Sasha and Stella's Initial Reflections on The Cass Review

In this culture war its always one step forwards and 2 steps back, but the TRAs are on the backfoot at last.
Well done.

I love Stella!

Let’s hope this isn’t basically ignored the way the WPATH leaks have been.

Dr. Cass as a guest is a very exciting idea. She's the next logical episode of the pioneers series.

No more having to be cautious with language and tip toeing around. I love hearing the full throated confidence in Stella's voice. Back to least invasive first, basic principles of addressing mental and emotional health. Maybe most importantly doing away with the idea that this a life or death emergency and the distraught and upset child knows best and must lead the way. This is very encouraging.

I listened to an interview with Hillary Cass on the BMJ (British Medical Journal) YT channel.

I am unconvinced the Cass report is anything to celebrate.

Hillary Cass uses language and spoke about "trans" as if it were an intrinsic human condition. She refers to the explosion in the number of children with gender confusion as a "generational" change, without referring to or questioning the sudden explosion in this phenomenon since DSM 5 changed the status of gender confusion from a mental to a physical medical issue in 2012.

Her report does not challenge the concept of "trans" and continues to defer to WPATH as an authoritative body on the subject.

It seems the outcome is more resources for medicalising children.

The children receiving the treatment will be those who WPATH thinks would profit from the use of puberty blockers, endocrine modification and surgery and more record keeping.

It seems she is giving WPATH resources to prove the Amsterdam model is the best intervention. No mention of the WPATH files.

Sasha, wonder if you have any idea where in the process is that evaluation/study of evidence for transgender care by US health officials (not sure who's doing it, NIH or CDC or AAP) that was announced a year or so ago?

Unfortunately Sweden now passed what is more or less a self ID law allowing to kids down to 16 to be able to change their legal sex (with the consent of parents) 🤦🏻‍♀️ It feels like one step forward two steps back when it comes to this absolute insanity…

I was checking Cass Review WIKI page the other day. There was lots of negativity in there trying to discredit its findings..must have been the work of Tactivists.. Today it has been removed and replaced by a neutral page.

New camera's? Looks great!

Hearing her review has definitely validated a lot of the things you have been sharing on this channel, about time we have a review this detailed.

I don't know how anyone can sincerely claim that the Cass Review is independent now that it's been documented Dr. Cass coordinated with Patrick Hunter of the Catholic Medical Association who was personally chosen by Ron DeSantis (the same guy who had his Department Of Health comission a "independent" systematic review that concluded COVID vaccines are harmful) to ban medical care for Trans Youth in Florida, to share information with the Florida Board of Medicine. This is why the Cass Review isn't taken seriously by any major professional medication association. It's a political document masquerading as a scientific one. It's not a peer-reviewed medical study. 🙄

The Cass review is very long but big sections of it are about stuff other than the treatments themselves, e.g. how to set up research protocols, safeguarding training, new referral pathways etc. The whole report is summarised in the first 45 pages of it. From there you can choose which sections you want to read in full.
So i would recommend to anyone to go to the original report itself rather than only reading other peoples takes. You dont need to read the whole thing and it's written in very accessible language.

Of course WPATH must speak against the report. Over half of their Board of Directors is trans and so they must "validate their choices."

The whole transitioning thing is soooo absurd that it can not enter my mind. The same with lobotomy 😮. How can anybody maintain that you can cure mental health with the scalpel? Worse even: there is no way that man can change what nature created....look at the pitiful results of such criminal experiments. The poor frankestein creatures resulted after the "affirmation treatment". It is heartbreaking, if it wasn't insane and evil.

This document was extremely biased and unscientific. Conveniently expanding the definition of child to include everyone up to age 25, and disregarding the vast majority, over 95% of the respondent data in order to reach a pre-established notion, something that goes against the credibility of a study heavily and does not fit the scientific method.

The document is being used for political control purposes, not actual concern. It is also notably vague on the stance of conversion therapy, even platforming a voice implying that the law should not put obstacles in the way of forcing such conversion on children.

The document, for some reason, can't seem to actually credit any transgender voices on the matter that it apparently sought out experienced data from, showing a heavily one sided bias in the selection.

If it was actually conducted out of concern and wellbeing, there'd be far more effort to actually seek out high quality and well adjusted responses, and not go in with the conclusion already decided, and evidence attempted to be tailored around it.

I need to know as well, what is your source for the supposedly low mental health struggles and suicide rates of unsupported trans teens and adults? It seems to conflict with a vast amount of credible studies conducted on large samples of the demographic itself in various parts of the world, that shows that they are concerningly much higher than average, and that trans affirming care, including not HRT but puberty blockers for children, massively reduces it. That the detransition rate is significantly lower than that of just about every other surgery, and several detransitioners have stated that they did so specifically out of fear and pressure from the stigma against being trans.

We're calling you a transphobe, because you are putting out misinformation that harms trans people. It fits the definition.

I hope this is the start of reason being injected into this insanity.

