d, professional medical organisations, there is even less excuse. The job of medical institutions is in large part to remember the mistakes of history. These organisations should respond with care, consider evidence, uncertainty, and the recurrent tendency of well meaning medicine to do harm with good intentions. Popularity should be resisted over the need for evidence and caution. This requires strong leadership. Shutting down, or trying to shut down debate about serious clinical uncertainties—as has happened—is unacceptable.
This has not been helped by the multiple lobby groups, welcomed by many institutions to influence their policy making in this area. The same rules that we would normally use to guard relationships with any other pressure group—be it promoters of disease “awareness campaigns” or party politicians looking for support—seem to have dissolved against social pressure to achieve a compliance badge on a website.
The other explanation for what has happened that I think pertinent is this. Doctors, quite rightly, have been afraid to make the same mistakes as medicine did when homosexuality was treated as an illness in the 1950s. Then, electric shocks, desensitisation, hormones, and psychotherapy were attempted to be used to “treat” homosexuality—shamefully. What medicine did then was to intervene—ineffectively and harmfully—in something that was not a disease and should not have come under a medical purview. As Cass states, for most young people experiencing gender dysphoria, it is temporary; it is often associated with neurodiversity; it mainly resolves over time, and medical intervention does not benefit the majority. There is a comparison, but it is in favour of medicine backing off from prescriptions and surgery, and understanding why a phenomenon might be happening, why it is being seen in a medical context, and what is the best and least harmful way to respond to such expressed and profound distress.
An interesting comparison. In both cases – homosexuality and gender dysphoria – doctors felt obliged, in line with the social mores of the times, to intervene medically. This was shameful on both occasions. For homosexuality no intervention was required: just a change in the social mores. Gender dysphoria, on the other hand, was an extremely rare complaint until very recently. It's a social contagion, driven by the gender industry. Whatever the answers may be, they shouldn't involve immediate prescription of puberty blockers followed by hormone replacement therapy. At least, thanks to Cass, that much is now clear.
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