Cass report with a history of the follies of the field of psychology.
The current WPATH and gender ideology is just one folly in a long history of follies of the field of psychology.
Subscriptions are free.
This was originally published in my local newsletter and I need to have this same report for The Gay Agenda. I think that this might be useful and I want to have reference posts for the future.
Cass Report. It exposes yet another folly in a long, very long list of follies of the field of psychology.
The above was the title of the post at Dallas Gay Liberation.
Cass Report
Before discussing the history of the follies of psychology and the report itself, I am having this section so you can go read the Cass Report yourself.
This is the webpage and the following link is for the 388 page report for which you can download a pdf.
https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/
https://cass.independent-review.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/CassReview_Final.pdf
There is this section of Overview of key findings.
The boldfacing as added.
There is no simple explanation for the increase in the numbers of predominantly young people and young adults who have a trans or gender diverse identity, but there is broad agreement that it is a result of a complex interplay between biological, psychological and social factors. This balance of factors will be different in each individual.
There are conflicting views about the clinical approach, with expectations of care at times being far from usual clinical practice. This has made some clinicians fearful of working with gender-questioning young people, despite their presentation being similar to many children and young people presenting to other NHS services.
An appraisal of international guidelines for care and treatment of children and young people with gender incongruence found that that no single guideline could be applied in its entirety to the NHS in England.
While a considerable amount of research has been published in this field, systematic evidence reviews demonstrated the poor quality of the published studies, meaning there is not a reliable evidence base upon which to make clinical decisions, or for children and their families to make informed choices.
The strengths and weaknesses of the evidence base on the care of children and young people are often misrepresented and overstated, both in scientific publications and social debate.
The controversy surrounding the use of medical treatments has taken focus away from what the individualised care and treatment is intended to achieve for individuals seeking support from NHS gender services.
The rationale for early puberty suppression remains unclear, with weak evidence regarding the impact on gender dysphoria, mental or psychosocial health. The effect on cognitive and psychosexual development remains unknown.
The use of masculinising / feminising hormones in those under the age of 18 also presents many unknowns, despite their longstanding use in the adult transgender population. The lack of long-term follow-up data on those commencing treatment at an earlier age means we have inadequate information about the range of outcomes for this group.
Clinicians are unable to determine with any certainty which children and young people will go on to have an enduring trans identity.
For the majority of young people, a medical pathway may not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress. For those young people for whom a medical pathway is clinically indicated, it is not enough to provide this without also addressing wider mental health and/or psychosocially challenging problems.
Innovation is important if medicine is to move forward, but there must be a proportionate level of monitoring, oversight and regulation that does not stifle progress, while preventing creep of unproven approaches into clinical practice. Innovation must draw from and contribute to the evidence base.
This is from the BBC, “Hilary Cass: Weak evidence letting down children over gender care.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-68770641
Even The Guardian realized that the current excesses of gender theory have not brought themselves down.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/26/cass-review-gender-identity-services-report
NPR
New Your Times, behind a paywall. “The Courage to Follow the Evidence on Transgender Care.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/18/opinion/transgender-care-cass-report.html
History of the follies of psychology.
It is always amazing to me that the field of psychology still has credibility. I guess it is because it always has different groups willing to have studies to tell you what you want to hear.
The sorry history of psychology is that there are psychologists willing to do studies or theorize something to support popular prejudice or ideology. You want Gays to be sick, they will have studies to support that, if you want to Gays to be well, there will be studies to support that.
Sigmund Freud had a theory of women having “penis envy.” The feminist movement put an end to that.
With psychology opinion puts on the rainment of “science” to dismiss disagreement as anti-science and retrograde.
The anti-comic book campaign of the 1950s was given credibility by psychologist Dr Fredric Wertham. From the following link:
However, it was during his work at the Lafargue Clinic that Wertham began to make questionable connections between juvenile delinquency and the popularity of comics.
