Dr. Hilary Cass, author of the Cass Review, YouTube screenshot

From LifeSiteNews

By Jonathon Van Maren

That a female physician has been advised to stop taking the bus or the train because she might be assaulted by trans activists for attempting to protect children from a horrifying – and ongoing – medical scandal should be shocking to us all.

Dr. Hilary Cass, the 66-year-old physician who led the team behind the 366-page Cass Review, has become a target of trans activists as the repercussions of her findings reverberate through the political and medical establishment. The abuse is not confined merely to online; she has been advised not to use public transport for her own safety. 

In an interview with the Times, Cass stated that critics of her report are putting children “at risk” by spreading “straight disinformation” and that criticisms, thus far, have been “completely wrong.” One Labour MP accused Cass of ignoring “100 transgender studies” in her findings. This, says Cass, is disingenuous in the extreme. 

“I have been really frustrated by the criticisms, because it is straight disinformation,” Cass told the Times. “It started the day before the report came out when an influencer put up a picture of a list of papers that were apparently rejected for not being randomized control trials. That list has absolutely nothing to do with either our report or any of the papers.” 

“If you deliberately try to undermine a report that has looked at the evidence of children’s healthcare, then that’s unforgiveable,” she continued. “You are putting children at risk by doing that.” The 100 papers that were allegedly “left out” of the report, Cass noted, were each individually examined by her team of researchers, who “pulled the results from the ones that were high quality and medium quality, which was 60 out of 103.” 

Cass’s crime, of course, is that her report debunks the transgender narrative. She has been encouraged, she told the Times, by the impact of her report in many quarters – but the response elicited from trans activists has been “pretty aggressive” and she noted that the vitriol spiked each time the Cass Review reported something “people don’t like.”  

“There are some pretty vile emails coming in at the moment,” she said of the profanity-laced digital missives coming her way. “Most of which my team is protecting me from, so I’m not getting to see them. What dismays me is just how childish the debate can become. If I don’t agree with somebody then I’m called transphobic or a TERF [trans-exclusionary radical feminist].” 

When asked if the vitriol was wearing her down, Cass responded: 

No… it’s personal, but these people don’t know me. I’m much, much more upset and frustrated about all the disinformation than I am about the abuse. The thing that makes me seethe is the misinformation. I’m not going on public transport at the moment, following security advice, which is inconvenient.

Indeed, six clinics, she said, refused to share research into the impact of puberty blockers – Cass called their reaction “coordinated” and “ideologically driven” and noted that “they were not particularly friendly to us when we approached.” 

That medical institutions would refuse to cooperate on a study of the long-term impacts of the care they give to children is, any reasonable observer should agree, a very red flag – and there were more. Tavistock also refused to hand over data on detransitioners, which Cass called “very disappointing.” When asked about ideological capture, she told the Times that “there were certainly one or two individuals… who I would describe as activists among the staff,” although she added that “the majority of staff believed what they were doing was right.” 

Although Cass will not be carrying out the recently-announced review of adult gender clinics, she did condemn GenderGP – which we have reported on in this space several times – for continuing to advertise and prescribe puberty blockers, noting that the “care” provided by Dr. Helen Webberley “certainly doesn’t come anywhere near anything one would recognise as adequate in terms of a proper assessment and exploration.”  

That a female physician has been advised to stop taking the bus or the train because she might be assaulted by trans activists for attempting to protect children from a horrifying – and ongoing – medical scandal should be shocking to us all. The last few years have desensitized us to this sort of behavior. Fortunately, it appears that the Cass Review’s findings are having a seismic impact on the debate trans activists desperately tried to avoid, nonetheless. 

Jonathon Van Maren is a public speaker, writer, and pro-life activist. His commentary has been translated into more than eight languages and published widely online as well as print newspapers such as the Jewish Independent, the National Post, the Hamilton Spectator and others. He has received an award for combating anti-Semitism in print from the Jewish organization B’nai Brith. His commentary has been featured on CTV Primetime, Global News, EWTN, and the CBC as well as dozens of radio stations and news outlets in Canada and the United States.

He speaks on a wide variety of cultural topics across North America at universities, high schools, churches, and other functions. Some of these topics include abortion, pornography, the Sexual Revolution, and euthanasia. Jonathon holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in history from Simon Fraser University, and is the communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.

Jonathon’s first book, The Culture War, was released in 2016

From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

“The treaty would put us under the thumb of the U.N. and communist China and the WHO for whatever they wanted to declare a crisis, whether it’s poverty crisis, or a gun violence crisis or a climate crisis, or a health crisis, and make us listen to the WHO. That is not constitutional.”

