Opinion: A Rebuttal To Britain’s Cass Review

Although, predictably, the likes of Family First, right-wing UK website Spiked,  and anti-transgender pseudofeminists are crowing about the UK Cass Review on halting puberty blocker treatment to trans children and adolescents, criticism has been building about the report itself.

Under the report guidelines, trans children and adolescents would have to wait until they are aged from seventeen to twenty five to undergo treatment, despite the fact that according to developmental psychology, strategic reasoning skills are usually in place by the time most adolescents are fourteen. This is called “Gillick competence’ and it is the reason that young pregnant people under sixteen can consent to abortions on their own behalf without interference from possibly dysfunctional and abusive parents.

However, there is the question of gender identity clinic provision. After closing the Tavistock Centre, which previously provided such services for trans children and adolescents, there was no replacement service provided.

Trans health providers and advocates have strongly criticised several British media outlets for the absence of  critical scrutiny from those with relevant professional expertise within the fields of pediatrics, developmental psychology or endocrinology. The culprits include the Times, BBC, the Independent,  the I Paper and Murdoch tabloids.  Doctors Aidan Kelly and Natacha Kennedy have strongly criticised the inadequacy of the Cass Review’s literature review and its obliviousness to the problems raised by randomised control trials in medical research.

For those unfamiliar with medical research protocols, a randomised control trial would deny some trans adolescents access to medical treatment, meaning that their dysphoric experience of inappropriately gendered puberty would start, which would potentially cause considerable psychological harm among those affected.  Anti-transgender pseudofeminists appear to care nothing for the mental health needs of trans children and adolescents and that is reprehensible.

So, by imposing the inapplicable protocol of randomised clinical trials as a gold standard, the Cass Review has illegitimately ignored a sizeable body of amenable medical research that upholds the propriety of puberty blocker access for trans children and adolescents. It is worth noting that in advocating delayed transitioning for vulnerable trans children and adolescents, the Cass Review does not provide any evidence to affirm its anti-transgender findings.

The Cass Review pathologises trans lives. Amnesty International UK and the UK civil liberties organisation Liberty recognise this.  Unfortunately, the New Zealand media seem to be following the lead of their British counterparts and are failing to consult duly qualified medical practitioners with appropriate expertise in this context.  We have heard quite enough from unqualified populists with no such professional background, the fundamentalist fringe and pseudofeminists in this context.

 It is time that our own mainstream media followed professional expertise and evidence-based research in this context. For that reason, the Cass Review’s findings must be rejected as seriously flawed and a risk to transgender child and adolescent health, wellbeing and safety.