In recent weeks, the Cass Review out of the United Kingdom has been used to argue for bans on care. The Endocrine Society and American Academy of Pediatrics respond, rejecting such arguments.
Will NPR and The New York Times run a story on this? I seriously doubt it.
What are they so afraid of? Why are news organizations so eager to throw us under the bus? I suspect it is because we are literally viewed by entities such as the NYTs as disposable. There are more potential right wing subscribers than there are trans people and The Times is banking on the assumption that our non-trans allies won't cancel their subscriptions because of articles targeting trans people and that advertisers also won't leave. They are playing a numbers game and they don't give a damn about trans lives or the truth. In a world with different values, advertisers would be appalled and NYTs employees would simply walk out.
I am a retired physician trained in clinical epidemiology and research design. I have yet to read the Cass report but if half of the reported links to DeSantis are true, it is damning. No professional researcher would communicate with a politician about their study, except to explain the results, and to object to their misinterpretation.
Analyzing scientific studies takes years of experience and in this case should never have been a “ one person” endeavor, but one run by a committee of experts.
The United States professional societies produce reports on treatments and medical evidence regularly ; it is one of their major professional obligations. They are not beholden to the government to acknowledge issues of funding or economics. I suspect Cass was encouraged to produce the report she did because gender affirming care is expensive. Far cheaper for the NHS to say it is ineffective.
Cass is a retired pediatrician and no expert in this field. Her statements to the media have been very unscientific sounding. The only thing she may have going for her is her androgynous appearance.
I think you’re probably right. I think a big part of it is that the waiting lists here in the UK are so long as well - several years in most cases (the waiting list I’m on for adult gender services is five and a half years long). What better way to address scandalous wait times than just to stop providing the care people are waiting for and insist we’re just a trend or that we all aren’t really trans but just autistic or have mental health issues that can be treated with CBT and antidepressants instead - which the Cass report essentially does (though it’s not as if wait times for those treatments aren’t terrible as well, because those services are also underfunded and understaffed).
Awesome to see the actual experts taking stronger and stronger supportive stances as science marches on...
...now if only the mainstream press and just a couple more politicians would listen to 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮, instead of to the malevolent screaming assholes who've either had their credentials revoked, or (far more often) never had any in the first place, we'd be making some real progress!
Yeah... sadly, the GQP culture war is far too big a cash cow for any of the profit-driven outlets to flush it down the sewer it belongs in (*𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘵- even the ones who are supposedly on our side of this shitshow). Manufactured outrage keeps butts in seats through the next commercial break (or scrolling past their data-harvesting sponsors' ads) far better than fact-driven reporting does.
Cass has also led to effective puberty blocker bans and bans on any new under 18s patients being referred for hormones, too. The Scottish Government have actually interpreted Cass more harshly. In England the NHS is being instructed to coax families of trans youth on waiting lists in for ‘additional mental health support’ so they can threaten to set social work on them if they’ve used private services, like Gender GP, to get care for their kids. Essentially they are threatening families to forcibly detransition their kids or face having them taken away. It’s shocking and vile.
In The Netherlands, a country that saw a disastrous election in 2023 and went full extreme-right ever since, the transphobia also went up quick, within 3 months of forming a new house of Representatives, the amount of transphobic motions and rhetoric has gone up 700%.
We have a fascist party leading right now, that wants to get rid of public broadcasting services, which already tells you so much.
The number 2 in the current political party is one that campaigned hard on trustworthy and respectful governing, banking massively on the idea that they are a trustworthy party for exposing an AI-driven tax agency scandal that plummeted thousands of people into massive debts, and led to state-sponsored kidnappings because judges were super-eager to go along with the idea that the immense, crushing debt made the home unsafe for the children of the people affected.
These people were labeled as fraudsters with tax funds (child care, mostly) merely for having an algorithm check the last name: if it sounded to Middle-Eastern, you were labeled as a fraudster.
I think this party gained a lot of trust from people for this sole reason, but they showed to not give a flying F.
The whole idea that the Dutch State should never ever have the opportunity to turn itself against a particular group of citizens ever again, was scrapped within a month of forming a new House of Representatives by this exact party.
Within a month of forming the new House of Representatives, there was a debate about 2 reports about how to combat the long waiting lists and reform transgender healthcare, and broaden the knowledge about gender dysphoria in other forms of healthcare, be it physical or mental.