Wertham’s opening salvo against comics came in an article published in Ladies Home Journal called, “What Parents Don’t Know about Comic Books.” He went on to publish his notorious book
Seduction of the Innocent, which became a national sensation, wreaking havoc on the comics industry for years to come.Seduction of the Innocent was a work of junk science that vilified horror, crime, jungle and superhero comics. Wertham asserted that comics were a corrupting influence on youth and a leading cause of juvenile delinquency. Wertham’s “science” was based around the habits of at-risk youth, lacked a control group, and did not account for the habits of adult comic readers. Chock full of specious claims and unscientific conclusions, Seduction remains infamous for the assertions that Batman and Robin were involved romantically, Superman was an anti-American fascist, and most egregiously, the conclusion that crime comics were teaching children how to commit violent and evil acts.
https://cbldf.org/resources/history-of-comics-censorship/history-of-comics-censorship-part-1/
https://universityarchives.princeton.edu/2018/04/comic-books-censorship-and-moral-panic/
As I will show, the field of psychology has been running off the rails for a very long time. I regarding the field as being somewhat more credible than haruspication.
Currently the whole field of psychology is having the Reproducibility Crisis. That is, the fundamental experiments in which that field of “science” is based on have failed to be reproduced. Anyone can produce a study claming this or that, but someone else, an independent group of researchers should be able to reproduce your results. These issues of reproducing results aren’t confined to psychology, but psychology has been particularly bad.
This is an article from Psychology Today which is written a popular audience. From the article.
Some scientists have warned for years that certain ways of collecting, analyzing, and reporting data, often referred to as questionable research practices, make it more likely that results will appear to be statistically meaningful even though they are not. Flawed study designs and a “publication bias” that favors confirmatory results are other longtime sources of concern.
A series of replication projects in the mid-2010s amplified these worries. In one major project, fewer than half of the studies that replicators tried to recreate yielded similar results, suggesting that at least some of the original findings were false positives.
A variety of findings have come into question following replication attempts, including well-known ones suggesting that certain types of priming, physical poses, and other simple interventions could affect behavior in surprising or beneficial ways. It is important to note that psychology is not alone, however: Other fields, such as cancer research and economics, have faced similar questions about methodological rigor.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/replication-crisis
Anti-psychiatry movement. The follies of psychiatry had become so apparent that in the 1960s there developed an anti-psychiatry movement.
This movement was in response to the horrors of electro-shock therapy, insulin shock therapy, and the lobotomy operations. There were over 50,000 lobotomy performed from 1939 to 1951.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-psychiatry
Foucault based his book, “The Archeology of Knowledge,” on the follies of psychology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Archaeology_of_Knowledge
A list of follies
The field of psychology has had a long long history of ideology passed off as science. I am going to try to remember all the more ludicrous ones, but I am sure I will overlook some.
Hysteria: This word is based on a woman’s anatomy, from the Greek work “hystera” which means uterus. Supposedly according to psychiatric theory a woman’s uterus could make them hysterical, that is emotionally out of control.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abstract/488986
This article discusses how later Sigmund Freud decided that hysteria was from penis envy.
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/history-quackery/history-hysteria
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Penis Envy: This was once a dominating idea in the field of psychiatry that when young girls discovered they didn’t have a penis they had penis envy and women’s whole psychology is supposedly based on that. It was proposed by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. It lost credibility when the feminist movement arose in the 1960s.
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100315226
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Drapetomania
This was a mental illness that was the cause of African Americans feeling slavery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapetomania
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Jazz
There was a lot of people in the 1920s who were upset by jazz. Since middle class people and moralists were upset, “scientists” soon found discovered that jazz caused all sorts of mental problems.
The widely influential “Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation,” by Anne Shaw Faulkner, National Music Chairman of the General Federation of Woman’s Clubs, in the Ladies Home Journal.
