Processing the Cass Review

I’ve got a dozen Google Docs, maxed out at something like a million characters each. Like any respectable magpie, I know where I’ve stashed different pieces of information that once had the power to surprise me. But I never sit down and read what I’ve gathered straight through. Because the tools at my disposal are modest, my focus is modest. I tinker in the shadows of The Thing itself. Take my thesis, the initial submission of which I finished—entirely coincidentally—on the day the Cass Report dropped. Over the course of two years, I looked at how one subpopulation handled one subject in one setting. Possible that I know this subject better than anybody else does. But in the scheme of things, it’s a stray footnote about a strange corner of the Internet and its unhappy denizens and the doubts they confessed and then disowned.

If you’ve spent a lot of time toiling in the dark with a book of matches in hand, like I have, the Cass Review comes as something of a shock, even if the report contains few revelations for those of us who’ve been following this issue for years. What’s shocking is the way the report casts the whole sordid mess in the pale, flat, brutal daylight that rises on the scene of a great debauch.

I don’t know how I thought I’d feel reading the Cass Review. Vindicated, maybe? Instead, all I feel is unspeakable sadness. Because this whole movement within medicine was so senseless, so blind, and cut such a path of destruction through our societies. Because I am still not convinced we will learn from it.

I've paid far less of a price than many for my contact with this issue. But I lost long-time friends over things laid out bare in this report (yes, I lost a long-time friend over my concerns about puberty blockers!). I left a career that was far more secure than the living I try to patch together now over this because I couldn’t keep writing press releases and funder reports when this was happening.

And—in the stark light of day—it just looks so mad. All of it. Mad every step of the way. How could it possibly have cost so many people so much (relationships, livelihoods, body parts)? How has it dragged on so long?

The social scientist in me has hypotheses. But the human being in me is baffled.

Does anybody feel vindicated? It would have been better to have been wrong about something so grim.