The party that stated the Dutch State should never ever have the ability to retaliate against a group of citizens anymore used a former microbiologist (probably to make her lies sound more valid) to retaliate against transgender healthcare for minors.
It used the Interim Report (the Cass Report was not yet out at the time, but still) for calling for a pause "because concerns in foreign countries have lead to a ban on care".
When a representative from a pro-trans-rights party asked if she was out to change the healthcare by trying to decrease waiting lists or in any way change the system so that it could help alleviate the worst of the problems currently affecting the accessibility of this car, the representative (Rosanne Hertzberger) she flat out said "No."
Imagine being a politician and having the chance to change something, and just being like "Nah, I just want to make the things stay the way they are...because F those children!"
This representative by the way filed 2 motions:
1. Create a database of transchildren and revoke their patient-doctor confidentiality rights, because politicians need to look at their medical records.
2. Call for research into the long-term dangers of puberty blockers.
Motion number 1 was explicitly called out by our Minister of Health, Wellbeing and Sport, who is a former public news broadcaster host and worked on a TV program about medical issues, that once centered an episode around transchildren in the early 90's.
She has been very pro-trans-rights as well, and strongly condemned the serious nature of this motion, by explicitly telling the House of Representatives "Urgently calling not to support this motion, because of the dangers of such a database, and the medical privacy being revoked."
Even with the urgent call to not file the motion, the person filing it, has stayed it: This means she's probably waiting for a moment in which government has upped it's transphobia even more, so the time is more right later.
The second motion, got filed and approved. This with a FORMER MICROBIOLOGIST being to F'ing stupid to do her research well because she would've found out this research is currently ongoing in the leading gender clinic in The Netherlands.
I asked representative Hertzberger in a personal email if she was still out for calling for a ban (something she, by the way, denied was her purpose with the motions, which is obviously nonsense: you do not use the Interim Report for nothing, along with using the language of "Concerns in foreign countries like the UK", and "possibly requiring us to take a step back as well").
In this email I asked: "If there are explicit, clear, negative outcomes to be expected of not treating a child with puberty blockers, outcomes that we do not need new research for, would you still be OK with banning treatment?"
If you read that question well, you'll see I'm talking about children experiencing precocious puberty, because, after all, those children are apparently also getting very dangerous medication, yet we never hear from them, nor do we hear politicians losing their mind over those.
Representative Hertzberger turned out to have a reading problem: she immediately messaged back and said that not treating a transchild is unethical (which in me prompted the thought: "So why ask for a step back because of "concerns" in foreign countries then?").
It gave me the proof that it's about the children that get treatment, not the medication.
That, is something I mailed her back, thanking her for the response, and thanking her for providing me with proof that she is out to get transgender children, and is not concerned about the medication at all.
Ever since, I'm probably blacklisted: any email I sent has been left waiting for an answer...
The same party by the way, also used undemocratic means of killing of a self-ID proposal.
Their reasons for this were weird: they backdated the existence of their party by suggesting that their party's leader being a member of a different party meant their party had spoken out about this self-ID law change proposal (in layman's terms inappropriately named "The Transgender Law").
Another reason was calling all transwomen rapists. The self-ID law according to them allows legal rape...
The VU Medical Centre in Amsterdam condemned Cass as well, and explicitly explaining how double-blind randomised trials are considered unethical, and unobtainable as a result in medical trials, because it almost always means someone is knowingly going to be worse off.
Other than that, any other major organisations have yet to strongly condemn Cass, even our national public broadcaster wrote almost critique-less about the Cass Report...
I'm luckily able to give a presentation at work (A TV station luckily doing quite well on reporting on trans-issues) about the wave of transphobia in media and politics, and explain to an audience that might be clueless some of the names involved that you will see a lot when it comes to misinformation about transgender healthcare.
The topic of gender affirming care has become so intensely politicized that at this point, almost anything that comes from other than a major, well-established medical organization with longstanding policy positions, should be viewed with a high degree of skepticism.
Thank goodness these professional organizations were able to respond in what must be for them a moments notice. I won't expect a response from the AMA for at least a year. Even the United Nations might chirp in sooner.
There is an abundance of high-quality evidence that Dr. Hillary Cass is a transphobic shill.
