Sex and Gender

In spring 2025, NHS England may launch its much-anticipated “Pathways” trial into puberty blockers, a £10.7 million endeavour led by King’s College London and backed by the National Institute for Health and Care Research. This follows the Cass Review’s damning verdict on the thin evidence behind these drugs—gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonists used to pause puberty in children with gender dysphoria—and a subsequent halt to their routine use in March 2024. With [read more…]

In light of the Cass Review, the new use of puberty blockers for children is now pretty much restricted to those enrolled in clinical trials in the UK. The Cass Review underscored the lack of consensus and the significant gaps in knowledge surrounding the use of puberty blockers, prompting a more cautious and scientifically robust approach to their application, if they were ever to be used in the future. There [read more…]

Continued from Breaking Down Cass Review Myths and Misconceptions: What You Need to Know: Part 1 The Myths (Part 1) … Myth 1: 98% of all studies in this area were ignoredMyth 2: Cass recommended no Trans Healthcare for Under 25s.Myth 3: Cass is demanding only Double Blind Randomised Controlled Trials be used as evidence in “Trans Healthcare”Myth 4: There were less than 10 detransitioners out of 3499 patients in [read more…]

It has now been just little under a week since the publication of the long anticipated NHS independent review of gender identity services for children and young people, the Cass Review. The review recommends sweeping changes to child services in the NHS, not least the abandonment of what is known as the “affirmation model” and the associated use of puberty blockers and, later, cross-sex hormones. The evidence base could not [read more…]

from the twitter thread. Let me tell you about “Reece’s Pieces”. So, Brighton Skeptics were to hold a talk in January between Hannah Barnes and Helen Lewis. Barnes was the journalist who wrote a book exposing the debacle of the Tavistock gender clinic and how it was desperately failing vulnerable children. What a perfect topic for a public critical thinking meeting! It involves the failure of evidence-based medicine, the ideological [read more…]

Apologies for the delay on publshing Part II. The weight of muddle proved too much for me at times! But I thought I must publish as far as I got… This is Part II of an appraisal of Steven Novella’s claim that it is “not scientifically controversial” that sex is not a “binary” of male and female but a “bimodal distribution”. (Part 1 here) In short, is sex a discrete [read more…]

In a recent blog post on the web site Science Based Medicine, Steven Novella asks the question “What does the science actually say about biological sex?” His motivations are made quite clear in the opening paragraphs where he wants to clear up “misconceptions” about sex that mean we do not know how “best to approach people who identify as transgender or non-binary”. But rather than clear up misconceptions, Novella wades [read more…]

Prospect Magazine is an “intellectuals’” magazine in the UK covering arts, society, science and politics. Their Summer issue contains an essay by journalist Angela Saini called “What is a woman?”. I wrote a twitter thread detailing how this essay is a good example of a type of argument used to trick people into thinking sex is not a well established scientific concept. This is that (slightly edited) twitter thread… This [read more…]

Much confusion appears to exist in popular discussion about the nature of sex. This has political importance at the moment, most visibly in recognition of people with trans identities in law and society. Confusions abound around conflations of the terms sex and gender, but, most fundamentally, about what a sex is, and what it means for an organism, animal or human, to have a sex. What is a sexed body? [read more…]