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A couple of weeks ago, I posted an article on how the fundamentalist movement, in the past, committed acts of fraud disguised as science. I talked about how they’d done so for decades, I talked about their intent and their methodologies, and how they have been adopted over time by the right in general.
I then applied this to the Cass Report, the “report” used by the Tory government in Britain to ban most forms of trans medical care and by American rightists to both deny health care and pass laws against trans people. I showed how exactly the same recategorisation and data selection methods were used to de-rate almost every study on youth gender transition, so that they could create a report which claimed there were “few to no high quality” studies on the matter.
I said I didn’t know for sure this was the same sort of ill intent, or that they happened to be doing the same thing as fundamentalists and rightist have been doing for the last many decades. I couldn’t prove that’s what they were doing, I could just demonstrate that it looked awfully, awfully similar, as in, exactly the same.
Whelp, looks like we can prove that ill intent now.
The Cass Report describes Dr. Cass as “a senior clinician with no prior involvement or fixed views in this area.”
This is a lie.
Not only had she met with American politician Ron DeSantis to aid his efforts to ban gender transition, turns out she was recommending the so-called “gender critical” hate screed, Irreversible Damage, which compares gender transition to the Holocaust.
She also, turns out, included studies to argue against trans health care that are not only outdated and fail to meet her own theoretical standards, but which have been out-and-out discredited.
Again: it all comes down to picking the data you want to get the result you want, and that’s exactly what she and her team did.
Talking of the team, some of the other people appointed to work with her on the report were also active in anti-trans/anti-queer politics, including lobbying against ending “conversion therapy” and helping Republicans with bans on trans health care, serving as “expert witnesses” in favour. Tories have now admitted the group was salted with “gender critical” activists specifically to “expedite” the work, while trans people were explicitly excluded.
Erin in the Morning has the details, as do Drs. Max Davie and Lorna Hobbs in a report they have kindly also placed in Google Docs for better public accessibility.
The Cass Report is a rightist political document disguised as a scientific work, with better cover than, say, the work of Dr. Paul Cameron, but with no better scientific validity or intent. If you don’t know who Cameron is, count yourself lucky. Or read my M&Ms post, the same one I linked above. Either will do.
This was a hatchet job and a work of hatred used to both condemn and deny medical care to people who desperately need it, and it is yet another lie that must be exposed, and another fraud about which people should know.
It is, once again, yet another goddamn lie of the right.
87 days remain.
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