Dr Hilary Cass has this week published the final report, following her independent review of gender identity services for children across the UK. The conclusions and recommendations in this final report are entirely consistent with those of her interim report, with a much more detailed review of the available scientific evidence now being provided. What she describes is an appalling medical scandal, whereby many vulnerable children were needlessly sterilised and worse, largely for idealogical reasons. This has been front page news for every major newspaper in the UK, with the first two sentences in The Times report providing a concise summary of the story:
“An entire field of medicine aimed at enabling children to change gender, has been built “on shaky foundations”, the chairwoman of an NHS review has concluded. Dr Hilary Cass found that there was no good evidence to support the global clinical practice of prescribing hormones to under-18s to halt puberty or transition to the opposite sex.”
Quote from The Times, April 10th 2024
Notwithstanding almost 400 pages of evidence to support the conclusions of this independent clinical review, the hostile response to The Cass Report from some quarters has been very predictable. The ideologues and cultists who required no real evidence in the first instance to support inflicting serious harms on vulnerable children, were not persuaded by incontrovertible evidence against their position. Inevitably, these same people will soon deny ever having promoted the positions they have used to denounce others as bigots and worse, but while they still maintain these positions it’s useful to record how they reacted to the mountains of evidence in The Cass Report.
In the video clip depicted above, the interpretation of The Cass Report provided is as follows:
“What we actually found out was that the waiting lists were too long, not that they were getting stuff too soon. That was nowhere in the report … The whistleblowing was not about children getting harmful prescriptions. It was that they were not getting this care … It wasn’t because they were getting drugs that they shouldn’t have had. It was because they weren’t getting access to these things … It wasn’t about prescribing stuff that wasn’t supposed to be prescribed, or prescribing it wrong. There was a long waiting list. That’s why they split it into two centres, to spread the load.”
Quotes from Deluded Cultists
These Deluded Cultists claim to have read the views of Dr Hilary Cass, and concluded that her main concern was that long waiting lists were preventing children from getting puberty blockers. Their interpretation of the recommendations in The Cass Report that were being implemented by the NHS, was that more clinics would be opened to spread the load, so that more children could be prescribed more puberty blockers.
In fact, the same people were then reminded that when they learned that the treatment pathway starting with puberty blockers would unnecessarily sterilise many vulnerable children, they reacted by stating that this was “not the end of the world” because “adoption is an option”. That is an absolutely monstrous position, which knowingly assents to inflicting appalling harms on children.
It might be expected that this situation would give any rational person pause for thought with respect to the ideology that they had been promoting. However, it is well understood that incontrovertible evidence against their position can make idealogues more likely to double down. In the present case, this Backfire Effect initially required the Deluded Cultists to believe that all of the referenced reports about the conclusions of The Cass Report, were deliberate lies about the actual conclusions that the independent review arrived at. The position of the Deluded Cultists was that only those who had reported Dr Cass as striving for more puberty blockers to be given to more children, had actually read the report properly.
It was pointed out that this would require not only all national media in the UK to be lying about The Cass Report, but also that each of those mutually competitive national media outlets had simultaneously invented the same false quotations from the report. Moreover, an audio clip of Dr Hilary Cass herself was provided wherein she had explained to the BBC that there was “no evidence” for the efficacy of puberty blockers in treating gender dysphoria. Consequently, the position that anyone disagreeing with the Deluded Cultist interpretation of The Cass Report was lying, was synonymous with the position that Dr Hilary Cass was lying about the conclusions of Dr Hilary Cass.
A rational person who imagined that this would be the point at which the cognitive dissonance would become too great for the Deluded Cultists to sustain, would unfortunately be suffering from a failure of imagination.
In response to references summarising the consistent reporting across the BBC, The Guardian, Sky News and many others about the Cass Report, we were told that this was “cherry-picking articles”. That is, where literally all of the UK media was quoting the same conclusions from the Cass Report, we were admonished that we should instead read “unbiased sourced”, and that a failure to find alternative conclusions demonstrated “transphobia and wilful scientific ignorance”.
In response to audio of Dr Hilary Cass describing her own conclusions as she wrote them in her own report, we were told that she “could be just flat out wrong” because the she did a short radio interview instead of “laying out a case that makes her point”. This seems to rather ignore the fact that the BBC radio interview was about the conclusions of publicly available report consisting of almost 400 pages, which reviewed all available scientific evidence.
It seems we have come to the point where presenting evidence to the Deluded Cultists has ceased to be useful. It won’t be long now until the same ideologues deny ever having uttered the words they streamed themselves shouting onto the Internet.