Advocates for child gender transition are “misguided ideologues”.
The Cass Review is an objective scientific source. The study validates what has been happening throughout Europe and Great Britain. Most of the Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland have all rejected the decades-long positions on supporting and advocating transgender treatment for minor children. The following analysis is from Jersey Conservative www.jerseyconservative.online .
If New Jersey politicos can distract themselves away from their narrow interest long enough to consider the wider world, they will know that an earthquake of sorts is shaken Europe with a report out of the United Kingdom (Great Britain and Northern Ireland… And its dependencies “beyond the seas”) on “gender care” for children.
The Cass Review or the “Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People” was commissioned in 2020 by the National Health Service (NHS England and NHS Improvement) and led by Hilary Cass, a retired consultant pediatrician, and former President of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health. It encompassed several systematic reviews of scientific literature on “patient cohort, service pathways, international guidelines, social transitioning, puberty blockers and hormone treatments.” The final report was published on April 10, 2024.
The interim report of the Cass Review was published in March 2022. It noted that the clinical approach used by the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) “has not been subjected to some of the usual control measures typically apply with new treatments,” and “raises concerns about the lack of data collection by GIDS.” Data collection is important because, without numbers, you can’t have facts. Without data, what you are left with is hysterical pronouncements. That’s why collecting data is so important in any policy discussion. Further, without data collection and public access to it, the people’s right to know can be effectively nullified by determined ideologues.
The interim report stated that medical professionals were “under pressure to adopt an ‘unquestioning affirmative approach’ to children unsure of their gender, ‘overshadowing’ other issues such as poor mental health.” The 2022 interim report agreed that “support should be holistic, based on the best available evidence and that no assumption should be made about the right outcome for any given young person.”
Writing in The Free Press (edited by Bari Weiss), author Lisa Selin Davis notes the Cass Report concludes that children with gender dysphoria have been mistreated for years.
A long-awaited report out this week found that medical professionals in the UK who advocate for gender transition in children are misguided ideologues.
Written by British pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass, The Cass Review, which is nearly 400 pages and took more than four years to compile, comes to the following conclusions:
- Thousands of vulnerable young people were given life-altering treatments with “no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress.”
- “It has been suggested that hormone treatment reduces the elevated risk of death by suicide in this population, but the evidence found did not support this conclusion.”
- “Social justice” ideology is driving medical decision-making, and “the toxicity of the debate” has created an environment “where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views.”
Activists insist the science on this matter is settled, but Cass’s tone recalls a stern British nanny calmly explaining to unruly children how to get their room in order. She shows us that everything about the issue is unsettled and unsettling. For instance, she notes, “social transition”-- whenever young children assume other gender identities-- is an “active intervention” that may set youths on a path to medical transition. And may even make gender dysphoria worse.
The review, commissioned by England’s National Health Service, comes after more than a decade of whistleblowing by clinicians in the country's Gender Identity Development Services, or GID, which was established in 1989 (but mostly off the radar for its first 20 years, because few children and families sought services).
These whistleblowers detailed how kids were fast-tracked to medication while a culture of fear grew around raising any concerns, even as demand for youth gender medicine exploded. Eventually, the NHS decommissioned GIDS and hired the neutral, no-nonsense Cass to detail what went wrong and what to do right moving forward.
Her report made the further damning conclusions:
- Clinicians “are unable to reliably predict which children/young people will transition successfully and which might regret or detransition at a later date.”
- A disproportionate number of patients were “birth registered female presenting in adolescence…. a different cohort from that looked at by earlier studies.”
- Many parents feel their children had been medicalized by professionals who didn’t take other difficulties into account, “such as loss of a parent, traumatic illness, diagnosis of neurodiversity, and isolation or bullying in school.”
- There is a lack of strong evidence to show that puberty blockers “may improve gender dysphoria or overall mental health.”
- The majority of gender dysphoric patients in early studies found that their symptoms desisted after puberty, with most coming out as gay or bisexual later.
Cass notes that “for most young people, a medical pathway will not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress.” She supports expanding the treatments to regional, holistic centers, essentially ending the specialist gender clinic model. The treatment should be based on unbiased psychological care, and robust and consistent evaluation tools must be developed so reliable evidence can finally be gathered.
This final report – an interim one Cass issued in 2022 – echoes what a number of Western nations, such as Finland and Sweden found when they review their own youth gender services. It also underscores what we see in the United States: poor quality research, an un-studied population, and detransitioners traumatized by the treatment they received.
The Free Press notes that some state governments in America are banning “the medicalization of gender dysphoric youth,” while others (such as New Jersey) are holding themselves out as sanctuaries for minors seeking transition.” This represents an unhealthy politicization of medical science. In the opinion of the Center for Garden State Families, this has nothing to do with science. This is wholly an ideology masquerading as medicine!
Lacking data, medical associations – including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association – have been steamrolled by an ideology that often takes on the aspects of religion. Instead of allowing an open debate, these medical professionals are behaving like the religious ideologues who imprisoned Galileo Galilei and burned Giordano Bruno at the stake. They continue to push the “affirmative” model criticized by the Cass Review as though it was a religious imperative.
The Free Press concludes:
In her review, Cass directly addresses the 9000 young people who have moved through gender treatments via the NHS, stating bluntly: research “has let us all down, most importantly you.”
The United States needs to form a truly bipartisan commission that looks at the evidence regarding his gender medicine. As things stand now we will continue to be stuck in a perpetual culture war, with parents in distress kids paying the price.
The Center for Garden State Families opposes all therapies that deny the biologic scientific reality that there are only two sexes and two sexual identities, male and female.
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Interested readers can access the full Cass Review here: https://cass.independent-
The 2022 Interim Report can be accessed here: https://cass.independent-
A Helper Report on Whistleblowers Who Led to the Cass Review can be accessed here: https://www.thefp.com/p/how-
Read It for Yourself. Make up your own mind.