The Cass Report has finally been peer reviewed

You forgot to check their ethics section ("competing interests" subsection)

This thread seems to have died a death.

Pity, because another thing that's missing from their rapier analysis of the Cass report is any mention of how valid the ROBIS tool is anyway.

Unsurprisingly, the answer is "Weeeelll…. it depends."

Basically the main aim of the AMSTAR-2 is to assess the methodological quality of a review, while that of the ROBIS tool is to evaluate the level of bias present within a systematic review.

The ROBINS-1 is "the preferred tool to assess risk of bias in Cochrane Reviews for non-randomized studies (NRS)". The second study tries to improve on that, by combining it with yet another tool, RoB2 - and still identifies flaws and limitations in the tools themselves.

Yet a poster here thinks a single use of ONE tool, by a group of trans activist researchers, with no mention of any of the acknowledged limitations of the tool they've chosen, is worth the paper it's printed on.

Far more likely is that this was the only way the activists could get the result they wanted, and that if they had genuinely been testing for bias, as opposed to organising their study so as to find bias, the study would have looked very different.

I've looked at it a bit more, and it's very noticeable that they confine themselves to criticising the report, but entirely fail to name a single study that, had it been included in the report, would have changed the conclusions.

So they haven't debunked the findings at all. The evidence for giving puberty-blockers is objectively so weak as to be reckless. Several other countries (the Scandinavian ones in particular) have reached similar conclusions from their own research.

If these people had managed to show otherwise, you may be sure they would have said so.

I've also discovered that Natacha Kennedy, who's one of the authors, was found to be behind a smear campaign against academics who held differing views to hers.

So - someone who can be relied on to be totally objective, right?

(I wonder why @circadian seems to have so little interest in their own thread - have they posted in it at all after the OP?)

Posters tend to pop up on all the threads any time Cass is mentioned, with the "Cass has been debunked" line, as if it was an established fact. None of them stick around to debate it.

Edit: It's more posting along the lines of "things are as I say they are, because I say so."

I'm very sorry to hear about your child, I hope they are ok.

As does choosing which study to chose to support your assertion about Cass being debunked.

Indeed. So how did you choose that study to base your belief that Cass has been "completely eviscerated" on? What was it about it that convinced you? I'm wondering about this "deeper level of engagement": where is it?

Because the more I look at this study, the more unreliable it seems.

Latest thing: the author I mentioned just now, Natasha Kennedy, a trans activist who ran a smear campaign against academics who held differing opinions to her - almost all female academics of course - well get this:

Goldsmiths College

confirmed that she was an employee but would not explain which department she worked in or why she appeared to be listed twice in the staff directory: once as Mark Hellen, in the department of educational studies, and secondly as Natacha Kennedy, who is named in equality and diversity reports. Both profiles appear to be active.

It also remained unclear why an academic paper on Ms Kennedy’s specialist subject of transgenderism in children, published by the Graduate Journal of Social Sciences in 2010, cited two co-authors: Natacha Kennedy and Mark Hellen.

Neither Ms Kennedy nor Goldsmiths would clarify whether the paper was by two individuals or the same person. A spokesman said: “Goldsmiths prides itself on its inclusive community and is committed to the values of freedom of speech within the law.”

Here it is: https://itgl.lu/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Kennedy-and-Hellen-Transgender-Children.pdf

Two authors, but in reality both seemingly the same person. Does the ethical integrity of someone doing a study into the, well, integrity, of a report matter at all?

What does it say about the other authors of the report that they didn't see a problem with having this person on their team?

And where are the non trans activists in the author-group? I mean, in a report looking for bias on a very contentious issue, wouldn't you expect them to at least try to have a range of opinions in their own group of authors? It's not as though there were only two of three of them.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that this "evisceration" of Cass is in fact a complete set-up intended to manufacture the conclusions it came to. And it didn't take a very deep level of engagement to identify those issues.

Anybody that thinks that interrupting the natural growth cycle of a human being and not allowing them to go through puberty at the appropriate age is a good idea is an idiot.

If people are having issues going through puberty they need to be helped through those issues by psychologists etc but stopping a child going through their natural growth cycle at the appropriate age is barbaric .

And please don't mention precocious puberty in girls because the treatment for that just delays it for a few years while they are too young and then they can go through it at 12/13 like they normally would.