Mick Hartley

More on the BMA debacle, from Sanchez Manning in the Telegraph – The trans row ripping apart Britain’s doctors’ union:

The anger is palpable in the voice of Dame Professor Clare Gerada as she demands to know what right Britain’s biggest doctors’ union has to second-guess the Cass review – the landmark report on NHS child gender services, which found that children had been let down by a lack of research into medical interventions – after it announced it would lobby against implementing the recommendations.

“Cass took four years and did thousands of interviews, eight independent systematic reviews, had endless consultations and has come up with a very good report,” Gerada, a former president of the Royal College of General Practitioners, says. “Then along comes the British Medical Association in a meeting that no one is really invited to and makes this ruling.

“What right has the BMA to second-guess the Cass review, the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges – which represent our professional values – and the three major royal colleges covering psychiatry, paediatrics and GPs?”

Published in April by leading paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass, the review found that there is “remarkably weak evidence” about the long-term impact of puberty-suppressing hormones, known as “puberty blockers”. Last month, the Government renewed a temporary ban on the drugs’ prescription to children not already taking them.

But while the review has been accepted and supported by the vast majority of the medical establishment, the BMA announced on July 31 that it would lobby against the implementation of its recommendations.

The union said that following a motion passed by the BMA council it will set up a “task and finish” group to “publicly critique” the review. It went on to publicly condemn the Government’s restrictions around puberty-blocker prescriptions.

Today the BMA’s membership is at risk of being riven apart by this extraordinary decision – and more than 1,400 doctors have signed an open letter expressing their “dismay” at the BMA’s position. Among them are 70 professors and 23 former or current presidents of medical royal colleges and clinical leaders – some of the country’s most eminent physicians.

Gerada is one of them. She says she wants to know: “Why is the BMA doing this?

“I prescribe medicines to children and adults and every single one of those medicines has been through rigorous clinical studies. I can tell patients what the reason for that medicine is and the risks and benefits. That’s standard.

“All the Cass review is doing is saying we need to do the same for puberty blockers. This is about making medicines safe for children.”

Gerada, 64, who has been a member of the BMA since she was 18, also questions how the union is going to carry out a thorough “critique” of the Cass review by January, which is when it has said it will present its evaluation.

“What does the BMA think it is going to do in four months and what expertise is it going to draw on? My view is it should not be doing this. The arrogance of that beggars belief…

“After Christmas I am going to seriously consider whether I will apply for a council position on the BMA or resign.”

Dr Az Hakeem, a consultant psychiatrist, has specialised in treating patients with gender dysphoria. He resigned his BMA membership some years ago and today he has his own take on why the union has taken this stance.

“The BMA has been taken over by a brigade of people wearing red braces and putting pronouns in their bios who have turned their back on evidence-based medicine in favour of a cult of ideology,” he argues.

“To dismiss the very hard work of Dr Hilary Cass and her team and their four years of evidence-based research is a mockery of the position that they hold.”…

Consultant psychiatrist Dr Lenny Cornwall, who has been a member of the BMA since 2016, argues that the incident has exposed the “outrageous way” the doctors’ union is operating.

“I hadn’t quite realised how it [the BMA council] operates in terms of it being so secretive,” he says. “It is taking an ideological decision when the Cass report is a scientific review. That is not an appropriate thing for a medical union to do.

“It should be saying you have to accept the medical scientific process. It is not a matter for the BMA to review medical scientific evidence.”

Interestingly, there's some info about the BMA activists driving the trans ideology:

The motion was reportedly tabled by Vassili Crispi, a junior doctor in Yorkshire, and consultant anesthetist Dr Tom Dolphin, who was previously a chair of the BMA’s junior doctors committee.

Dolphin, who has acted as a media spokesman for striking doctors, has previously boasted of charging the NHS £1,870 for a single cover shift during the strikes. Later he donated the sum to the BMA’s strike fund, writing on X (formerly Twitter) that the war chest “supports people to strike, meaning the strike is stronger and the win will come sooner”.

Last October, in another post on X, he described the Conservative government’s decision to ban trans women who were born male from female hospital wards as “cruel, unworkable and almost certainly illegal”.

Crispi, meanwhile, who was also said to have been active in driving the doctors’ strikes, is the co-author of a paper, published in a medical journal, that called for the adoption of “gender-neutral terminology”, and demanded that LGBTQ+ education must be “embedded” with the undergraduate curricula for medics and ‘regularly revisited during postgraduate training”.

A third doctor who backed the motion was Emma Runswick, 28, the deputy chairman of the BMA council. She too has been central in the pro-strike coalition of junior doctors who were elected to the BMA’s leadership body in 2022 and she describes herself as “unashamedly socialist”. (She is the daughter of two Labour activists who have supported former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.)

She has been open on social media in sharing her view on puberty blockers. In one post, she criticised Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s ruling to continue the ban on puberty blockers for children as a “terrible political decision”.

For many medics, one of the greatest surprises isn’t the motion to challenge the Cass review but the sheer number of medics willing to publicly oppose the BMA’s stance. Gerada and Cornwall point out that previously many doctors were fearful of speaking out on issues of child gender treatments. That “bubble” has now burst.

“This has fired up doctors in a way that I hadn’t quite grasped when I signed the letter,” Cornwall says. “When the signatories go up to more than a thousand you realise that actually there’s a massive strength of feeling here.

“That’s because the Cass review was seen as such a relief because people have been so frightened to challenge gender-affirming care for children for fear of being called a bigot.”

A blessing in disguise then? The ideologues who've taken control of the BMA have now revealed themselves, allowing doctors at last to see clearly the true colours and motivation of their union representatives.