Another trumpet blare shaking the walls of the woke edifice is the Cass Report, published within the last two weeks by Dr. Hillary Cass and York University on the practice of trans medicine by the British National Health Service. To no one’s surprise, it reveals the shoddiest and outright dishonest practices at the Tavistock Clinic that’s now closed. Cass issued her preliminary report over a year ago that was similarly excoriating.
Thanks to the Cass Report, in the UK, the trans hustle may be over. The only things left are, first, the issuance of medically-sound and ideology-free guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of gender dysphoric children and adults. The Finns and Swedes have already done so and provide a useful template to guide the UK. With that and, second, the resolution of the roughly 1,000 lawsuits against Tavistock, the Brits will have paved a straight road toward sanity in the medicine on gender dysphoria.
The salient features of the Cass Report echo those from her preliminary one – that there is no, or extremely weak, evidence for giving puberty blockers and/or cross sex hormones to children, that what evidence there is has been routinely overblown by the trans industry, that children referred for gender reassignment often present with multiple mental health diagnoses and yet were treated only for gender dysphoria; that parents were often intentionally kept in the dark about the nature and consequences of those interventions; that there was little-to-no effort to follow the kids post-treatment. Tavistock had, since 2009, some 20,000 gender referrals, but, despite that gold mine of information at their fingertips, made no effort to track their patients and gather data on the long-term results of treatment. Given the paucity of medical literature on exactly that subject, it’s hard not to conclude that the British trans industry simply didn’t want to know the results of the experimental medicine they were practicing on underage human guinea pigs.
Those practices at Tavistock have appeared in the U.S. too. The complaints by Jamie Reed of the Washington University Transgender Center look amazingly like those of British and Australian whistleblowers, but the trans medicine establishment here remains adamant that “the science” supports what they do, even though it very clearly doesn’t. In the absence of an honest assessment of that science and a sharp reversal of policy on gender dysphoric kids, we’re left to wonder how many more children need to be damaged before we see a return to a medical practice whose job is to “first do no harm.”
In the past, I’ve argued that the trans medical industry is ripe for correction via civil litigation. When we read the Cass Report and insider accounts of what goes on in those clinics, the prospect of lawsuits looms large.
And sure enough, that’s starting to happen. So far there are only about 18 lawsuits, but we can safely bet that plaintiff’s lawyers across the country are watching the proceedings, collecting the evidence, considering the defenses raised and how to defeat them in court.
Now, a wise reader contacted me a couple of years ago to raise the issue that, since professional associations, like the American Academy of Pediatrics, have greenlighted this type of practice and since individual physicians are entitled to rely on the representations of those associations in making treatment decisions, those physicians have a ready-made defense.
That, in my opinion, would be a fair point but for two things. The first is that the practices reported by insiders find no justification in the literature, either that of the AAP or anyone else. A child being diagnosed and treated with lifelong consequences that are badly understood by medical science, based on a single visit with a psychologist and an endocrinologist is nowhere explicitly approved by any professional association. Neither is lying to parents, yet both have been reported to be common practice. Plus, the outcry from much of the medical community can’t be ignored. In order to avoid civil liability, individual doctors must, at some point, remove their heads from the sand and notice that the claims of their professional associations are being discarded by medical services around the world as both false and misleading and heaped with criticism here at home. Is it negligence on the part of a doctor to fail to do so? It easily could be.
Second, while doctors may have a defense of reliance on the AAP, what’s the AAP’s defense? It can be found liable too if its representations about the state of the science are both false and misleading, which they are and have been. When courts notice that its embrace of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for children has zero support in reputable science, I doubt there’s a way the AAP can escape liability.
Again, sure enough. One of the pending lawsuits includes the AAP as a defendant and the complaint is a doozy. Go to page 8 and read the utter dishonesty of the AAP’s guidelines on which doctors are supposed to rely in making medical decisions with permanent consequences for children’s health.
To summarize briefly, among others, Toronto child psychologist Dr. James Cantor dove deeply into the AAP’s Gender Policy Statement and published his analysis of same in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy. Dr. Cantor found, among many other things, that (a) there is no evidence that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones benefit gender dysphoric children in either the long or short term, (b) the Statement makes many claims that are not supported in the scientific literature, (c) many claims in the Statement are exactly the opposite of what’s in the literature, (d) the Statement sometimes contradicts the scientific literature cited by the AAP itself, (e) the statement makes claims that seem to have come from thin air, (f) the method for dealing with gender dysphoric children worldwide, i.e., ‘watchful waiting’ is dismissed as “outdated” by the AAP without any evidence for doing so and (g) much of the science cited by the Statement is about sexual orientation and therefore irrelevant to gender dysphoria.
Dr. Cantor summarized his analysis thus:
In its policy statement, AAP told neither the truth nor the whole truth, committing sins both of commission and of omission, asserting claims easily falsified by anyone caring to do any fact checking at all.
Does that sound like something a jury would like to hear in finding negligence and possibly gross negligence on the part of the AAP? I believe it does.
We all understand that a complaint in civil court is just that; nothing has yet been proven. But when experts throughout the western world use the sort of language that Cass, Cantor and many others have, and the health services of at least three nations say the same, it begins to look like the AAP’s ideologically-based claims specifically and those of the trans medicine industry generally are ripe for their long-overdue destruction in U.S. civil courts.
It’s starting to happen, much as I predicted.
This originally appeared at The Word of Damocles.
