The Cass Report Hatchet Job

Like me you’ve probably been hearing a lot of the so-called Cass Report commissioned by the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) putatively to evaluate transgender health care but really to see preside over its being interred into an early grave.

It was another in a long line of similar hatchet jobs, such as the one commissioned by Paul McHugh’s, who presides over axing the nation’s first transgender program at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

McHugh was a notoriously and proudly anti-gay homophobe and committed Catholic, who had helped defend numerous priests credibly accused of pedophilia, and he arrived at Hopkins with the express intent of shutting down its gender program, and promptly did so based on a scabrous 100+ page “report” published in the dubious conservative pseudo-journal The New Atlantis.

There is a much more detailed summary of the 400-page Cass Report findings available at Evan Urquhart’s Assigned Media and elsewhere, but here are some of the low-notes.

The nutshell is that it’s a UK TERF’s wet dream, going out of its way to refuse to refer to trans boys and trans girls as trans boy or trans girls, which kind of gives away the game at the outset.

Like many New York Times’ articles, it devotes a lot of ink to hypothesizing in an entirely evidence-free way the many reasons that transgender kids are probably not transgender — which is A Very Bad Thing.

It repeatedly opines or implies that transgender is being spread by (wait for it…) a social contagion.

Also that trans are is like a gateway drug that locks trans kids into being transgender. This is a favored Heads-I-Win-Tails-You-Lose games played by the TERFian right.

If lots of kids detransition, then the medical care was at fault. But if lots of kids don’t detransition, then the medical care “locked them in” and was still at fault.

Only 27% of NHS kids were referred for blockers or hormones, and only 82% of those ever got them.

In other words, barely more than 1-in-5 or just 22% of kids seen actually received the care they went to NHS to get.

This should be a national scandal rather than the basis for a report. It is not only rotten odds by any measure, but also impossible to square with the charge that NHS doctors were pushing medication on kids like they had a Pez dispenser in every lobby.

Moreover it comes as third suicide of a UK trans adolescent in which the infinite wait-times for NHS care has been impicated in their death.

Adding insult to injury after the case of a single detransitioner named Keira Bell halted the NHS system across the UK which was then seeing 5,000+ trans kids yearly, after four years of studying the medical records Cass was only identified 10 examples of detransitioners out of 3306 patient records.

For those of you keeping score at home, that’s about 0.3% — even less than the miniscule 1% which many studies of detransition rates have found.

In other words, if anything NHS doctors were being overly-conservative and not providing enough care. A fact which was evident in the adolescents who had long wait times and ndidn’t receive any medication until they were in their late teens, when many of the physical changes from Endogenous Hormone Poisoning actually were “locked in.”

Despite this — and after dismissing 101 out of 103 studes which found positive value as insufficiently rigorous (that is not a misprint) — Cass leans heavily into avoiding care at all costs.

The report pushes the like even a social transition is serious, harmful, and probably wrong. We’re talking names & pronouns here, people!

As I said, a TERF wet dream, without a shred of redeeming value.

Making matters worse, it appear that while dismissing all those positive studies and findings for being low quality, Cass accepted a Reddit survey from an undergraduate student as evidence at face value (thanks to Erin Reed).

Luckily, the mainstream media in the U.S. analyzed the report in-depth and quickly debunked its obvious biases and blatant transphobia.

Just kidding.

Mostly they’ve all parroted the findings in print like they were taking dictation directly from Lord Voldamort.

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