Dr. Hilary Cass Is Not Your Personal Army

An object lesson in activism versus science

The final Cass Review landed last week and no one in gender critical spaces has been able to talk about anything else since then. After an extensive review of all the available literature, the team of clinical experts from York University found “a lack of high-quality evidence” that pediatric transition is safe or improves mental health. They also “recommend an extremely cautious clinical approach and a strong clinical rationale for providing hormones before the age of 18,” a sentence that will probably put the British National Health Service out of the pediatric transition business altogether.

Reactions to the Cass Review ran the gamut. At one end of the opinion spectrum, transgender activists who needed the ‘trans kids’ to justify their demands on society reacted with utter denialism, feigning indignation that Dr. Cass and the York University team had not accepted all their favorite low- and middling-quality studies at face value. These same activists were horrified to see Stonewall …