Why a respiratory paediatrician should not review trans care
Dr Helen Webberley on Robby Starbuck: transition and children, Robby Starbuck
The Cass Review is an authoritative, independent assessment of transgender healthcare, carried out by a qualified expert in the field. If a doctor was appointed to lead it, that doctor must have been the right person for the job.
What I was pointing to in that clip is something that has troubled me since the review was commissioned: Dr Cass is a respiratory paediatrician. She has spent her career managing lung conditions in children, which is genuinely skilled and important work, but it is not transgender care. She had not managed trans children or trans adults before this review. That is not a personal criticism; it is a professional fact, and it matters enormously when you are asking someone to pass judgement on a specialist field they have never practised in. We would not ask a cardiologist to review oncology services and treat the result as definitive. The same logic applies here. The review's conclusions shaped policy that has caused real harm to real young people, and the person who wrote it had no clinical experience in the area she was reviewing.
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