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Camilla Kingdon vs. transgender people

Camilla Kingdon is a South African-born pediatrician based in the United Kingdom. Kingdon was involved in the 2024 Cass Review, created as a pretext to restrict or ban transgender healthcare for minors. Kingdon has co-authored work with Zhenya Abbruzzese, a founder of anti-trans hate group Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine.

Background

Camilla C. Kingdon trained in medicine at the University of Cape Town before relocating to the United Kingdom in 1991. Kingdon initially explored adult medicine but soon moved into pediatrics. After completing padiatric training in London and achieving a Certificate of Completion of Training (CCT) in 2000, Kingdon began a long-standing career as a consultant neonatologist, primarily at Evelina London Children’s Hospital, specializing in neonatal nutrition, donor milk banking, and neurodevelopmental follow-up of high-risk infants.

Kingdon served as Head of the London School of Paediatrics and Child Health for five years and earned a master’s degree in Medical Careers Management. Kingdon has held leadership roles at the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH), serving as Vice President for Education and Professional Development and later President from 2021 until 2024. In 2025, Kingdon took on a strategic governance role as a Non-Executive Director at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust. Kingdon was appointed by the UK government as independent chair of an expert review of children’s hearing services.

Cass Review

As part of the 2024 Cass Review, Kingdon wrote the lead editorial for the Gender Identity Service Series published in The BMJ journal Archives of Disease in Childhood in 2024. In it, Kingdon supported continuing the UK’s gatekeeping model through regional gender clinics, many of which have years-long waitlists.

Comprehensive adolescent services in the UK are sadly lacking and I think we should all have a collective vision of seeing gender services being part of a suite of services offered to children and young people in regional adolescent services. A holistic approach like that would mean that our patients would get the full range of physical and mental health needs addressed in one place, and staff working in these services would find collective support from the wider multiprofessional team.

This edition of Archives of Disease in Childhood includes the latest evidence review of everything that has been published on this topic and gives us the important foundation on which to build our collective expertise and confidence as we set up the new services to take care of these children and young people.

In 2025, the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) announced tightly controlled clinical trials for puberty blockers, to be managed by the Children and Young People’s Gender Dysphoria Research Oversight Board. Simon Wessely was announced as chair, with Hilary Cass as Independent Advisor on Gender and Kingdon as Chair of the Children and Young People’s Gender Services Provider Collaborative. The group is leading PATHWAYS, an acronym for Puberty suppression And Transitional Healthcare with Adaptive Youth Services. The PATHWAYS study “aims to find out how the NHS can best support children and young people with gender incongruence,” including how puberty blockers, or gonadotropin releasing hormone analogues (GnRHa) might be used.

Selected writing by Kingdon

Cheung CR, Abbruzzese E, Lockhart E, Maconochie IK, Kingdon CC (2024). Gender medicine and the Cass Review: why medicine and the law make poor bedfellows. Archives of Disease in Childhood, epub 14 October 2024 https://doi.org/10.1136/archdischild-2024-327994

Kingdon, C. C. (2024). Holistic approach to gender questioning children and young people. Archives of Disease in Childhood, archdischild-2024-327100. https://doi.org/10.1136/archdischild-2024-327100

Resources

Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (rcpch.ac.uk)