A number of scientific men who have been working on experiments in musico-therapy with the insane, declare that while regular rhythms and simple tones produce a quieting effect on the brain of even a violent patient, the effect of jazz on the normal brain produces an atrophied condition on the brain cells of conception, until very frequently those under the demoralizing influence of the persistent use of syncopation, combined with inharmonic partial tones, are actually in capable of distinguishing between good and evil, between right and wrong. [Boldface added.]
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5401/healthhist.13.2.0013
https://www.openculture.com/2019/02/jazz-music-was-considered-harmful-to-human-health.html
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Child Abuse and Freud and Fraud and psychoanalysis.
Sigmund Freud had originally theorized that psychological problems results from trauma such as child abuse and rape. He later rejected his own theory and held that women patients had “fantasized” their memories of rape and seduction.
J.M. Masson had a job at the Freud Archives and there were papers there not to be released to the public for reasons that became obvious later.
But Freud eventually renounced this theory in favor of a new view, that his women patients had "fantasized" their early memories of rape and seduction - a view on which the whole budding science of psychoanalysis would be based. [Boldface added.]
Masson makes available previously unpublished letters from Freud's closest friend, Wilhelm Fliess, which reveal that Freud had grave doubts about abandoning the "seduction theory." Masson discovered that not only had Freud read the contemporary literature documenting the high incidence of sexual abuse of children, he had in all likelihood witnessed autopsies of children who had been raped and murdered. That Freud abandoned his seduction theory, Masson argues, was a failure of courage rather than a clinical or theoretical insight.
As a result, most psychiatrists and psychoanalysts have in effect been reluctant to trust the memories of their patients, women in particular, about the traumas they experienced in childhood. Like Freud, they see such traumas as fantasy rather than reality. This cover-up of the truth, Masson asserts, has poisoned the entire profession.
https://archive.org/details/assaultontruth-freudssuppressionofseductiontheory
It was a feminist Florence Rush who rejected Freud’s theory in 1971. She said that “Freud intentially ignored evidence that his patients” were victims. When Masson published in 1984, he had independently come to the same conclusion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Freudian_Coverup
This is about Masson getting into the Freud archives to release stuff.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1983/12/05/trouble-in-the-archives-i
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Diary of a Mad Housewife
In this movie the housewife dissatisfaction with her bogus husband is alleged by her psychiatrist to be a product of her mental illness and not that her husband is a fool.
I notice that this source omits the obvious issue of psychoanalysis being ridiculed in the moive, but it has some background info.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diary_of_a_Mad_Housewife
It was based on a book with the same title. This is a review.
https://theliterarylioness.com/diary-of-a-mad-housewife-book-review/
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Prefrontal Lobotomies and Electroshock Therapy.
There were these horrors in the history of psychiatry with leading experts and published papers justifying it.
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Carl Jung, Nazis and that article in Forum
Carl Jung had an article in The Forum, April 1930, pages 176-182, titled, “Your Negroid and Indian Behavior.” the Carl Jung fans don’t mention it, but racists still use it.
You can download it here. I have seen a physical copy also.
https://www.unz.com/print/Forum-1936mar-00176/
Carl Jung, the psychoanalyst, in his article, “Your Negroid and Indian Behavior,” who explains American behavior stating, “What is more contagious than to live side by side with a rather primitive people?” Warning:
The inferior man exercises a tremendous pull upon civilized beings who are forced to live with him, because he fascinated the inferior layers of our psyche.
And:
It would be difficult not to see that the Negro, with his primitive motility, his expressive emotionality, his childlike immediacy, his sense of music and rhythm, his funny and picturesque language, has infected American behavior. [Boldface added.]
And:
The Negro, by his mere presence in America, is a is a source of temperamental and mimetic infection … [Boldface added.]
Then there is the stuff about his anti-Semitism and fooling around with the Nazis. There is a small industry trying to exhonerate Carl Jung, because they love the Jungian games they can play. So don’t bother to discuss this with Jungians. You will be see as disparging the true faith. If you are a fan of rationalization, then reading about the debate over Jung will provide endless entertainment.
