Hilary Cass sent a document to every single MP and Peer, justifying and defending the puberty blockers trial

Worst of all there will be all sorts of omissions in what they look for such as what @AmaryllisNightAndDay was referring to, and most likely the long term will not be followed through for long enough.

We should really document all the excuses they will make to extend and increase the numbers.

I think she's become a little too accustomed to people lauding her as wonderful and amazing and so believes she can do no wrong. She's been positioned as the leading expert on the issue of gender distressed children and that's given her a lot of power. Anyone dissenting to any of her recommendations is simply an enemy that must be defeated; she doesn't care to engage with the arguments and see if they have any merit.

Her demeanour and public statements on this issue have changed over the last number of years. She used to quote evidence/studies and speak in unemotive/impartial terms. Now, she's making impassioned speeches in HoL and telling people to believe her based on her personal reputation and the backstory of a fictional child.

Who got to her, and how?

Someone higher up the thread** suggested that there is evidence she has always been an ideologue.

**Aha - it was @BettyBooper, who said:

BettyBooper · 11/07/2026 10:56

Cass was personally pushing for a PB trial two years before her report was published. She did not admit that until a couple of months ago. It certainly wasn't explicit in the report.

She is literally behind the entire thing. This is her idea and her baby.

Imho she's been a true believer all along and twisted the science in the report to recommend a PB trial she wanted. Nothing in the report actually supports it.

Oh, so she has merely stopped bothering to pretend to unbiased reasoning based on the science of the matter? Makes sense, I suppose. But she did do the pretending for quite a long time.

I'm not entirely sure she hid it. I remember during the release of the report, hearing her speak in interviews, she did seem to believe in the concept of 'true trans' especially for people showing signs of distress in early childhood. And the report made no attempt to genuinely interrogate the concept of gender dysphoria in any serious way, it more or less stated that it exists and needs to be treated medically in some fashion.

Yes, but for how long before she was selected to be in charge of this review had she been saying protrans-slanted things? I don't know enough about her to be able to say for sure. It may be that at some point whilst the review was in process, she was faced with what seemed to her very persuasive evidence for the existence of gender dysphoria (as opposed to any other sort of dysphoria some people certainly do feel), but we don't know what that might have been.

I’ve posted this on a couple of other threads, but not on here, so will add here too:

This is a post on X from a developmental psychologist who spoke to Cass before the report came out:

https://nitter.net/wontsomeonethi2/status/2069800467811459454

Before the Cass Review was published, I had the opportunity to talk to Dr Cass about my research. I outlined how young children think that putting on a dress turns a boy into a girl and the relevance of this to younger children who think they have changed sex.

I have not mentioned this before publicly but I feel it is time to do so. She listened to what I had to say and appeared to understand the implications for younger children who identify as transgender (I'm using "identify as" as a placeholder here because the concept of internal identity in younger children is very problematic).

Dr Cass said "oh, that's interesting, I thought those cases were "safe", where they say they are trans very young" [I paraphrase but she definitely used the word "safe"]

She knows there's no magic internal feeling in young children who think they are the opposite sex. I've told her and she's heard it and acknowledged it might not be right to go ahead with social or medical transition in these cases. SHE KNOWS. I have no idea why she's doubling down on this. No idea.

Ah that is so interesting. Katie Alcock's research and articles she has written have been very important to me in trying to persuade of the error of social transition of young children when the subject arose in my work years ago.

I submitted written evidence to the Cass review about social transitioning, abetted by schools - knowing that was strictly speaking outside the remit of the Cass review but also wanting them to understand how a child gets locked on to a belief and therefore potentially a pathway. Just the sort of child who will now been even more sure that PBs are the answer as the 'wrong' puberty rushed towards them.

There were probably many who write to her about social transitioning, about what's going on in schools.

It is so disappointing.

Edited to take out info that's too identifying

Just to say, pre-edit posts can still be seen on MN - if you want it gone-gone you will need to ask MNHQ to delete it (and then re-post without the info/edits)…

I think what I was wondering was what changed her from what was to all intents and appearances a very reasonable and competent paediatrician in one field and another, with a career that had gone well and no apparent axe to grind on this one subject, into someone who seems to be feeling it personally and proselytising somewhat. My experience has been that there's usually a reason for such a change, so I wondered what it had been.

This is the bit I can never get over, (and sorry - I know this has been said repeatedly).
That otherwise intelligent adults can seriously believe that toddlers and little children think they're really the opposite sex and should be treated as if this fantasy is true, Despite all the evidence about how creative play, imagination, role play and fantasy is how young children explore and make sense of the world.

The fact that these people take the word of disordered adults, mostly male and many with a range of paraphilias, adds to the disbelief - and danger to children.

Remember the Orkney scandal in which a lot of children were taken away from their families in dawn raids and held with none of their familiar toys or clothes, and pumped for evidence their parents had been sexually abusing them?

One of the bits of "evidence" was one of the children telling them about a man in a black cloak and his nasty turtles. The black-cloaked man was eventually established to have been the local priest, but the turtles might be harder to explain if you didn't happen to know that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was a TV programme at the time and very popular with children roughly that age. The child-experts involved seem not to have been aware of that phenomenon and invented all sorts of convoluted ways to explain why turtles, since they are not found in the Orkneys and however would the child have known they existed? obviously some perverse adult must have been involved....

And all these twerps seem to think that children never lie! They can't have had children in their non-professional lives or met them in non-clinical settings, is all I can say: children exercise their imaginations (which is what that sort of lying amounts to) all the time! "Mummy, when I was on holiday in Spain with Aunt Jane" and a farrago of wonderful nonsense, when Aunt Jane and the child have never gone to Spain at the same time as each other, is quite as normal as an imaginary playmate, and goodness only knows what the child-experts make of those. (And I think I don't want to. I will stick to Binker, brave as elephants and never never cries except like other people when the soap gets in his eyes, and the half-dozen sheep one or another of whom used to accompany me everywhere, invisibly and mostly silently, during the two or three years before I went to school.)