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Nicola Stingelin-Giles vs. transgender people

by Andrea James Reviewed October 21, 2026 4 min read

Nicola Stingelin-Giles is a bioethicist, research-ethics consultant, and anti-transgender activist. Stingelin-Giles is a prominent defender of the 2024 Cass Review and its lead author, Hilary Cass.

Background

From 1987 to 2001, Stingelin-Giles worked for the Purdue/Mundipharma/Napp group of Sackler family pharmaceutical companies, rising to global head and intellectual property specialist. Purdue launched painkiller OxyContin in 1996, which drew on controlled-release IP developed at sibling company Napp for its time-release feature. Peer-reviewed research has linked OxyContin’s introduction and marketing to a substantial share of overdose deaths in the United States’ subsequent opioid crisis. Stingelin-Giles subsequently began training as a bioethicist.

Stingelin-Giles earned an MBA from from City University Zürich in 2004. tingelin-Giles has been a member of Roche’s external ethics advisory group since 2006. Since 2012, Stingelin-Giles has also worked as an independent ethics consultant to several international pharmaceutical companies.

Stingelin-Giles then earned a doctorate from the University of Basel and was affiliated with the Institute for Biomedical Ethics. From 2010 to 2013, Stingelin-Giles worked at Basel as a lecturer, researcher and postdoctoral fellow. Stingelin-Giles later worked in the Department of Clinical Ethics at the Psychiatric Hospital of the University of Basel. There, with Stella Reiter-Theil and Elisabeta Ioana Hiriscau, Stingelin-Giles published on ethical questions in mental-health and prevention research involving children and adolescents.

From February 2010 to 2012, Stingelin-Giles also led the ethics work package of ADAMS, an EU Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) project in genomics and genome-wide association research.

Stingelin-Giles co-authored a 2011 paper in Bioethics with Stella Reiter-Theil and others. The paper set out the theoretical framework of METAP, a multi-centre project supporting clinical ethics.

Anti-trans activism

Stingelin-Giles is a prominent supporter and defender of the 2024 Cass Review, a document created as a pretext to restrict or ban medical transition options for young people in the United Kingdom.

In a May 2025 statement submitted to the UK government on “research integrity,” Stingelin-Giles cites a 2025 Royal Society article on “science under threat” to attack critics of the Cass Review:

“[T]he values that have driven science for the benefit of humanity are (again) under threat due to financial pressures and ideological agendas that are being used to: (a) suppress the conduct of research and (b) ignore, suppress, systematically discredit [1] or distort research findings.

[1] As an example, the White House issued on 20th January 2025 an executive order ‘defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government’. The UK Cass Report (that has been adopted for implementation by the NHS) has been subjected to the international discreditation of its evidence base and resulting recommendations.

In June 2025, Stingelin-Giles, Camilla Kingdon, and Hilary Cass coauthored a response to a target article by Jeffrey Kirby on the ethics of trans healthcare for youth. Kingdon and Cass were key figures in the development of the 2024 Cass Review.

Policy and practice in the management of children and young people in the UK has changed in response to publication of The Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People (Cass 2024b) (“the Cass Review”/“the Review”). In contrast to the situation in the US, where views about the correct approach to this area of medicine are split along partisan lines, the Cass Review has the support of both major political parties, with implementation being started under the previous Conservative government and continued under the current Labour administration. Much of the subsequent disinformation about the Cass Review in the US arises from a fundamental and profound misunderstanding about the commissioning and governance of independent reviews in the UK, lack of knowledge about UK regulatory processes, and disregard for the extensive stakeholder engagement processes. This is evidenced, for example, in a recent opinion piece in the New England Journal of Medicine (Aaron and Konnoth 2025), and a widely cited essay on the Yale Law School website (McNamara et al. 2024) which has subsequently been extensively debunked by a number of authors (Cheung et al. 2025; McDeavitt et al. 2025) Some of these errors are also reproduced in Kirby’s target paper in this issue (Kirby 2025).

The cited anti-trans authors who “extensively debunked” criticisms of the Cass Review are:

Other anti-trans critics of Kirby in the same issue include:

Selected writing by Stingelin-Giles

Stingelin-Giles, Nicola (May 5, 2025). SDY0003: UK as Global Leader in Upholding the Highest Standards of Research Integrity. https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/141419/html/

Kingdon, C., Stingelin-Giles, N., & Cass, H. (2025). The Cass Review; Distinguishing Fact from Fiction. The American Journal of Bioethics, 25(6), 5–10. https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2025.2504397

  • response to Kirby, J. (2025). A Multi-Lens Ethics Analysis of Gender-Affirming Care for Youth with Implications for Practice and Policy. The American Journal of Bioethics, 25(6), 57–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2025.2497983

Resources

Infectious Diseases Data Observatory (iddo.org)



LinkedIn (linkedin.com)

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