Republican lawmakers and conservative activists rallied outside the U.S. Capitol Thursday morning to raise awareness of and opposition to a global pandemic agreement that they say poses a grave threat to national sovereignty and basic freedoms.

On May 27, the World Health Assembly (the governing forum of the World Health Organization’s 194 member nations) is slated to meet and finalize the details of the WHO Pandemic Agreement, on the surface a plan to better handle global health crises like COVID-19 in the future. However, critics have found a number of alarming details in the drafts that have been released.

The Washington Stand’s Ben Johnson explains that the plan’s February 8-15 draft “redistribute 20% of all U.S. ‘pandemic-related products’’ to other nations,” empower censorship for the sake of preventing an “infodemic” of “too much information” and “false or misleading information” from creating “mistrust in health authorities and undermin[ing] public health and social measures,” and institute a “Conference of the Parties” to alter the deal further via a two-thirds vote.

An updated draft released April 16 drops the “infodemic” language in favor of a shorter and more vague statement about “[r]ecognizing the importance of building trust and ensuring timely sharing of information to prevent misinformation, disinformation and stigmatization”; but retains the redistribution language as well as the Conference of the Parties’ amendment power–meaning that the most objectionable aspects of earlier drafts could be restored once the agreement is adopted.

On Thursday, the Sovereignty Coalition organized a press conference to make their opposition to “global governance” known. Participants included U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), U.S. Reps. Bob Good (VA-5), Chris Smith (NJ-4), Chip Roy (TX-21), and other members of Congress; Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, Tea Party Patriots Action president Jenny Beth Martin, Center for Security Policy executive chairman Frank Gaffney, and Women’s Rights without Frontiers and Anti-Globalist International president Reggie Littlejohn, among other heads of conservative groups.

‘Not Now’ Campaign to Defend America’s Sovereignty Against WHO https://t.co/ThSRYgGHtP

— Sovereignty Coalition (@sovcoalition) April 18, 2024

“This is the most important issue that is getting the least amount of attention relative to its importance,” declared Good. “The treaty would put us under the thumb of the U.N. and communist China and the WHO for whatever they wanted to declare a crisis, whether it’s poverty crisis, or a gun violence crisis or a climate crisis, or a health crisis, and make us listen to the WHO. That is not constitutional.”

“Are we for standing up for Americans, or are we for ceding authority to international bodies to govern us and to shove their progressive, radical, Marxist ideas on the American people?” asked Roy.

Should the agreement be ratified, Littlejohn warned, the Conference of the Parties would have the power to “mandate vaccines, mandate masks, mandate lockdowns, and mandate quarantines,” as well as “mandate that the governments of the world surveil and censor their citizens, no doubt through digital IDs, which can be used as the basis of a Chinese-style, social credit.”

The Sovereignty Coalition also released a poll of 1,000 likely voters by McLaughlin & Associates finding that only 29% thought it was a “good idea” to delegate America’s pandemic decision making to the WHO, that nearly 75% thought health decisions should remain with their elected representatives, that nearly 64% believe any such agreement must be ratified by the Senate, and that 68% want approval delayed until the public has had the opportunity to see and debate the final text.

Long known for a similar left-wing bias to that of the United Nations, the WHO has faced additional criticism since COVID’s outbreak in 2020 for, among other offenses, opposing bans on travel from China that could have limited the reach of COVID, for legitimizing the false claims coming out of the Chinese government that initially downplayed the gravity of the situation and covered up the Communist regime’s mishandling of it, and for favoring the lockdown and mandate policies that exacerbated harm while curtailing basic freedoms and failing to improve health outcomes.

“In December [2019], the WHO refused to act on or publicize Taiwan’s warning that the new respiratory infection emerging in China could pass from human to human,” U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) wrote in April 2020. “In mid January [2020], despite accumulating evidence of patients contracting what we now know as COVID-19 from other people, the organization repeated the [Chinese Communist Party’s] lie that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission. In January, the WHO, at Beijing’s behest, also blocked Taiwan from participating in critical meetings to coordinate responses to the coronavirus and even reportedly provided wrong information about the virus’s spread in Taiwan.”

Near the end of its tenure, the Trump administration began the process of formally withdrawing the United States from the WHO. But upon taking office, President Joe Biden notified the body that it would contribute $200 million by the end of February 2021, restoring the aid Trump had canceled and asserting a “renewed commitment” to the WHO.