What Do We Want? Medical Malpractice. When Do We Want it? Now!

Fallout from Cass

Vindication, as it turns out, is not so sweet after all. Watching the fallout from the Cass Review actually turns my stomach. The last few years come rushing back, and for those of us who had an inkling that experimenting on children was not cool – that no one is born in the “wrong” body; we are our bodies – it’s a heart-breaking time. Those who thought that lying to kids that they could easily change sex, and telling their parents that these kids may kill themselves if they didn’t, those of us on that “side” do not feel great these days. We feel desolate, and we feel rage for the children whose bodies were subjected to medical misconduct of mammoth proportions that are only just beginning to be understood.

Make no mistake: this is a huge medical and institutional scandal in which many were complicit. How can it be that six out of seven adult gender clinics were allowed to refuse to hand over any data to Cass? These are NHS clinics, remember, and they are supposed to be accountable. The fact that they are not is an institutional failure on a grand scale. At least now they will be forced to comply.

This flippancy about data points to an appalling lack of concern about the outcomes for young people experiencing gender distress, whether or not they transitioned. Lack of record-keeping was noted at the Gids Tavistock during the Keira Bell case. There is no other area of medicine in which this would be acceptable.

Into the void where data should be have poured all sorts of myths: about a lack of regret for kids who transition, about mental health outcomes, about suicide prevention. So loaded is this area, wish fulfilment has replaced evidence-based science. 

Some of what we already knew has simply been confirmed by the Cass Review. 

Puberty blockers were used in the past on a short-term basis for the treatment of precocious puberty and sometimes in the treatment of women with endometriosis. The idea that these drugs are harmless, reversible and merely like pressing a pause button has been in debate for several years. The concerns about their links to adverse effects on bone development and brain maturation were known. Now it seems there may even be links to cancer.

What is more, after two or three sessions at Gids, nearly all the children prescribed these drugs progress onto cross-sex hormones. Well under any age of consent, they are being medicalised in a way that will have lasting effects. 

What got the alarm bells ringing for so many is the fact that this new and growing cohort of patients with “gender dysphoria” were young girls . An ideology that preached “trans rights” mostly for adult men who identified as women was, in reality, being practised on the bodies of distressed girls.