In The Wizard of Oz, after Dorothy's house crushes the oppressive Wicked Witch of the East, the locals of Munchkin-land celebrate by singing:
“Ding dong, the witch is dead!”
That classic line came to mind in April upon release of The Cass Review, which laid bare the dubious basis for prescribing puberty blockers and cross-gender hormones to children. Dr. Cass’ report landed hard on the heels of the explosive WPATH Files, which exposed gender clinicians’ rampant misgivings regarding the ability of children and adolescents to grasp the long-term consequences of those treatments.
Surely, I thought, this will finally crush the rotten edifice of transgender ideology. How could it possibly survive?
Yet survive it has, at least in North America.
In Europe, the Cass Review served to vindicate the newly cautious approach taken in recent years by a number of countries, with Germany the latest to pump the brakes: the 128th German Medical Assembly resolved in May to restrict puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries for gender-dysphoric youth under age 18, and to limit self-ID laws to those over age 18.
By contrast, the American Academy of Pediatrics declared that the “gender affirming care” model remains “grounded in evidence and science” — despite the fact that Dr. Cass had just revealed the so-called “evidence” to be essentially non-existent.
The American Endocrine Society was similarly unyielding:
“We stand firm in our support of gender affirming care… NHS England’s recent report, the Cass Review, does not contain any new research that would contradict the recommendations made in our Clinical Practice Guideline on gender affirming care…. Banning evidence-based medical care based on misinformation takes away the ability of parents and patients to make informed decisions.”
If there was “evidence-based medical care” to ban, they might have had a point. But there isn’t any.
You may remember these lines from a charming children’s poem by Dennis Lee:
An Ookpik is nothing but hair
If you shave him, he isn’t there
After four years of painstakingly plucking away at the façade surrounding the pediatric transgender craze and searching in vain for evidence to support its tenets, that’s what Dr. Cass concluded: it just isn’t there.
But trans ideology isn’t a cute, big-eyed, fluffy owl: it’s a malignant witch, and it’s preying on our children.
Yet the AAP and the AES, refusing to acknowledge that reality, are doing the equivalent of closing their eyes, putting their fingers in their ears and shouting “Nah, nah, nah, nah”.
In an interview with The New York Times, Dr. Cass had this to say about the American response to her work:
“It wouldn’t be too much of a problem if people were saying ‘This is clinical consensus and we’re not sure.’ But what some organizations are doing is doubling down on saying the evidence is good. And I think that’s where you’re misleading the public. You need to be honest about the strength of the evidence and say what you’re going to do to improve it.”
At least American media gave Dr. Cass somewhat of a hearing. Contrast that to Canada, where Canada’s flagship newspaper, The Globe and Mail, ignored her devastating report entirely for more than two weeks before Robyn Urback mentioned it briefly in a single column.
The CBC weighed in, but only to the negative, employing pediatricians Sam Wong and Tehseen Lahda and family doctor Jake Donaldson to smear Dr. Cass’ investigation.
Apart from readers of The National Post or The Epoch Times, consumers of Canadian news content can be forgiven for being completely unaware of The Cass Review. The report isn’t just fading from view — for Canadians it never really came into view.
I recently read a paper in The Archives of Sexual Behavior which examined puberty blockers via the lens of “open futures”. “Open futures” is an ethical construct which speaks to the reality that children don’t yet have the capacity to properly exercise their rights, and that therefore those rights must be carefully protected so they can be exercised in the future. The authors concluded that delaying "medical transition until the child has had the chance to grow and mature into an autonomous adult would be most consistent with the open future principle."
The paper made me think of one of the shortest stories ever written, a six-word micro-fiction masterpiece purportedly created by Ernest Hemingway:
For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.
The reader is left to fill in the gaps, to contemplate the raw circumstances underpinning those words: A life not lived? A life cut impossibly short?
That short narrative speaks perfectly to the carnage visited upon thousands of children by the fiction of gender fluidity: we’re interfering with the pathway of normal physiology; we’re cutting off access to normal and healthy lives; we’re sentencing kids to unending medical misery, and we’re stealing their right to an open future.
This is what Canadian doctors, by their complicity, and Canadian media, by their silence, are enabling.
Enough. It’s time to kill the witch.
In the absence of a national health care system in Canada and in the USA, we are left with far too many autonomous health care organizations making their own flawed and politically motivated decisions, none of them really taking the time to look at the evidence and implications.
As with Covid, it's become a situation where every organization looks at what their neighbor is doing and then does the same, or perhaps a bit more (not wishing to look like a laggard).
A few brave political souls, like Danielle Smith and Blain Higgs, have said "enough is enough". Sadly, very few, if any, doctors in significant leadership positions are willing to take the risk.
Our country is a genuine trouble, when so many institutions have become politicalized and ideologically captured.