So glad they put out these statements, hopefully it can help stem some of the harm Cass has done.
Will NPR and The New York Times run a story on this? I seriously doubt it.
What are they so afraid of? Why are news organizations so eager to throw us under the bus? I suspect it is because we are literally viewed by entities such as the NYTs as disposable. There are more potential right wing subscribers than there are trans people and The Times is banking on the assumption that our non-trans allies won't cancel their subscriptions because of articles targeting trans people and that advertisers also won't leave. They are playing a numbers game and they don't give a damn about trans lives or the truth. In a world with different values, advertisers would be appalled and NYTs employees would simply walk out.
I just paid $50 to write this so hear me out!
I am a retired physician trained in clinical epidemiology and research design. I have yet to read the Cass report but if half of the reported links to DeSantis are true, it is damning. No professional researcher would communicate with a politician about their study, except to explain the results, and to object to their misinterpretation.
Analyzing scientific studies takes years of experience and in this case should never have been a “ one person” endeavor, but one run by a committee of experts.
The United States professional societies produce reports on treatments and medical evidence regularly ; it is one of their major professional obligations. They are not beholden to the government to acknowledge issues of funding or economics. I suspect Cass was encouraged to produce the report she did because gender affirming care is expensive. Far cheaper for the NHS to say it is ineffective.
Cass is a retired pediatrician and no expert in this field. Her statements to the media have been very unscientific sounding. The only thing she may have going for her is her androgynous appearance.
I think you’re probably right. I think a big part of it is that the waiting lists here in the UK are so long as well - several years in most cases (the waiting list I’m on for adult gender services is five and a half years long). What better way to address scandalous wait times than just to stop providing the care people are waiting for and insist we’re just a trend or that we all aren’t really trans but just autistic or have mental health issues that can be treated with CBT and antidepressants instead - which the Cass report essentially does (though it’s not as if wait times for those treatments aren’t terrible as well, because those services are also underfunded and understaffed).
Awesome to see the actual experts taking stronger and stronger supportive stances as science marches on...
...now if only the mainstream press and just a couple more politicians would listen to 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮, instead of to the malevolent screaming assholes who've either had their credentials revoked, or (far more often) never had any in the first place, we'd be making some real progress!
Yeah... sadly, the GQP culture war is far too big a cash cow for any of the profit-driven outlets to flush it down the sewer it belongs in (*𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘵- even the ones who are supposedly on our side of this shitshow). Manufactured outrage keeps butts in seats through the next commercial break (or scrolling past their data-harvesting sponsors' ads) far better than fact-driven reporting does.
Sad but true. All electronic media feed on clicks.
Cass has also led to effective puberty blocker bans and bans on any new under 18s patients being referred for hormones, too. The Scottish Government have actually interpreted Cass more harshly. In England the NHS is being instructed to coax families of trans youth on waiting lists in for ‘additional mental health support’ so they can threaten to set social work on them if they’ve used private services, like Gender GP, to get care for their kids. Essentially they are threatening families to forcibly detransition their kids or face having them taken away. It’s shocking and vile.
Almost as bad as Texas.
Congratulations Erin on winning an award for your blog you deserve it and we're happy to get the attention for this cause.
In The Netherlands, a country that saw a disastrous election in 2023 and went full extreme-right ever since, the transphobia also went up quick, within 3 months of forming a new house of Representatives, the amount of transphobic motions and rhetoric has gone up 700%.
We have a fascist party leading right now, that wants to get rid of public broadcasting services, which already tells you so much.
The number 2 in the current political party is one that campaigned hard on trustworthy and respectful governing, banking massively on the idea that they are a trustworthy party for exposing an AI-driven tax agency scandal that plummeted thousands of people into massive debts, and led to state-sponsored kidnappings because judges were super-eager to go along with the idea that the immense, crushing debt made the home unsafe for the children of the people affected.
These people were labeled as fraudsters with tax funds (child care, mostly) merely for having an algorithm check the last name: if it sounded to Middle-Eastern, you were labeled as a fraudster.
I think this party gained a lot of trust from people for this sole reason, but they showed to not give a flying F.
The whole idea that the Dutch State should never ever have the opportunity to turn itself against a particular group of citizens ever again, was scrapped within a month of forming a new House of Representatives by this exact party.
