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C. Ronny Cheung vs. transgender people

by Andrea James Reviewed November 2, 2026 6 min read

C. Ronny Cheung is a British pediatrician and anti-transgender activist. Cheung has collaborated with anti-trans hate group Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine on a paper defending the 2024 anti-trans Cass Review.

Background

Cheung earned a bachelor’s degree from University of Cambridge in 1998 and a medical degree from University of Oxford in 2001. Cheung became a Member of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health in 2006 and completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Medical Education at University of Dundee in 2013.

After qualifying, Cheung worked in Oxford, in Brisbane, Australia, and in Leeds, then completed specialist pediatric training in Birmingham and London. In 2010, Cheung was made a Fellow of both the Academy of Medical Educators and the Higher Education Academy.

Cheung was seconded as a clinical advisor to the Chief Medical Officer for England at the Department of Health, and as a health policy advisor to the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit in the Cabinet Office. From 2012 to 2018, Cheung was clinical advisor to Public Health England’s Child and Maternal Health Intelligence Network.

Cheung joined Evelina London Children’s Hospital as a consultant general pediatrician in 2014 and has served as joint Head of Service for General Paediatrics. Cheung was later joint clinical lead for improvement at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, the hospital’s parent trust. Since 2023, Cheung has been the trust’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer responsible for clinical improvement.

Cheung also served as clinical director of the Healthy London Partnership’s Child Death Review Transformation Programme. Cheung holds an honorary senior lectureship in the Department of Women and Children’s Health at King’s College London.

Cheung has held a series of volunteer roles at the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH), including membership of its Trainee Committee and Health Informatics Committee, and advisory roles on the Child Health 2030 and Facing the Future standards working groups. Cheung was part of RCPCH’s editorial and author team for the first State of Child Health report in 2017. RCPCH then became clinical lead and chief editor of the second report, published in 2020, which tracked UK children’s health against a set of national indicators. In December 2022, the college announced Cheung as its new Officer for Health Services, a role focused on the design and delivery of children’s health services. Cheung later joined the college’s Board of Trustees.

Cheung’s research focuses on child health services, healthcare quality and outcomes, and unwarranted variation in children’s care. Cheung was lead editor of the 2012 and 2013 editions of the NHS Atlas of Variation in Healthcare for Children and Young People, which mapped differences in care and outcomes between areas of England.

With the Nuffield Trust, Cheung has co-authored reports on international comparisons of child and adolescent health, emergency hospital use among children, childhood obesity, and local variation in infant mortality. Cheung’s Nuffield Trust work also includes developing age-specific hospital catchment populations to measure variation in children’s admissions.

Anti-trans activism

Cheung’s main published contribution on transgender healthcare is a 2024 article defending the 2024 Cass Review. Cheung’s paper is illustrative of how Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) and ideological allies within professional associations and journals frame their political aims as apolitical, while claiming their critics are politically motivated.

Authors and contributors:

  • Zhenya Abbruzzese: SEGM
  • C. Ronny Cheung: RCPCH (trustee)
  • Camilla C. Kingdon: RCPCH (past president)
  • Elaine Lockhart: RCPsych (chair, Faculty of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry)
  • Ian K. Maconochie: RCPCH (past registrar)
  • Two researchers who assist SEGM on papers:
    • Simon Lancaster “for his support in researching the history of Independent Reviews, and manuscript support”
    • Ray Zhang “for his support of the methodological review section”

Cheung at al. summary

Cheung and colleagues criticize frequent targets of SEGM:

The paper responded to a July 2024 motion [original] by the British Medical Association (BMA) Council calling for a public critique of the Cass Review and a pause in its implementation. The authors examined the two papers cited in the BMA motion:

In addition to these criticisms of the Cass Review, the paper also criticizes:

Cheung and colleagues’ main arguments are:

  • They claim both critiques treated the Cass Review as a clinical practice guideline, not an independent review. In their view, this “category error” undermined criticisms about chair Hilary Cass’ lack of gender-medicine experience, use of unnamed contributors, and the absence of GRADE ratings in the recommendations.
  • They claim methodological criticisms of the University of York systematic reviews were largely unfounded. The authors rated two US studies the critics said had been wrongly excluded (Chen 2023 and Tordoff 2022) as at “critical risk of bias” using the ROBINS-I tool.
  • They claim the Integrity Project paper was written mainly to support US litigation against state restrictions on youth gender medicine. It contained factual errors, including on how the review scored WPATH’s guidelines and on a claimed 0.3% detransition rate.

Analysis and reception

This paper illustrates three key disputes:

  1. The ongoing conflict within the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) over models of transgender healthcare for young people. Non-affirming clinicians support restrictions like rigid gatekeeping and use of medical options only within research settings. Several high-ranking RCPCH members, including Cheung, former presidents Hilary Cass and Camilla Kingdon, and current president Steve Turner, support and defend the Cass Review. RCPCH members who support affirming models have been critical of the Cass Review and its conclusions.
  2. The global influence of SEGM in discrediting professional bodies, position statements, and guidelines supporting affirmative models. SEGM cultivates relationships with reputable clinicians and researchers like Cheung to add a veneer of credibility to their political aims.
  3. The ongoing conflict between the British Medical Association and the collection of journals it publishes under the BMJ banner. These journals have editorial independence from the BMA, and they are consistently sympathetic venues for critics of transgender healthcare policy for young people, especially SEGM-affiliated critics. Academics have commented that BMJ “needs to take responsibility for its own part in enabling anti-gender ideology,” a view Gordon Guyatt acknowledged in a statement cutting ties between SEGM and McMaster University.

Cheung and colleagues cite several pieces from BMJ publications, including BMJ itself and Archives of Disease in Childhood:

They also cite:

They also cite several consistently anti-trans writers and bloggers:

Citation and dissemination

The article has since been cited in anti-trans academic journals known for promoting non-affirming models of care, including Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy and Archives of Sexual Behavior. Many authors have direct ties to SEGM or the Cass Review:

Selected writing by Cheung

Cheung, C. R., Abbruzzese, E., Lockhart, E., Maconochie, I. K., & Kingdon, C. C. (2024). Gender medicine and the Cass Review: why medicine and the law make poor bedfellows. Archives of Disease in Childhood, 110(4), 251–255. https://doi.org/10.1136/archdischild-2024-327994

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