The US Needs a Cass Review of Its Own

A piece in today's Boston Globe

Photo by Braňo on Unsplash

Just this morning, I was lamenting on Twitter that the Cass Review wasn’t front page news in America. If the conclusions of the four years of research had been “gender medicine for kids is evidence-based and life-saving,” everyone would have covered it.

There were decent articles in The New York Times (clearly 90% of it had been written before, with opponents lined up to quash it before the Review’s publication) and in The Washington Post. But mostly regular old folks still don’t know about it. I suggest the main reason for that is the confirmation bias of the news media and the fear of repercussions for telling the truth. (Also, they keep talking about trans kids, but they mean kids with gender distress, since many of the kids referenced hadn’t transitioned. But I’ll tend to that another day.)

But thank heavens for The Boston Globe, which has been the one lefty publication willing to go heterodox on this subject. They put my piece up today. (If you’re reading on a computer, you should be able to click the X on the upper left and the window will go away.)

The toxicity of the culture war over youth gender medicine is well known to most of us. What’s less well understood is how that poisonous climate affects the very cohort being argued about — and those who care for them.

An exhaustive, level-headed 388-page report, commissioned by the National Health Service in England and released last week, warns: “Polarisation and stifling of debate do nothing to help the young people caught in the middle of a stormy social discourse.”

I’ve been talking for years about getting all the data. We know so little about those who have transitioned, medically or socially, and those who have desisted or detransitioned. We need a Cass Review!

Of course, for that, we also need a Cass. And that’s the biggest problem. One of the consistent ways I shock people is by telling them: “Republicans have the science right”—whether you like what they’re doing with it or not. The people I say this to immediately see me as a conservative in liberal’s clothing, because bipartisanship is a dirty word and communing with Republicans is treason, rather than the solution to the polarization that has allowed youth gender medicine to get so out of hand. They think it means I’m voting for Trump. I am not. I want a less polarized, fairer society. Gathering the data for our own version of the Cass Review is one thing we could do to get there.

Please read and comment and thank the Boston Globe Opinion section for being braver than many of the other liberal papers.