Times Radio: puberty blockers, with Andrew Neil

Andrew Neil put the Cass Review to me as though it were the final word, and everything else followed from that. If the Review is authoritative, WPATH is not. If WPATH is not authoritative, informed consent is impossible. If informed consent is impossible, puberty blockers should never have been given to anyone. The argument has a logical shape, and for a viewer who does not know what is inside the Review, or what WPATH actually is, or how informed consent works with young people, it sounds persuasive.

I had been on the programme before and I knew how the conversation would go. The claims came in fast and they were stated as settled fact, which is a different thing from being settled fact. The Cass Review is not the most comprehensive study ever done on this subject: that is an assertion, not a finding, and the Review has been seriously criticised by gender medicine specialists internationally. WPATH is made up of people who work in the field, which is exactly what you would want from a clinical body and not a reason to dismiss it. And informed consent in young people is a clinical and legal concept with a real meaning, not a rhetorical one.

The conversation was combative, and that is fine. What matters is whether the things being stated as fact are actually true. Each of the claims put to me that day is addressed below, with what the evidence actually says.