Motion #21

Cass and Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People

Synopsis

This motion states the Green Party’s unequivocal support for the recommendations of the 2024 independent review by Hilary Cass as fully in line with our own evidence-based approach to healthcare and safeguarding of children and young people. In addition, we support the NHS ban on puberty blockers for this cohort.

Motion

Insert into the Record of Policy Statements

The Green Party unequivocally supports the final recommendations of the 2024 Cass Report, the independent review of services provided by the NHS to children and young people who are questioning their gender identity or experiencing gender incongruence.

Hilary Cass rightly highlights the risks of prematurely prescribing drugs unlicensed for this purpose and without prior research into their harms and benefits. The focus should be on providing support and services which meet the holistic needs of each young person while building the evidence base of the effectiveness and impact of different approaches.

We agree with Cass that the healthcare approach should be broadened to help the growing number of children and young people who are looking for support from the NHS to help them to manage their reported gender distress.

Cass makes many sensible observations and recommendations. The Green Party particularly endorses:

·       Better clinical evidence base must be established.

·       Holistic approach to considering each young person’s needs should be adopted.

·       Recognition of the harm caused by excessive waiting times.

·       Need for more local and regional services, easier to access.

·       Importance of services operating to the same standard as other services for young people with complex needs.

·       More training on working with trans people across the NHS, not just for those working in gender services.

·       Importance of listening to children and their families and treating them as individuals rather than as a homogenous group.

·       Better continuity between children’s and adults’ services.

·       Need to address potential loss of patient medical records when someone has their gender recorded differently to their sex.

Thousands of young people have not been properly supported by NHS gender identity services, which must now embrace multidisciplinary, holistic healthcare, including psychological and psychopharmacological treatment approaches.

The Green Party supports the ban on the NHS prescription of puberty blockers for children and young people as wholly consistent with the recommendations of Cass, medical due diligence and the precautionary principle. Private providers should also be prevented from prescribing puberty blockers to this cohort outside the NHS.

The Cass review is an important part of the process of improving healthcare for young people who may be questioning their gender identity.

Conference calls upon spokespersons for the Green Party, in particular, our Health Spokesperson, those in national leadership roles, and our parliamentarians, elected or appointed, to faithfully communicate and promote this official position as appropriate and proportionate.

Background

SOC Note: in the interests of preventing the Agenda document from becoming excessively large and in order to save on printing costs, SOC here includes a link to a PDF of this background paper: <https://spaces.greenparty.org.uk/file/file/download?guid=97ba5194-fb4a-400e-9cd6-c62709762086&hash_sha1=a1cb454e>