Anti-Trans hate group SEGM embedded in the NHS gender services

The SEGM conference agenda reveals NHS officials with healthcare-defining roles are speaking for the religiously funded hate group.

The Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) conference is well underway, the speaker list includes NHS staff that influenced the Cass Review and are defining the United Kingdom’s Transgender healthcare.
Earlier this year the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) declared SEGM “Anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience” alongside its recognition of being a hate group.

Trans healthcare in the United Kingdom is an ever-growing scandal.

The Cass Review has and will continue to cause abhorrent failings, Victoria Atkins used it to issue an unprecedented ban on life-saving puberty-suppressing hormones that Wes Streeting intends to make permanent. It is the foundation for the youth gender services in the NHS and the basis for the educational framework used to train clinicians. Prominent roles in creating and implementing the discredited Cass Review are speaking for SEGM, such as Richard Byng and Richard Stephens who are “members of the NHS working group on gender dysphoria”, which directly influenced the Cass Reviews harmful recommendations, as did Trilyby (Tilly) Langton, who authored the systemic reviews that lay its foundations. Byng has published multiple articles in the BMJ opposing gender-affirming care.

Micheal Absoud the “deputy chief investigator for the proposed puberty blocker trial” is speaking on “Autism spectrum disorders and gender dysphoria in adolescents”. The outcome of the upcoming unethical clinical trial will define trans youth’s access to life-saving gender-affirming care and it is in the hands of someone associated with a recognised hate group, that strongly opposes the validation of young people’s gender identity, especially through the use of medical treatment.

Anastassis Spiliadis is part of a conversion therapy group and will be responsible for “training clinicians in the new youth gender services in the UK”. The educational framework built from the Cass Review will provide clinical reluctance to medical intervention through ‘exploratory therapy’. The clinicians providing that therapy will be trained with the harmful ‘understanding’ that a young person’s gender identity is confused neurological distress and that it may desist with time.
Repackaged conversion therapy.
Julie Alderson has been establishing “a new CYP Gender service in the southwest of England that will provide holistic healthcare as part of the national implementation of the Cass Review”. Riittakerttu Kaltiala, a Cass Review advisor, will also be at the conference.

The Cass Review suggests that it is difficult to discern if a young person is experiencing Gender Dysphoria or Body Dysmorphic Disorder, Amita Jassi the leading BDD clinical psychologist for children and young people at the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust will be speaking for SEGM, likely pushing the belief that Gender Dysphoric youth are confusing their Body Dysmorphia for gender identity. Also speaking is Kathryn Webb an NHS clinician, whose doctoral research at the University of Oxford “included regret after gender-affirming surgery”.

Shockingly giving a talk on “The role of the family in addressing youth gender distress” is Richard Stephens, cofounder of Bayswater a self-proclaimed “support group” containing members who openly discuss “destroying their trans children’s belongings” and have even gone as far as “blocking access to ChildLine”. A Crown Prosecution Service spokesperson confirmed that Bayswater “influenced guidance” allowing parents to destroy their child's hormone replacement medication without it being considered abuse.

None of the mentioned NHS officials spoke at WPATH’s conference last week.

Labour can’t hide behind Cass forever.

The widely discredited and globally rejected Cass review is centred around a harmful ‘understanding’ that being transgender or non-binary is a consequence of misinterpreted psychological pain, a defence mechanism for trauma, depression or anxiety, rather than a core fundamental of an individual’s sense of self. Recommending mandatory Autism screening through the assumption that autistic adolescents are less trustworthy in their understanding and articulation of identity and societal binaries.

Cass implies gender identity is an issue to be corrected or avoided, those who influenced that implication, and those embodying it, are defining trans healthcare in the United Kingdom.

Despite the increasingly long list of countries that have rejected the Cass Review, in the UK it is being heralded as the ground-breaking golden standard in trans healthcare that should be relied upon at every opportunity, and those responsible for the implementation of legislation that has destroyed young people’s access to life-saving care have exclusively relied on Cass for justification. With every piece of the scandal that gets exposed, the harder it will be to hide behind a review that will hold partial responsibility for the downfall of the United Kingdom’s medical reputation.

Cass will be remembered alongside Wakefield. The intentional manufacturing of all stages in a process to warp guidance and policy, the cherry-picking of staff with known anti-trans bias and affiliations with a pseudoscientific lobbying group. It was the causal factor for an unprecedented ban on life-saving medication and an incredibly rushed report aimed at silencing the conversations of trans youth’s suicidal ideation. The updated youth gender services are built on a tailored review created to restrict access to healthcare, the clinical staff are trained to provide invasive experimental conversion therapies.
SEGM’s grasp can be seen in the reviews and studies that shaped Cass, members of the review’s team, and positions of defining importance in the NHS gender services. An orchestrated attack pushed by a far-right religiously funded anti-trans hate group.

It is a monumental healthcare scandal.

We are, however, at a time where institutionalised transphobia has poisoned as much of the country as SEGM has poisoned the possibility for affirmative healthcare.
It could take decades to heal the damage caused.