Within a month of forming the new House of Representatives, there was a debate about 2 reports about how to combat the long waiting lists and reform transgender healthcare, and broaden the knowledge about gender dysphoria in other forms of healthcare, be it physical or mental.
The party that stated the Dutch State should never ever have the ability to retaliate against a group of citizens anymore used a former microbiologist (probably to make her lies sound more valid) to retaliate against transgender healthcare for minors.
It used the Interim Report (the Cass Report was not yet out at the time, but still) for calling for a pause "because concerns in foreign countries have lead to a ban on care".
When a representative from a pro-trans-rights party asked if she was out to change the healthcare by trying to decrease waiting lists or in any way change the system so that it could help alleviate the worst of the problems currently affecting the accessibility of this car, the representative (Rosanne Hertzberger) she flat out said "No."
Imagine being a politician and having the chance to change something, and just being like "Nah, I just want to make the things stay the way they are...because F those children!"
This representative by the way filed 2 motions:
1. Create a database of transchildren and revoke their patient-doctor confidentiality rights, because politicians need to look at their medical records.
2. Call for research into the long-term dangers of puberty blockers.
Motion number 1 was explicitly called out by our Minister of Health, Wellbeing and Sport, who is a former public news broadcaster host and worked on a TV program about medical issues, that once centered an episode around transchildren in the early 90's.
She has been very pro-trans-rights as well, and strongly condemned the serious nature of this motion, by explicitly telling the House of Representatives "Urgently calling not to support this motion, because of the dangers of such a database, and the medical privacy being revoked."
Even with the urgent call to not file the motion, the person filing it, has stayed it: This means she's probably waiting for a moment in which government has upped it's transphobia even more, so the time is more right later.
The second motion, got filed and approved. This with a FORMER MICROBIOLOGIST being to F'ing stupid to do her research well because she would've found out this research is currently ongoing in the leading gender clinic in The Netherlands.
I asked representative Hertzberger in a personal email if she was still out for calling for a ban (something she, by the way, denied was her purpose with the motions, which is obviously nonsense: you do not use the Interim Report for nothing, along with using the language of "Concerns in foreign countries like the UK", and "possibly requiring us to take a step back as well").
In this email I asked: "If there are explicit, clear, negative outcomes to be expected of not treating a child with puberty blockers, outcomes that we do not need new research for, would you still be OK with banning treatment?"
If you read that question well, you'll see I'm talking about children experiencing precocious puberty, because, after all, those children are apparently also getting very dangerous medication, yet we never hear from them, nor do we hear politicians losing their mind over those.
Representative Hertzberger turned out to have a reading problem: she immediately messaged back and said that not treating a transchild is unethical (which in me prompted the thought: "So why ask for a step back because of "concerns" in foreign countries then?").
It gave me the proof that it's about the children that get treatment, not the medication.
That, is something I mailed her back, thanking her for the response, and thanking her for providing me with proof that she is out to get transgender children, and is not concerned about the medication at all.
Ever since, I'm probably blacklisted: any email I sent has been left waiting for an answer...
The same party by the way, also used undemocratic means of killing of a self-ID proposal.
Their reasons for this were weird: they backdated the existence of their party by suggesting that their party's leader being a member of a different party meant their party had spoken out about this self-ID law change proposal (in layman's terms inappropriately named "The Transgender Law").
Another reason was calling all transwomen rapists. The self-ID law according to them allows legal rape...
The VU Medical Centre in Amsterdam condemned Cass as well, and explicitly explaining how double-blind randomised trials are considered unethical, and unobtainable as a result in medical trials, because it almost always means someone is knowingly going to be worse off.
Other than that, any other major organisations have yet to strongly condemn Cass, even our national public broadcaster wrote almost critique-less about the Cass Report...
I'm luckily able to give a presentation at work (A TV station luckily doing quite well on reporting on trans-issues) about the wave of transphobia in media and politics, and explain to an audience that might be clueless some of the names involved that you will see a lot when it comes to misinformation about transgender healthcare.
The topic of gender affirming care has become so intensely politicized that at this point, almost anything that comes from other than a major, well-established medical organization with longstanding policy positions, should be viewed with a high degree of skepticism.
Thank goodness these professional organizations were able to respond in what must be for them a moments notice. I won't expect a response from the AMA for at least a year. Even the United Nations might chirp in sooner.