[Tubby Isaacs]

Nothing's settled, but Streeting's ban was based on a report from the Commission of Human Medicine. As I understand it, this is a separate process from the Cass Review.

I take your point that it wasn't just the one side that wouldn't compromise.

The criticism of Corbyn in there may have been unfair. He got a bit of stick for stating very clearly his support for single sex spaces in accordance with the Equality Act. Obviously, he was keen to be seen to be on the right side, but one thing I think he'd have been good at is listening patiently to both sides.

[Crabcakes]

Nothing's settled, but Streeting's ban was based on a report from the Commission of Human Medicine. As I understand it, this is a separate process from the Cass Review.

Fair point. The report was separate, but came after the Cass review publication. So given the timing I suspect it factored into Streeting’s decision (in fact, given the context it would be bizarre if it didn’t), but as you say wasn’t a direct cause.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Quite possibly, but has anybody even resigned from the CMH (I don't want to sound like I know much about them, I'm looking all this up now)? That's a lot of very senior doctors across lots of disciplines. Wouldn't we expect at least one of them to walk out if the report was a load of bollocks just based on a rogue report by Cass?

https://www.gov.uk/government/organisat ... membership

What we might call the medical "establishment" doesn't exactly seem to be unhappy to be rid of puberty blocker prescription. I'm wary of calling out the "medical establishment" for obvious reasons.

[Crabcakes]

I wouldn’t expect anyone to resign, to be honest. The Cass report does a lot of people a lot of favours - it sets out a route to be followed and can be used to justify decisions on that route. Having worked in healthcare for 30-odd years now, and the last decade in evidence-based guidance, I know first hand it can take a long while for consensus to shift even if (increasing) evidence is against it. When it solves problems for people without being outright “wrong”, that shift can be even slower - look how long it took to reverse the stance on treating ME as a primarily psychological condition. And similarly, this lack of progress came about in part because the affected population were largely excluded from being involved with policy decisions about their own care for far too long a time.

That said, I’m not expecting anything explosive like vaccines and autism with Wakefield - there is no suggestion of outright fraud. What I do think will happen is that there will be a continuing questioning of some of the findings and recommendations, other reports that include more direct input from the affected communities and better methodologies will come to contradictory conclusions, and eventually it’ll be superseded. It’s just not good enough - it’s not rigorous enough in places (for example, one section warning about impaired brain development from gender-affirming medical treatment comes from a single speculative study involving female mice), and it’s also been assessed independently as being at risk of bias in many domains: https://bmcmedresmethodol.biomedcentral ... 25-02581-7

Ultimately, trans people and trans youth deserve better, and they’re being let down by people in positions of authority who don’t want to make difficult decisions and media who just want one word answers to “define a woman” type questions.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Even if it were purely about convenience, I think we could expect to see a lot more senior doctor opposition to the ban, both inside and outside this committee. The choice of Cass could certainly be seen as a fix, but it's not like Victoria Atkins or Streeting chucked a load of people off the committee and put a load of placemen on it. I'm happy to take the advice as good faith. I don't think even Streeting is saying the science is settled, though as you say, that Private Eye article talks like it is.