You say that America is an outlier but you rarely mention why. Medicine is an industrial complex in the US. Doctors and surgeons should not be getting wealthy by creating lifelong medical patients from previously healthy children. Extreme capitalism is to blame for that.

This is merely the start..Don’t forget that Men are STILL co opting Women’s spaces

Truth always...eventually.. pierces through fraud.

if not immediately, eventually...

Keep shining the light!
☀️

♀️✊

Is it just me or it shouldn't take 4 years of in-depth research instead of — oh I don't know, 4 seconds of basic reflection — for anyone to figure out that operating on physically healthy people and/or putting them on strong medication is... (shocker!) not good.

Russell's teapot was not chocolate. You're mixing elements of two thought experiments.

The work of Hillary Cass will have impact across the world. I’ve seen crazy people in America saying it’s a politically motivated attack on trans people when it’s nothing of the sort. It simply concludes that irreversible medical intervention in the lives of young people without any body of evidence to support it is inappropriate. This report is a landmark analysis of this topic.

It's completely untrue to say that rigorous scientific studies aren't possible in circumstances where Randomized Controlled Trials would be impractical and / or unethical. High quality observational studies such as cohort studies and case-control studies with adequate follow-up periods and valid measures of the variables of interest can be a valuable source of data. Natural experiments or quasi-experiments where an intervention group and a control group with reasonably similar demographic and clinical characteristics were effectively created by decisions or circumstances beyond the researchers' control - such as government policy decisions that applied to some people but not others, or natural events that affected some people but not others - can also be very useful.

Gender health care for children and adolescents is probably the most politically polarized and the most emotionally charged area of health care today - even more so than abortion and voluntary assisted dying. It seems to me that our societies could be doing so much more to normalize a wider range of gender expression. People who are nominally on the progressive side of the gender health care issue pay lip service to the idea that there are many ways of being a boy or a man, and many ways of being a girl or a woman, but it appears as though gender transition is sometimes framed as the default response to children and adolescents who question their gender. In reality it is just one option among many others, such as providing psychosocial support and psychological therapeutic support to explore what gender can mean, to foster a healthy sense of self, to address bullying and social exclusion, to build belonging and a sense of purpose, to improve communication and relationships with parents, siblings, and peers, to treat trauma and stressor-related disorders, neurodevelopmental disorders, anxiety disorders, mood disorders. We should also be using popular culture, the mainstream media, and the education system to increase societal acceptance of unconventional forms of gender expression.

I think that psychiatrists, paediatricians, and endocrinologists should have the option of prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children and adolescents when they think it is clinically indicated. The clinical practice guidelines probably need to be tightened up so that psychosocial and psychological supports are prioritized, and medical transition is only used when those other supports aren't working to alleviate the person's distress. That would require increased federal government spending on psychosocial and psychological supports, which are currently under-funded not only in cases of gender-questioning children and adolescents but across the health care and disability systems in general. It seems to me that some areas of health care are overly medicalized because it is perceived as cheaper and simpler to prescribe medications than to provide psychosocial and psychological support, to guarantee people good quality housing, to guarantee people good quality education from early childhood to university, to guarantee people paid work, and to guarantee income support that is above the Henderson Report poverty line (currently about $90 per day for a single person in Australia) to people who need it.

The medical ethics of providing a medical gender transition to a child or an adolescent are complex. A minor by definition does not have the autonomy and the decision-making capacity of an adult. The extent to which a child can give genuine informed consent to far-reaching medical interventions that don't have a strong evidence base and that have significant side effects is questionable. It probably should be an option that's available in some cases but presenting it as the standard response to a child or adolescent who is questioning their gender makes no sense and is not a progressive perspective on this issue.

I think it's very disturbing that scientific research in this area of health care doesn't have the freedom to question the merits of medical gender transition as a therapeutic response to gender-related distress. Scientific research is supposed to be about the pursuit of truth. It isn't supposed to reinforce or signal a set of political commitments. Practitioners who don't like the studies that question medical transition as a treatment and that favour psychosocial and psychological interventions should critique the research methodology on scientific grounds. They should do their own, more rigorous scientific studies. They shouldn't try to stifle other researchers' work. They shouldn't equate questioning medical transition as an intervention with being transphobic or bigoted.

I’m sorry but if young children/people are being given chemical and surgical procedures and are being lied to about medical complications and in effect are being sterilised and castrated, why is there no clear evidence of this???? There needs to be follow-ups of every single child/adult that has had ‘trans’ treatment and disclosure of all physical and mental issues following the treatments. Total access to their medical records if the nhs has done this. It’s disgraceful abuse of children and vulnerable adults. Neither can give proper consent for these really dreadful treatments.

“Cis-Hetero normative” needs to be reframed as what it really is: “unmedicalised-normative”. There should be nothing wrong with a basic position that says, all else being equal, that NOT being burdened with life-long medicalisation and all the health complications that come with it, is better than it’s opposite. Which means you need to demonstrate why such medicalisation is absolutely necessary, beyond a reasonable doubt. The data that Cass has collated shows that the latter simply hasn’t happened.

If you are going to comment on something at least have the integrity of actually reading it. What a fake.