Doctors Quit British Medical Association Over Its Support for Puberty Blockers

Hundreds of U.K. doctors are protesting the British Medical Association’s (BMA) rejection of the Cass review’s recommendations against prescribing puberty blockers for minors. Some are even quitting the BMA after decades of membership.

Pediatrician Hilary Cass led a systematic review of the existing literature on treatments for gender-confused children. The final, peer-reviewed report concluded that “unproven” treatments such as puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones were “not the best way” to treat children and adolescents with “gender-related distress.” It recommended that such treatments be discontinued.

According to the Times, “The rest of the medical establishment and the NHS [National Health Service] have fully accepted and supported the review.”

Motion Sickness

However, on July 31, the BMA’s 69-member council “passed a motion calling for a ‘critique’ of the Cass review and arguing it is discriminatory to stop prescribing sex hormones to children,” the paper reported earlier. On Monday, it elaborated that “the BMA has argued that there are ‘weaknesses in the methodologies’ used by Cass and that its recommendations are ‘unsubstantiated.’”

Wrote the Times:

The motion was tabled at the BMA council by Tom Dolphin, a consultant anesthetist in London, and Vassili Crispi, a junior doctor in Birmingham who has said that “rejecting the Cass review is one of many steps we need to take.”

It was backed by Emma Runswick, deputy chair of the BMA council, who is the ringleader of a left-wing and pro-strike coalition of junior doctors elected to the leadership body in 2022. Runswick has described the ban on puberty blockers as a “terrible decision” and repeated a debunked claim that it is linked to more suicides.

The council did not bother to ask its 195,000 members for a second opinion before passing the motion. Council member Jacky Davis, who opposed the motion, told the Times:

The BMA council contains a vocal minority who have an anti-Cass agenda. They are driving policy in a direction that the membership have not been consulted on and do not agree with.

This minority has voted to block the implementation of Cass, an evidence-based review which took four years to put together. They have no evidence for their opposition…. It is not our business as a union to be doing a critique of the Cass review. It is a waste of time and resources.

Insurgency Room

It soon became apparent just how out of step the council is with its members. Days after the vote, a group of them posted an open letter to BMA chairman Philip Banfield stating:

We write as doctors to say, “not in my name.” We are extremely disappointed that the BMA council has passed a motion to conduct a “critique” of the Cass review and to lobby to oppose its recommendations.

The passing of the motion was opaque and secretive. It does not reflect the views of the wider membership, whose opinion you did not seek. We understand that no information will be released on the voting figures and how council members voted. That is a failure of accountability to members and simply not acceptable.

The doctors urged the BMA to “abandon its pointless exercise” of attacking the Cass review. “By lobbying against the best evidence we have,” they wrote, “the BMA is going against the principles of evidence-based medicine and against ethical practice.”

The letter has since been signed by over 1,400 doctors, 900 of whom are BMA members. Among the signatories, the Times noted, are “high-profile figures, including nearly 70 professors and 23 former or current presidents of medical royal colleges.”

Is There a Doctor in the BMA?

Some of the signatories have gone so far as to terminate their BMA memberships, the Times reported:

Comments left by signatories include dozens saying that they are resigning or considering resigning their membership. Many doctors criticized members of the council, with one calling for a “vote of no confidence in BMA leadership,” another saying that it was “an abysmal failure of leadership” and another commenting that “activists appear to have been allowed to take over.”

According to the Telegraph, one doctor remarked:

On the basis of the BMA’s outrageous stance on the superbly researched and written Cass Report, which has my full support and endorsement, I have decided to leave the BMA having been a member for 50 years since I qualified as a doctor. 

Increasingly, they not only fail to represent my views, they display no respect for the very premise and ethos inherent in being a medical professional.

The precise number of members who have left over the matter is not yet known.

Whether or not the BMA reverses itself, the incident and the media coverage of it — the Telegraph’s report included a sidebar explaining the shift in medical opinion on puberty blockers from being “safe” and “reversible” to having “lasting physical and psychological effects” — show that the LGBT lobby is rapidly losing its stranglehold on medicine, at least in the realm of Charles III. As LifeSiteNews’ Jonathon Van Maren observed:

The ideologically captured British Medical Association is facing a full-scale revolt from its own members, and its credibility is taking a severe hit. Even the press coverage of their move, which would have been laudatory only a few years ago, is almost universally negative.

The BMA is still committed to its agenda — but its grip on the narrative has been broken, and it seems unlikely that the union will be able to reestablish it.