Letter from academics concerned about the Cass Review

[MidsomerMurmurs]

Sally Hines et al have written a letter…
https://uncommon-scents.blogspot.com/2024/04/letter-from-academics-concerned-about.html?m=1

Worth a read, both for the quality of its argument and for the list of signatories.

https://twitter.com/lecanardnoir/status/1779535066944634919
When your letter against the Cass Review is signed by Andrew Wakefield, then some alarm bells ought to go off that you are on the wrong side

They might as well have written it in crayon. The nerve of these people

Andrew Wakefields name seems to have disappeared -was probably a wind up

So a grand total of 97 people vaguely connected with universities in the whole world don’t like the Cass Report. How underwhelming.

I googled a random sample of those 97 names, and found a PhD student, a lecturer in tourist behaviour, someone who can’t even spell the name of their university and quite a lot of men in woman-face.

Where is Andrew Wakefield on the list?
TBH I disagree with the logic, I don’t really care if one particularly shonky person is on the list. What I find more interesting is how few and how insignificant the signatories are, as well as how irrelevant their fields are. It hasn’t really got much traction. Most people have more sense than to make idiots of themselves by pretending expertise on a kind of research that they don’t actually know anything about merely on the basis of their being academics.

"As academics with decades of research experience between us"

But in what? I googled a few names at random and discovered a couple of sociologists, and "educational specialist" (whatever that means), a historian, a computer scientist.

I get that they don't like the conclusions reached but the response is embarrassing.

Wakefield was on it last night and when I looks this morning and yes, it was possibly a wind-up but also signatories were by invitation or vetted: it wasn’t something where people could instantly sign and appear online.
https://twitter.com/lecanardnoir/status/1779547330372338152

Ha ha, what a surprise - not!

Yes, of course. Lucy Hunter Blackburn makes that point too:

https://twitter.com/LucyHunterB/status/1779541868952351165
"Its methodology is shoddy in the extreme and it is clearly biased throughout" say people asserting their exceptional personal qualification to critique a medical study from a background in... [these are the first four people I picked randomly]

Last few pages of this thread has already been having fun picking through the signatories:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womensrights/5026968-no-more-puberty-blockers-for-children-from-the-nhs-reported-in-the-times?page=33

One person did have a vaguely-related discipline - evading "sadistic commands communicated in adverts, TV programmes and magazine articles; a fetishistic gaze that dissects the body into parts to be improved through commodification".

But apparently totally unable to apply that critique in this case...

95, as at least 2 people are on the list twice.

See posts on this thread from page 33 about some of the signatories. I've posted all the ones I've searched for - I havent been selective for effect.

It's off the scale batshittery. For the most part entertaining but one or two are actively worrying.

Is that because they used male and female names or because whoever compiled the list, couldn't do it properly despite their academic credentials?

No, 3 and 49, and 14 and 45, are exactly the same names.

Presumably the letter came back around and they forgot, and didn't check, they'd already signed. And the writer/editor failed to check.

Maybe they should improve they methodology when compiling a protest letter.

Maybe they could, I dunno, use alphabetical order.

I think my favourite signatory was the one whose subject area is in “the politics of music in public spaces and the workplace”.

For those of you on Xitter, this analytic takedown by Benjamin Ryan of the complaints about Cass is worth a read.
https://twitter.com/benryanwriter/status/1779003988647494097#

TLDR: they haven't read the report properly and they are talking rubbish

What I can’t understand (but I suppose is probably explained by the fact many of the supporters and signatories have skin in the game) is how prepared they are to just dismiss any/ all concerns for children’s well-being. Even if you support gender ideology, surely a report like this and the fact everyone’s talking about it should mean that you consider your position and the evidence. And instead of statements which essentially amount to ‘we don’t like it’ from people with unrelated qualifications, shouldn’t there be some focus on why a report like this has been produced and what its findings may mean?

I just can’t get my head around the ‘we care about children so we’re dismissing this out of hand’ approach.

Or in order of their academic department’s REF ranking. If that’s what it’s still called (research evaluation framework).

Or their institution’s ranking in one of the many annual evaluation exercises designed to help parents understand if their child is going to be landed with £60k+ of debt at an absolute dud of an institution.

Was that the one whose conclusions (from the above quoted research) was about how to take selfies better?

First name on the list is familiar ...sorry don't know if it's possible to get sharetoken for an old piece

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/trans-goldsmiths-lecturer-natacha-kennedy-behind-smear-campaign-against-academics-f2zqbl222

How has Sally Hines become an academic?
Apart from the astounding disinformation, it's so poorly written.
Too many gins perhaps, as per her status quo?

Trans Goldsmiths lecturer Natacha Kennedy behind smear campaign against academics

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/eb941d92-b2ec-11e8-8fb1-ac438dd6af00?shareToken=7d7476010262063807ca2a795c5e380a

As academics and experts in the field, we regard The Cass Review as potentially harmful to trans children

Experts in the field

They moan about how the horrid Cass person used 'the impossibly high bar of a double-blind trial'. I can't be sure without going and looking it up, but I'm pretty sure that Cochrane reviews chuck out anything that isn't double-blind.

In any case, it's not an 'impossibly high bar'. Double blind trials are standard when bringing new drugs to market.

Plus, Grace Lavery has signed it. I'm not forgetting GL's miscarriage comment in a hurry.

So there’s even an objective tool to measure the quality of studies, if I’m interpreting the Newcastle-Ottawa scale correctly. And the Cass review used that tool in their determination of which studies should me used in their overall analysis. That’s fairly strong proof that they didn’t cherry pick which studies they liked.