Dr Cass, a former president of the UK’s Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, participated in a panel live from the UK on Tuesday night, which was hosted by Australian psychiatrist Phillip Morris, the president of the National Association of Practising Psychiatrists, one of the first bodies to call for caution on experimental medical treatments and greater wholistic psychotherapy for young people with gender distress.
Dr Cass criticised the activist World Professional Association for Transgender Healthcare for essentially suppressing evidence that the standards of care it devised were not evidence-based and showed no proof of alleviating the distress of children.
These standards are followed by most of Australia’s major children’s hospitals that all frequently prescribe puberty blockers and hormone treatments to children and teenagers. Dr Cass noted in her independent report handed down in April that has been “highly influential in directing international practice, although its guidelines were found by the University of York’s appraisal to lack developmental rigour and transparency”. The Cass report included an appraisal by the University of York that analysed international gender affirmative care guidelines, including those of the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne. The review found its guidelines similarly lacked rigour and independence.
“The evidence base is weak … international guidelines have for the most part not followed standard evidence-based approaches,” Dr Cass told the Australian seminar. “And it has influenced most other international guidelines. There is a sort of echo chamber of sort of copying and pasting off each other. The only guidelines that have taken an independent and evidence based approach are the Swedish and the Finnish guidelines.”
All of Australia’s children’s hospitals including most of the country’s state health ministers have rejected the relevance of Dr Cass’s report to Australia for reasons that appear spurious given the fact that Dr Cass’s report examined gender affirming care models internationally, and that the deep research carried out by the independent review into puberty blockers is clearly relevant beyond the UK.
Source: Gender affirmative guidelines just an echo chamber: expert