The Fanatics at the RCPCH

Gender Identity Activists have infiltrated the Royal College of Paediatrics

As recently as Spring 2023, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health showed the extent of gender lobbyists’ influence over it by allowing Gendered Intelligence to write an article in its magazine. This was unprecedented access, giving a gender identity pressure group the opportunity to address paediatricians directly. As below, Gendered Intelligence used this to tell paediatric doctors that they should participate in the social transition of children and teenagers by using their chosen name and pronouns. This is despite the fact that in 2022, the Interim Cass Report stated social transition is not a neutral act, but an ‘active intervention because it may have significant effects on the child or young person in terms of their psychological functioning’.

Further to this, Gendered Intelligence’s article states that paediatricians should not assume that a child’s parents should be told of their self-diagnosed ‘gender identity’ and claims that this is not a safeguarding matter. It also tells doctors that child patients should be allowed to use whichever ‘spaces they want’ in terms of toilets and changing rooms, which undercuts other patients’ rights to same sex facilities and is indeed something that also diminishes the safety of these children. 

Gendered Intelligence encourages doctors to act in an affirming manner to children whose ‘gender identity does not match or sit easily with the sex they were assigned at birth’. This is a dangerous ideological instruction which effectively asks doctors to agree with the child on their dysfunctional view of their body. Doctors would not be asked to ‘affirm’ an anorexic patient’s view of themself, as this would clearly not be in the patient’s best interests.

It would be very revealing if the public could know the extent to which lobby groups such as Gendered Intelligence and Stonewall have steered the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health - influences which will have directly impacted the taxpayer-funded NHS. Unfortunately, two Freedom of Information requests enquiring about the RCPCH’s relationship with and funding sent to Stonewall were met with flat refusals due to the college ‘not being a public body’. One of these FOIs was from February 2021, in which the College was asked to disclose any application it made in 2019 or 2020 to be a Stonewall Diversity Champion or to be included on Stonewall’s Workplace Equality Index. The College was also asked about any feedback it received from Stonewall in 2019 or 2020. The other FOI was from December 2021 and asked for details of any funding that the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health provided to Stonewall between 2015-2021. This information remains unknown. 

Although the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health’s profile on the website Charity Job currently states that the RCPCH is a Stonewall Champion Employer, Sex Matters keeps an ongoing list of organisations who have been on the Stonewall Champions list and updates it by crossing off organisations as they become aware of them leaving - one of which being RCPCH. We can therefore conclude that the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health was a paid-up Stonewall Champion for some years but now seems to have ended this association without fanfare. 

Internal Activism at the RCPCH

It also appears that there are doctors internal to the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health who express gender identity activist sentiments.

Dr Max Davie

Dr Max Davie is a consultant in Community Paediatrics at Guy’s & St Thomas’ Trust, which is coincidentally the same Trust that the doctor credited with starting the national NHS Rainbow Badge scheme is based in children’s sleep medicine - Dr Mike Farquhar.

According to this profile of Dr Max Davie (which RCPCH has recently made accessible to members only), he had an influence on Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health policy while in the role of Health Improvement Officer until 2022. A screenshot of this profile is included below. 

It would likely be fair to assume that the Health Improvement Officer was involved in the Royal College’s Health Policy Team. In June 2020, the RCPCH’s Health Policy Team published a statement titled RCPCH Publishes Commitments to Support LGBTQ+ Young People. In the section Key Messages for Health Professionals in the college’s Principle Statement, the RCPCH’s Health Policy Team states ‘The use of [gender identity affirming] pronouns and gender identifiers are important to children and young people. When healthcare professionals use identifiers inappropriately, or don’t ask children and young people in the first place, they lose trust in those caring for them’. The college was clearly following an affirmation-only path at this time, in which children’s self-diagnosed ‘gender identity’ must always be agreed with. 

In the section Role and Responsibilities of Health Professionals within this same statement, a disturbing attitude is conveyed in which parents are described as needing to be educated and corrected regarding their approach to their own children’s ‘gender identity’. ‘Help parents, schools and other agencies to adopt a supportive, flexible and responsive attitude to affirm a child’s expressed gender, whilst being sensitive to change over time. This will involve making appropriate adjustments.’ The nature of these adjustments is not specified and it begs the question, how far did the RCPCH expect parents to go to ‘affirm’ their child’s claimed gender identity? What made them think they had the right to try to override parents’ approach regarding their child? This overreach was sinister, particularly considering more recent developments in the UK’s guidance on gender treatments for children, such as banning the use of puberty blockers. 

In the same June 2020 statement by the RCPCH’s Health Policy Team, Dr Max Davie commented: ‘We’ve come a long way, but there is a lot more to do, especially for transgender young people. As a College, we stand shoulder to shoulder with LGBTQ+ young people, and we will do everything we can to support and protect them.”

The problem is that Dr Davie was referring to gender identity activists’ unique interpretation of ‘protecting children’, which is to advocate for them to continue to be given puberty blockers. This is seen in his paper with Dr Lorna Hobbs in reaction to the Cass Review in August 2024, in which they describe the prescription of puberty blockers being against the law as ‘shocking’. They also use the euphemism ‘puberty-pausing medication’, which implies that puberty can be easily stopped and started again with no ill or permanent effects to the patient. We cannot escape the fact that there are still doctors in various influential roles in the NHS who believe in medically facilitating a permanent change to child patients’ bodies based on the ethereal concept of ‘gender identity’, as though it is a concrete and inherent state of being in childhood. 

In August 2024, Dr Davie posted the following tweet criticising the Cass Review and linking to his and Dr Hobbs’ paper. ‘My colleagues and I have been worried for some time about the way the Cass Review has been reified into a kind of sacred text, when it’s deeply flawed and infused with ideology’. Was this simply projection, as Dr Davie seems to have held a deeply ideological approach towards so-called gender medicine for some years now? 

RCPCH’s Response to Schools Guidance

Another concerning factor which signals internal gender identity activists have significant control in the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health was the college’s March 2024 response to the last government’s schools guidance around children’s ‘gender identities’. The RCPCH raised concerns with the Department for Education regarding not using ‘affirming’ pronouns for children’s self-proclaimed gender identities and argued against parents always being informed. As reported in the Daily Mail, the statement recommends that the DfE ‘consult with 'trans voice organisations' to 'protect the psychological safety' of young people when proposing new policies’. In much the same way, presumably, that the RCPCH appears to have extensively consulted with Gendered Intelligence and Stonewall. 

The RCPCH’s statement was made by its Child Protection Officer Professor Andrew Rowland, who expressed concerns that children would not be ‘supported to be themselves’ at school. This is another telling phrase which shows Professor Rowland’s apparent belief that if parents and teachers do not pretend that children can change their sex, they would be stifling them in some fundamental way. 

However, parents must surely have the right not to have their children lied to about their own and other children’s sex in order to safeguard their psychological wellbeing. As Dr Hilary Cass states, social transition is an ‘active intervention’ which may significantly affect children’s psychological functioning. Therefore how can paediatric doctors in prominent roles within the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health justify pushing this on to children and their parents?