Cass Speaks at Secretive Conference

The most righteous causes are, as we all know, championed behind closed doors, where your victims opponents can’t argue in defense of their position or enlighten you with their lived experiences and point of view. Democracy may die in darkness, but clearly free speech thrives when the only people who can hear you are… the people who already agree with you.

That’s what Hilary Cass, author of the vile and useless Cass Report, seems to think anyway. We mentioned in our piece about an interview Cass gave last week that she was in the Netherlands primarily to speak at a conference at the Vrije Universiteit. Details on the conference were somewhat sparse, and it was not officially recorded… but fortunately, a very courageous soul took it upon themselves to record the conference and publish their recordings publicly.

Our hats off to you, Transsexual Menace.

So, what exactly did Cass say when she took the stage? Predictably, a lot of nonsense. Let’s go through it together, as a team, so that we can share in our suffering!

Right off the bat, Cass opens her presentation by lamenting that she was just on the cusp of a luxurious retirement from pediatric medicine… when she “made the mistake of picking up the telephone to one of the senior people in NHS England.” Her retirement is now, she says, “kind of crashed.”

The big timer affixed above my desk says I can’t talk about Riley Gaines for another twelve days, nine hours and sixteen minutes as of writing this, but if you don’t tell powerful cisgender magnate Evan Urquhart, I won’t either. You know what this reminds me of? Gaines’ constant griping about how she had big plans to go to dental school… until the transgender menace forced her to take a bunch of high paying positions and speaking gigs as a professional transphobe!

Okay. That’s out of my system. Thanks for keeping it between us.

Cass then claims the purpose of her review was to examine “how we look after children and young people who come to the NHS with concerns about their gender identity,” but considering the good doctor has spent a lot of her time saying out of pocket things like that pornography might make you trans, and admitting that she had no prior experience with trans youth care, it seems like sort of a disingenuous take on the goal of her work.

The more than 380 page review seemed fairly unconcerned with how the NHS actually “looked after” these children and young people, seeing as the portion of the review that looked at this was buried in Appendix 8. It starts on page 329 of the document, in case you’d like to take a look yourself!

Cass insists that her work wasn’t about “undermining the validity of trans identities,” but how could that possibly be the case when her review is directly responsible for the shuttering of the Gender Identity Development Service clinic? Later in her presentation, Cass says that her team conducted an independent audit of GIDS’ endocrinologist referral rates. They determined that only 27% of patients were referred to endocrinologists, and that 82% of those referred received puberty blockers. I’m no expert, but I fail to see how stats like those point to any sort of expedient medicalization pipeline that might put kids at risk. I guess that’s why you might bury that part in Appendix 8 of your totally objective, definitely apolitical document.

Cass also talks about how her review found “high rates of adverse childhood experiences” in trans youth, though she only defines these adverse experiences as “high rates of trauma and family stressors, and a range of mental health issues.” It’s unclear whether or not she intends to link mental health and neurodivergency to trans or gender diverse, but is it any wonder these kids have a higher incidence rate of childhood trauma when they can’t get the meds they need, their government hates them, and they’re constantly at risk of extreme violence or death because of the culture of transphobic hate people like Cass have helped stoke?

Of trans youth and their justifiable anxieties, Cass said, “Participation in everyday life is very important, because if you are in a state of anxious anxiety that is not a good time to make any decisions.” But how can these kids be expected to blithely go about the business of growing up when so many people want to hurt them? If they are in a state of anxious anxiety, is that not the perfect time to pursue solutions to that anxiety?

Which, of course, they can no longer do. Thanks to Dr. Hilary Cass.

Near the end of her talk, Cass says that some of the young trans adults she and her team supposedly spoke to said two things: First, that they wish they had known when they were younger that “there was more ways of being trans than a binary medical transition,” and second, that the advice they would give to their younger selves would be “don’t rush.”

That simply isn’t true. How do we know? Because the results of focus groups conducted with trans youth and young adults who had previously accessed the GIDS service were published on the Review’s website! For most of those young people, their major concerns with the service weren’t about non-medical transition or unnecessarily rushing. They expressed frustration with lengthy wait times, having too many hoops to jump through, and being afraid to be honest with providers because they worried that saying the “wrong” thing might lose them access to the care they desperately needed.

As usual, Cass spouted a bunch of uninformed conjecture and outright mistruths to a crowd of people primed to eat it up. I’m just glad we had a chance to give it a listen so we know how full of shit she is.

Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer who spends too much time playing video games!