ARTICLE – The Telegraph
MICHAEL SEARLES – 30 APRIL 2024 – THE TELEGRAPH
An NHS consultant at a transgender clinic has heavily criticised Dr Hilary Cass in the wake of her landmark report.
Dr Walter Pierre Bouman, a senior doctor at the Nottingham Centre for Transgender Health, said the paediatrician’s review into children’s transgender healthcare had been “poorly reasoned” and questioned her expertise.
He said there was “a fine line between naivety, narcissism and psychopathy” in a lengthy LinkedIn post.
Dr Cass, the former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, found there was a lack of evidence to support prescribing puberty blockers to children, warned against cross-sex hormones being given to under 18s, and urged caution in the treatment of all under 25s.
The NHS is now set to review all adult services amid the concerns raised by Dr Cass regarding the treatment of young people aged 18 to 25 at adult clinics, including in Nottingham.
Responding to a LinkedIn post by a lawyer, which claimed “judges have taken the wrong approach” in gender-critical cases and were “permitting the erosion of trans and non-binary people’s rights”, Dr Bouman thanked him for the article.
Dr Bouman, who is also an honorary professor at the University of Nottingham’s School of Medicine, said: “The judiciary in the UK has a tendency to overreach their remit – with devastating consequences for the lives of minority groups and their families in the UK and far beyond – as Hilary Cass has recently done with her poorly reasoned review.
Lack of evidence
“Hilary has never treated trans youth, nor is she a researcher of any significance, yet her ‘expert’ review provides supposedly ‘evidence-based’ recommendations,” he said.
The Cass review commissioned the University of York to undertake multiple pieces of research into existing literature, and the treatment and outcomes of patients, on its behalf.
An overarching theme of the review was a lack of evidence to support practices in the diagnosis and management of gender incongruence or gender dysphoria, where a person feels their gender does not align with their sex.
The Nottingham Centre for Transgender Healthcare was one of the six adult clinics that refused to participate in the independent review’s research and provide information to better understand what has happened to the around 9,000 children treated by the Tavistock’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), many of whom will now be patients at adult services.
All clinics have now agreed to take part in the research moving forward, according to NHS England.
Dr Bouman also criticised the judges involved in the Tavistock vs Bell case, who had initially ruled in favour of Keira Bell’s plea to ban puberty blockers for under 16s after she regretted taking them and detransitioned, before it was overturned by the Court of Appeal.
Dr Bouman said: “There is a fine line between naivety, narcissism, and psychopathy. I am hoping for a time that those in positions of power and influence develop a strict adequate ethical framework which provides evidence of their basic knowledge and (clinical/judicial) experience regarding the topic they provide judgment/treatment on/for.”
‘Embedding trans ideology’
Dr Bouman was formerly the president of the controversial World Professionals Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which critics claim had a “huge influence in embedding trans ideology in health care systems”, including the NHS.
Dr Cass was critical of WPATH in her report, saying that while it had been “highly influential in directing international practice”, its “guidelines were found by the University of York appraisal process to lack developmental rigour”.
Helen Joyce, director of advocacy at charity Sex Matters, said the comments about Dr Cass were “inaccurate and unacceptable coming from a senior clinician at an NHS-backed clinic”.
“Bouman is a past president of WPATH, the discredited global body pushing for ever-easier access to so-called ‘gender-affirming care’,” she said. “WPATH has had a huge influence in embedding trans ideology in healthcare systems around the world, including the NHS.”
Ms Joyce said the refusal of the clinic in Nottingham to engage in the review showed “an unwillingness to engage with critical scrutiny” and that combined with remarks by the clinic’s medical director, Jon Arcelus, “NHS England should be looking more closely at the approach taken by the Nottingham Centre for Transgender Health”…