes authored an article in The New Statesmen asking if politicians were trying to undermine the Cass Review.
Sadly, to date, politicians have not. However, the real question is, what is taking them so long?
For those of us on the inside of this debate, who eat, drink and sleep with Cass on our minds, witnessing first-hand the distress her review (emphasis her) has caused to the parents of trans children, not forgetting the children and young adolescents themselves.
The Cass Review was not “independent” as is often claimed by gender-critical activists – Cass was politically motivated, as admitted to by Kemi Badenoch in her tweet on June 8th 2024, saying:
The third reason was having gender-critical men and women in the UK government, holding the positions that mattered most in Equalities and Health. You only need to look at what the SNP did in Scotland to see what would have happened had we not intervened. The Cass Review would **never** have been commissioned under a Labour govt. Labour did not want to know. We had incredible opposition from the system on everything. It was when the ministers changed that everything changed.
It was bad enough that Cass was not independent – given the culture war against the trans community, this charge alone should cause politicians to sit up and take note.
Worse still, however, is the fact that the Cass review was not transparent – none of her team in the decision-making process has been declared – trans people and GIDS staff were excluded from the Cass team, and strangely, it now appears all the evidence that Cass herself gathered has disappeared.
Nor does Hannah Barnes make any reference to ever mounting criticism from gender health professionals worldwide:
• American Academy of Pediatrics
• GLADD UK
• The Amsterdam University Medical Centre
• Australian Professional Association for Trans Health
• British Association of Gender Identity Specialists
• The European Professional Association for Transgender Health
• The Integrity Project at Yale University
• Professional Association for Transgender Health Aotearoa
• Therapists Against Conversion Therapy and Transphobia
• United States Professional Association for Transgender Health
• World Professional Association for Transgender Health
The fact is because of Cass, the UK is a near-global outlier in regards to adolescent trans health, and only this week, yet another critique was made.
Published in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), a weekly peer-reviewed medical journal published by the Massachusetts Medical Society. It is one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious medical journals.
Had the authors supported Cass, I have little doubt Hannah Barnes would have screamed from the hilltops – but it was not.
Law professors Daniel G Aaron MD and Craig Konnoth raised concerns about how the Cass review was conducted and how its recommendations were being implemented. To date, only one (yes, one) newspaper has reported the NEJM paper, The National, in Scotland saying this about Cass:
- Was “not verified by experts”. It adds: “The review thus departed from standard practice; indeed, as mentioned above, if the US government issued a report in a similar manner, it would be violating federal law.”
- “Deviates from pharmaceutical regulatory standards in the United Kingdom“ and “calls for evidentiary standards for GAC that are not applied elsewhere in paediatric medicine”.
- Contravenes international standards by failing to list authors. “We do know that Cass chaired the review, but observers must speculate about who else participated in the manuscript’s drafting – and whether they held a bias against LGBTQLGBTQ LGBTQIA+ is an inclusive term that includes people of all genders and sexualities, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, queer, intersex, asexual, pansexual, and allies. While each letter in LGBTQIA+ stands for a specific group of people, the term encompasses the entire spectrum of gender fluidity and sexual identities. https://abbreviations.yourdictionary.com/what-does-lgbtqia-stand-for-full-acronym-explained.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT+ people”
- Had a “high risk of bias” according to the Risk of Bias Assessment Tool for Systematic Reviews and a ‘substandard level of scientific rigour‘”.
- “Improperly excluded non-English articles, ‘gray literature‘ (non–peer-reviewed articles and documents), and other articles not identified by its simplistic search strategy”.
- “The review’s departure from the evidentiary and procedural standards of medical law, policy, and practice can be understood best in the context of the history of leveraging medicine to police gender norms.
With no media voice, it is left to people like myself and organisations like TransLucent to continue to call out transphobia because that is precisely what the Cass Review is – prejudice and discrimination wrapped up in cotton wool for gender-critical journalists to support and defend… pretending the gender-critical activists “care” about kids …when in reality they most certainly don’t.
In many respects, the headline of Hannah Barnes’s article was deceiving; her concern was that the Women and Equalities Select Committee had started an Inquiry into Puberty Blockers.
Frankly, I am damn grateful for their concerns; at least just for once; the gender-critical hate movement is well and truly on the back foot.
Are politicians trying to undermine the Cass Review – A Response
Opinion Steph Richards 24/01/25