12/05/2024
The left wing weekly newspaper Socialist Worker says that the Cass Report into transgender young people's services, published on Wednesday April 10th, is full of inconsistencies and poor research. The paper spoke to three people working with young people to ascertain the feelings of professionals on the ground. Christabelle, who does child educational psychology work for a London council, told Socialist Worker, “The evidence base of the report and analysis of the evidence is awful.” She explained that Cass’s “main rationale for not taking into account research that pointed towards using puberty blockers as positive was because it didn’t use a ‘double blind’”. A “double blind” study is where one group of patients receive the drug and another group a placebo, with the participants unaware of which one they’ve received. This meant the literature review, which the report’s conclusions are based on, “excluded hundreds of studies, particularly, international studies”. These show that “puberty blockers and hormone treatments lead to positive outcomes for mental health and social outcomes for young trans people”. Monica, a worker in child and adolescent mental health services, said “The report has a poor characterisation of an affirmation model of gender identity services—it’s overly simplistic. It characterises gender affirmation services as agreeing with the young person and nothing else”. “But when you look at what clinicians say, that isn’t how affirmation works in practice. In practice, clinicians accept what young people are saying to us but are also open to these things being fluid. Gender affirmation services still accept that children are developing." Maggie, a healthcare worker from south London, told Socialist Worker that the report has “fundamental problems”. “The Cass report implies that ‘trans ideology’ took over the Gender Identity Clinics (GIDS) and that puberty blockers are part of this elusive and actually non-existent ‘trans ideology’,” she told Socialist Worker. “I completely disagree with that. The GIDS service was clear that puberty blockers are about giving people time to think, about putting puberty on hold. .... The closing of the Tavistock clinic has meant we’ve lost all expertise that was at the GIDS clinic. They had maybe 30 to 35 staff and something like 5,000 young people on the waiting list".
