After the Cass Review: Lessons for Free Speech from the Tavistock and Beyond

Recorded July 2024

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Tavistock GIDS whistleblowers Sue Evans and Dr David Bell are joined by Prof. Michele Moore, Dr Michael Biggs and Stephanie Davies-Arai to reveal the shocking story of how the care of children was sacrificed to ideology. When the Cass Report was published in April 2024, it was immediately recognised in the UK and abroad as a game-changing intervention in the debate over the treatment of children who express confusion about their gender. Led by eminent paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass, the systematic review was the most extensive and thoroughgoing assessment ever undertaken of the ‘transgender care’ pathway provided by the Tavistock and Portman Trust’s NHS-funded Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS). Devastatingly, Dr Cass and her team concluded that there was no robust evidence base for the ‘affirmative’ treatment thousands of children and young people have received, including the prescribing of ‘puberty blockers’ and cross-sex hormones. The exposure of this medical scandal was fought for, long and hard, by many who suffered for their commitment to medical ethics and safeguarding children. The first member of staff to raise concerns about treatment at the Tavistock Clinic was Sue Evans back in 2005, but she, and others after her, experienced serious attempts to silence them within the clinic, across related professional bodies, in universities, publishing, the media and public life. The Free Speech Union was honoured to bring together an expert panel, including whistleblowere Sue Evans and Dr David Bell from the Tavistock Clinic, who risked their careers and much more to pursue the truth. This is a unique opportunity for us to learn the lessons from the Cass Report and the Tavistock scandal: that open inquiry and freedom of speech are essential to protecting us from pernicious ideas.

About the Speakers

Sue Evans was a state registered nurse and psychiatric nurse and has worked in many areas of mental health. She was a Senior Clinical Lecturer at the Tavistock Clinic and during her employment there, she spent a period of years working in the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS). 

Dr Michael Biggs was the first to discover the experiment with puberty blockers conducted by GIDS and the first to publish its unfavourable results. His research on endocrinological interventions on children and adolescents who identify as transgender has been published in Archives of Sexual Behavior, Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, Journal of Pediatric Endocrinology and Metabolism, and Journal of Sexual Medicine, and in two edited volumes: Inventing Transgender Children and Young People and Sex and Gender: A Contemporary Reader. He acted as an expert witness in the case of Keira Bell and Mrs A. versus Tavistock NHS Trust (2020) at the High Court of England and Wales, for a case in the Australian Family Court, and for Dekker et al. v. Weida et al. in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida. He is Associate Professor of Sociology and Fellow of St Cross College, University of Oxford.   Dr David Bell is a past president of the British Psychoanalytic Society and worked at the Tavistock Clinic as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst for more than 25 years. In his role as Staff Governor, David was approached by clinicians who were working or had worked within GIDS, raising very serious concerns about its approach and in 2018 he wrote a report to convey these concerns to Tavistock management but they responded by instituting proceedings against him. Dr Bell’s persistence in working alongside other whistleblowers to force a change in approach, eventually led to the Cass Review. He is also a leading psychiatric expert in immigration/human rights.   Stephanie Davies-Arai is the founder and director of Transgender Trend, the leading UK organisation calling for