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LGBTQIA+ Issues and Relationship Discussion
The Cass Review Final Report
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Anonymous
Warmth, empathy and understanding should not be in the same sentence as medicine and science. |
Anonymous
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Well, the above-discussed link between antivaxxers and proponents of medicalized care for gender dysphoria in children is now explicit. Dr. Andrew Wakefield has signed on to this letter criticizing the Cass Review, which appears to be genuine (shocking, given how transparently awful the writing and data analysis is in the letter):
http://uncommon-scents.blogspot.com/2024/04/letter-from-academics-concerned-about.html It appears the fraudulent doctor had found a new and different group of vulnerable children to harm. I think anyone with a modicum of ethics would conclude that if Dr. Wakefield is on your side, perhaps you need to reevaluate. But I suspect that is not what is going to happen. |
Anonymous
I’d rather have Trump on my side. Wakefield is the worst of the worst when it comes to science and medicine. |
Anonymous
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Andrew Wakefield is not a doctor, so his "medical" opinion is irrelevant one way or the other.
The fact remains that Cass downgraded studies with the flimsy justification that children were provided "unblinded" medical care while receiving care. http://uncommon-scents.blogspot.com/?m=1 |
Anonymous
This dehumanization of people is exactly the problem. |
Anonymous
Don’t defend the analysis in that letter if you want people to think you have even the most basic understanding of data analysis and medical studies. It’s embarrassingly bad. I mean, there is a reason that quackery is endorsed by the King of Quacks. |
Anonymous
They’re not wrong: As academics with decades of research experience between us we can confidently say that The Cass Review would fail if it were submitted as an undergraduate dissertation. Its methodology is shoddy in the extreme and it is clearly biased throughout. It does not include a proper systematic literature review or material published in any language other than English as well as excluding most research evidence because it fails to reach the impossibly high bar of a double-blind trial. In fact trans healthcare is inappropriate for a double-blind trial; if you give hormones to one group of people and not to another, they will very quickly notice. It would also be completely unethical and in fact most medicine is not based on this kind of evidence anyway. In contrast The Cass Review provides very little evidence for the proposals it comes up with, and much of that 'evidence' is anecdotal. In effect the Cass proposals are largely un-evidenced and seem to be based on anti-trans rhetoric rather than science. The failure to systematically include trans peoples’ voices while liberally presenting anti-trans campaigners’ rhetoric - including those accused of supporting ‘conversion therapy’ - reveals a level of bias that is unacceptable in something as important as this. We regard The Cass Review as methodologically unsound, biased in the extreme (despite its reasonable-sounding language), dangerous, and rights-stripping in its proposals. If implemented it will cause great harm to trans and non-binary young people. This report should be scrapped, trans children deserve so much better than this. |
Anonymous
Which part was wrong? |
Anonymous
the part where they completely misunderstand that the studies were ranked based on quality; not ideology. if they think specific studies are stronger than they were represented, they should specifically say why. instead they just come up with a vapid, tweetable conclusion: “the Cass Report is biased! It screened out all the pro-medical-transition studies!” |
Anonymous
Oh, man, where to start? To do a full analysis would be a post that is too long for DCUM. So let’s just pick one idiotic sentence from the letter to start with: It does not include a proper systematic literature review or material published in any language other than English as well as excluding most research evidence because it fails to reach the impossibly high bar of a double-blind trial. Dispensing with the easy nonsense first: The claim about the lack of reviews from languages other than English is just stupid and betrays a complete lack of understanding of how meta-analysis of this type works. English is, right now, the global language of medical research. It is standard practice to only look at literature reviews that are in English, because the vast majority of them are in English. But let’s take this claim at face value. Normally if you are claiming extensive non-English data is relevant to a medical literature review and meta-analysis, you would identify such sources and data. The problem the authors have is that relevant non-English data and literature does not actually exist in any statistically relevant manner. You don’t have to actually take my word for that: WPATH made that exact point themselves in Statement 2.4 of Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People, Version 8. (I have linked directly to the PDF below if you want to read it yourself.) WPATH noted that 96% of the research literature concerning transgender care is in English. So, the point about the English language is just dumb. It’s also incumbent on the letter writers to identify all that extensive non-English literature if they believe that literature would have changed the outcome of the Cass review, and of course they didn’t do that, because they can’t. Link below: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/26895269.2022.2100644 Second of all, the claim that the Cass review excludes literature because it doesn’t reach the standard of a double-blind trial is also clearly false. First, as reference, the actual review is linked here: https://cass.independent-review.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/CassReview_Final.pdf There were six systematic reviews referenced in the Cass report. These are listed in Table 1, page 53 of the PDF. You can actually look at the reviews yourself if you want. What these reviews do among other points is grade the quality of evidence available for the subject. That’s typical in meta-analysis, so much so that there is a general protocol for how studies are graded into one of four categories: high, moderate, low, very low. People who don’t understand this, like the letter writers and signatories, assume that studies that are not graded “high,” (which is based on neutral analytical factors) are not evaluated. That is simply not true, and was not true in the Cass review. This is already too long and I’m not going to go through every page, but as an example look at Section 14 of the report, which discusses puberty blockers. 14.19 talks about how the evidence was assessed for quality, and then the low quality evidence was excluded. But the moderate quality studies were indeed kept. This is just one example of how that sentence is transparently false. I could probably do this for every single line of that stupid letter if I wanted to waste the rest of my day on abject nonsense, but I have better things to do. |
Anonymous
If it's not YOUR kid, shut up. There are a lot of things I disagree with other parents about. It's not your business and ask yourself why you're so obsessed with this instead of the thousand other medical decisions parents make for and with their children. |
Anonymous
Our insurance did. It was not very difficult for a trans girl. Harder for trans men, but I've certainly heard of trans men who get pregnant. |
Anonymous
Children are taken from homes and sent into foster care for less. The bottom line is that children cannot consent to life altering surgery and drugs. |
Anonymous
What would it cause you to change your practice TO, exactly? |
Anonymous
DP. I’m invested in this topic because I’ve encountered other areas of mental health care for my child where advocates want to shout down research they don’t like. I find that tendency extremely worrying. Also, I think that more broadly the attempts to falsely claim “the science is settled” impacts many other areas that concern me. Basically, this is one part of the troubling social media driven cancel culture that has far too much power. If trans activists didn’t try to shut down views they dislike, we wouldn’t be here. |