Clinical experience is what makes expertise legitimate
Dr Helen Webberley on Times Radio: puberty blockers, with Andrew Neil, Times Radio
The clinicians who actually treat trans patients every day are too close to the work to be trusted. Their experience is a conflict of interest, not a qualification. The people with real authority are the ones who reviewed the evidence from a distance.
I think this gets expertise exactly backwards. The physicians who make up WPATH are treating people in their clinics every single day. That is not a bias to be discounted; that is the thing that makes their knowledge real. When Andrew Neil suggested they lacked authority compared to the Cass Review precisely because they had skin in the game, I wanted to say: yes, they do, and that is the point. A cardiologist's authority over heart disease is not undermined by the fact that they see cardiac patients. It is built on it. Clinical experience is not a disqualifier. It is what expertise actually is.
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