The abstract for June and the Nazis: some implications for psychoanalysis.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21877366/
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Recovered Memory
This was something that sent innocent people to jail. Supposedly people had been raped or molested as a child, and they had repressed the memory and psychologists could unearth the memories. Unlike other crazed fads of psychology, the harm wasn’t limited to the patient, but sent people to jail and destroyed lives.
Those opposed to this crazed thing were smeared as abetting pedophiles and rapists and denounced. Of course some psychologists saw it as career building and they were crusaders against child abuse.
The excesses of this movement started to bring it down. Elizabeth Loftus is interviewed here about the false memory issue.
There was the whole debacle of the McMartin Preschool Satanic Panic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indictment:_The_McMartin_Trial
https://www.hbo.com/movies/indictment-the-mc-martin-trial
“Wenatchee Witch Hunt: Child Sex Abuse Trials in Douglas and Chelan Counties.
https://www.historylink.org/File/7065
People should have spoken up. These debacles were obvious from the beginning, but to question recovered memories meant you would be denounced as misogynist and encouraging child abuse and pedophilia.
Continuing Practice
If you think the psychology profession is going to clean up their act, you can forget it. After the current debacle with the excesses of gender theory, we will have some other horror in the future.
Dealing with some statistical shenanigans
If you tested tires on 20 cars and in a year they all failed, you would consider the tires as very poor quality. However, if you checked on their performance within a week, chances are they might be all good. Then you could say that the tires are 100% reliable, despite the fact that they are the very same tires.
Some studies on transitioning and detransitioning have relied as short time scale follow ups. This has resulted in statistics that represent gender interventions such as surgery and drug therapies as successful.
Given the actual time scale of detransitioning the statistics for detransitioning are likely to be much higher as time goes on. Assessing the percentage detransitioning in a short time is not going to give you a valid statistic.
What this means for the LGBT
The fight over trans issues has been marked by suppression of dissent and polarized conflict. It has been a matter of unilateralism. Demands by one group without consideration of another.
The primary issue here is that children have been ill-served by people rushing off to conclude that this person or that person is trans and then do surgery or hormones recklessly.
As time goes on, and people who for one reason or another thought they were trans realize that they aren’t, they will be detransitioning. The interventions are not something you can undo. Breat removal in teenagers can’t be reversed. Taking hormones have permanent changes. We are going to have a large population of adults who will be loud and bitter about their experiences for decades.
We will be having lawsuits for decades over the reckless behavior of medical practicioners.
As adults people can do what they want with their bodies. However, we restrict non-adults regarding whether they can drink alcohol, drive cars, have sex, work, sign contracts, and other activities. Further teenagers are susceptible to social influences. One of the real problems with suicides in high schools is that there is social contagion and one suicide can lead to another attempt.
What has happened will be bad for trans people. There legitimate needs of youngsters and adults be grouped in with the excesses of some ideologues and dismissed. The credibility of advocates for trans will be obliterated.
There has been a denial that some policies will be abused by persons who aren’t trans. Criminals are quick to see opportunity to exploit a system and male rapists have ended up in female prisons.
People are just not going to accept transmen in women’s sports. There are these endless arguments that hormones nullify the difference. They don’t. Transwomen go in and women get bump out for the first prize. In some cases, like rugby, there is injury.
Finally, parents do not want their daughter to be in a girls lockerroom with some guy walking around with a swinging dick.
Homophobes see opportunity.
Homophobes seen an opportunity to go after the LGBT with the excesses of the trans movement. For example Title IX rules reissued by President Biden prohibit discrimination against LGBT. What the homophobes have seized upon, is an expected future ruling that will require the acceptance of transmen in sports and in female lockerooms.
The LGBT establishment has welded the right to have transmen in female sports and in female lockerooms to the rights of the LGBT as a whole. Homophobes see this as a great opportunity. Drag shows and story book hours are alleged to be part of something leading to breast removal and hormones for teenagers. The word “grooming” is thrown out for anything and everything that supports LGBT. Any accomodation or support for trans is attached to the issue of breast removal in teenagers.
