The Women and Equalities Select Committee held a session this week on the “Evidence base of the safety and effectiveness of puberty blockers’.
As Hannah Barnes writes, this seemed strange given the recent four-year review into youth gender services that looked at that very question. Surely, therefore, you’d call the person who led that process, Dr Hilary Cass, as a witness? Apparently not.
Or a member of the team from the University of York who carried out the independent, peer-reviewed study of the evidence base for the use of puberty blockers to treat gender-related distress? None of them were invited either.
Sarah Owen, the committee’s Labour chair, chose to hear from the former clinical director of the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids, the Tavistock children’s service roundly criticised and closed down as a consequence of the Cass Review); a professor in bioethics who has argued for close to two decades that it is unethical to deny children treatment with puberty blockers; and an emeritus professor of endocrinology who has never worked with gender-distressed children, nor contributed to the research in this area.
That the committee would try to better in two hours what the Cass Review spent four years carefully investigating is incomprehensible. As Barnes concludes, the only thing the committee has succeeded in is creating the impression that it seeks to undermine the Cass Review.