The Cass Review shows it’s a disaster for professionals to confuse opinion with expertise

The first words of Dr Hilary Cass in her review published this week are: “This review is not about defining what it means to be trans.” Her wise refusal to engage in that heated debate gives the report its power.

As disclosed in its title, the report is about “gender identity services for children and young people”. “It is,” Dr Cass says, “about what the healthcare approach should be.” It unearths what has gone dreadfully wrong in a very sensitive part of the National Health Service.

Dr Cass’s discoveries and recommendations are important in their own right. The trans debate – moral, medical, social, scientific, political – will now be based on much better information. Hundreds of articles could be written about her findings alone, and probably will be. But today I would like to use the Cass Review to make a wider point.

It is about the terrible things that happen when people cease to behave professionally.

Dr Cass’s conclusion is that the provision of puberty blockers – and other aspects of gender identity treatment – has been rushed forward on dangerously thin evidence. She speaks of “a failure to reliably collect even the most basic data and information”. She adds that “data have often not been shared or have been unavailable”.

That is a shocking thing. It corrupts the NHS system more widely. In a letter to a newspaper yesterday, a Cambridge GP, Dr Fiona Cornish, pointed out how the lack of evidence has compromised professionals like herself: “As GPs, we are asked to prescribe by gender clinics” and have really had no choice about doing so: “The only position to take is to follow NHS guidelines, which allow pubertyblocking hormones. To decline on personal grounds leaves one open to complaints or a claim of discrimination.”

The gender ID professionals who acted so unprofessionally compounded their wrongdoing. There are seven NHS gender identity clinics in

England. Of these, only one – Exeter – agreed to co-operate with Dr Cass’s inquiries. The others turned away the team charged with collating all the evidence for her inquiry. Dr Derek Glidden, clinical director of the Nottingham Centre for Transgender Health, is also chairman of the NHS Clinical Reference Group on gender dysphoria. Yet he and his equivalents refused to help, even though ordered to do so by the relevant NHS director. So far, they have not been punished.

How could such behaviour come about? I suggest it happens when professionals confuse their expert knowledge with their personal beliefs, using the former to confirm their righteousness about the latter. The syllogism is: “We know a lot and we are good people. Therefore, we can do no wrong.”

When she was the relevant minister, Penny Mordaunt, now being touted as a successor to Rishi Sunak, said in Parliament: “Trans women are women and trans men are men.” She has subsequently been criticised for those words, but her less-noticed next sentence was, since she was speaking as a minister, more dangerous: “That is the starting point of the GRA [Gender

Recognition Act] consultation and it will be the finishing point too.” In other words, she and colleagues had already made up their minds, so the consultation would be a foregone conclusion. Ideology short-circuited evidence.

I suggest that this confusion of your duties at work with your personal beliefs is damaging professions across the Western world.

Also this week, the European Court of Human Rights told Switzerland that its citizens’ decision in a referendum about climate change rules was nullified because it contravened

Article 8 of the European Convention to “private and family life”. There is no appeal against the ECHR ruling, even though the Swiss vote was no idle expression of opinion, but a democratic decision made in a country which, under law, governs through referendums.

The Strasbourg judgment was political, under a threadbare legal guise, and therefore unprofessional. Yet of all the 16 judges involved only one – the British judge – refused to agree.

A smaller, almost comical, recent example is also drawn for the law. Last month, the Bar Council attacked the Garrick Club, which does not admit women members. “For now,” its chairman solemnly threatened, “it is a matter for individuals to determine whether or not membership of an institution, such as the Garrick Club, is compatible with the views they espouse in their professional lives, but this may change.”

Thus the approved regulator of the profession of barrister turns itself into

There are seven NHS gender identity clinics in England. Only one agreed to co-operate with Dr Cass’s inquiries

a court of morals over private, lawful preferences. Here, in short order, are other examples in recent years:

◆ the National Trust’s decision to stigmatise its own country houses for links with slavery and “colonialism”, and then to change its governance structures and member democracy to suppress critics

◆ the attempt (happily, defeated) by the then vice-chancellor of Cambridge University to allow freedom of speech only if it does not offend anyone’s sense of identity

◆ the failure of Gary Lineker or Chris Packham to accept that their work for the BBC as, respectively, sports commentator and wildlife and natural world presenter, must restrict their political interventions on social media; even worse, the BBC’s failure to enforce its own impartiality rules against them

◆ the fact that the Bank of England includes climate change policy as part of its remit

◆ the attempts by the boards of leading British museums to get rid of some of the collections under their care because of alleged historic wrongs

◆ the “debanking” of customers who fail to “align with the bank’s values”, as exposed by Nigel Farage.

All the above – dozens more could be listed – show how institutions are perverted from their proper purposes and therefore lose trust.

The same problem is now endemic in the Civil Service. Immediately after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, the websites of numerous government departments exploded with expressions of horror, republishing Black Lives Matter logos and tweets. No disciplinary action was taken. Yet these actions were wrong, not so much because of the content of the opinions expressed but because opinions should not have been expressed at all in that setting: the Civil Service’s value depends on its strict impartiality.

It is wrong – though now almost customary – for any civil servant to wear rainbow lanyards or any lanyards or badges expressing personal views, let alone BLM views, some of which are explicitly racist. The rainbow is not a neutral badge of friendliness to all (which should always be part of the job, no badge needed): it emerges from an identity politics which many people reject because they prefer our simple common citizenship. Such badges encourage the idea that speaking up for some external cause trumps your duties at work.

With this shift comes a trend in many professions to aggrandise their leading figures. They often become the “independent” head of this or that, sitting in judgment of the conduct of others. Thus it was that Sue Gray, a senior civil servant, was in charge of telling politicians how to behave ethically. After a gap of somewhat questionable shortness, she was lured away by Sir Keir Starmer (who, when head of the CPS, was very much the political lawyer of his day) to become his chief of staff. Her abilities are high, but her career path shows the decadence of the profession she has now abandoned.

This moral collapse has happened under a weak Tory government. Ms Gray’s trajectory suggests it will get even worse under a Labour one.

From trans to climate change, experts are too often allowing their own prejudices to taint their judgment