The LGBT establishment is going over the cliff by attacking the Cass Report. They have been so committed to it, and the LGBT is so intolerant of dissent, they can’t let go. After this is email out, I will add a list of links showing this. I also expet that some groups will be denying their past record in the future so I want to keep a record of which groups denied the Cass Report.
Going forward
Trans people will need support, because the right wing groups are not just planning to eliminate some items, they want to obliterate trans rights entirely and trans existence.
We will need to think why there wasn’t more dialog about this, and why there was no discussion, just denunciation. Also, why there was unilateral demands without concerns about other groups such as Gays and Lesbians and Bi.
We need to be respectful. If someone says they are Martha, I am willing to say that, even if they don’t look like a Martha to me. We need to realize that they are making their way throught life like anyone else.
I am looking online for a video on the Cass Report, but they are all screaming.
There is a movement to divorce from the Trans, they have an initialism, LGB (scissors)TQ. I suggest that we consider LGBT to be more L+G+B+T with allied interests, but seperate groups. We will always needing to be allies, but we also need to understand that there are seperate interests and directions and one groups interests don’t over rule the others.
We need to be more critical of ideological fashions and psychology.
The people in queer studies could be a lot less condescending and ideological.
As the current reigning ideologies collapse, like Recovered Memory, and other excesses of the psychology profession, I want to keep it bring down the rights of the LGBT. With this post I start a project to defend us.
As for those who might say I am late to the game, I have a published record elsewhere going back years critiquing ideological excesses. So the homophobes will not be able to tar me with their rubbish. Also, I will be a voice to defend trans.
Going back to the late 1970s I have always thought that they should be respected and supported.
Stances of LGBT organizations and publications on the Cass Report.
Cass review
https://www.thepinknews.com/2024/04/10/cass-review-extreme-caution-puberty-blockers/
https://www.gaytimes.co.uk/life/what-is-the-cass-review-final-recommendations/
https://xtramagazine.com/health/trans-health/united-kingdom-cass-review-trans-health-264642
https://www.advocate.com/health/hilary-cass-nhs-report-debunked
https://www.attitude.co.uk/news/the-cass-review-explainer-463447/
https://mermaidsuk.org.uk/news/the-cass-review-mermaids-response/
https://socialistworker.co.uk/news/cass-review-1/
https://socialistworker.co.uk/news/cass-review-2/
https://www.thepinknews.com/2024/04/11/cass-report-anti-trans-bigots/
https://transsafety.network/posts/tsn-statement-on-cass-final-report/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/26895269.2024.2328249
https://www.thetrevorproject.org/
https://www.thetrevorproject.org/resources/category/gender-identity/
https://www.thetrevorproject.org/press/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Cass
https://www.rainbow-project.org/cass-review/
https://diva-magazine.com/2024/04/10/the-cass-review/
https://www.them.us/
https://www.them.us/story/cass-review-nhs-trans-youth-healthcare-report
https://www.stonewall.org.uk/about-us/news/stonewall-statement-cass-review
https://ruthpearce.net/2022/07/01/cass-review-gra-study-an-appalling-breach-of-research-ethics/
https://growinguptransgender.com/2022/04/06/the-failure-of-the-cass-review/
https://www.scottishtrans.org/our-initial-response-to-the-publication-of-the-cass-review-10-4-24/
Final Note:
People can scream and yell all you want. After bringing down the neo-Confederate movement and dealing with their hostility, I am impervious to idiot ranting. Further, I am really good at keeping records and when the current excesses collapse finally, I will remember.
“Research into trans medicine has been manipulated,” is the title of this article in The Economist and made available without a paywall with permission at this website.
https://segm.org/The-Economist-WPATH-Research-Trans-Medicine-Manipulated
Kudos 👏, for the article