Category: Health Care

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Positive Movement By American Academy of Pediatrics & Others

From the Wall Street Journal.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, the nation’s premier association of pediatricians, plans to review the evidence for gender-affirming medical care and potentially amend its policies that help guide doctors and clinicians providing the treatment to transgender youth. 

The exact scope of the review has yet to be determined, but is expected to include an evaluation of medical interventions such as puberty blockers and hormones, which are in some cases used to delay puberty or boost physical features associated with a gender different from the patient’s sex at birth. 

The process, known as a systematic evidence review, typically looks at all relevant evidence behind any given treatment, adjusting for bias and other potential flaws. It will be conducted by an external organization, the AAP said. 

In a related matter.

PSH are Puberty Suppressing Hormones aka Puberty Blockers

Another change of mind about puberty blockers. (Good God. What was he thinking to begin with.)

“I’ve changed my mind based on the evidence; it’s really not a pause for the vast majority of young people,” he said.

Dr. Stathis, who is medical director of Child and Youth Mental Health Service at Children’s Health Queensland, was referring to Dutch and English data showing that almost all of the young patients started on blockers went on to cross-sex hormones, which have irreversible effects. 

Blockers have often been promoted as a “no regrets” option giving a child time to mature and consider the weighty decision whether to progress to lifelong hormones.

Dr. Stathis, a child and adolescent psychiatrist who founded the gender clinic at the Queensland Children’s Hospital where patient numbers rose from 48 in 2014 to 635 in 2021, made the remarks on July 23 during a lengthy presentation at a conference of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP) in Cairns, Queensland.

Dr. Stathis appears to be one of the first gender-affirming clinicians to publicly accept the findings of systematic reviews in Finland, Sweden and the United Kingdom since 2019 that the evidence base for medical transition of minors is of low quality and very uncertain.

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I Feel The ‘Earth’ Moving

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University Youth Gender Clinics Closing or Scaling Back

ANALYSIS: Some gender clinics are already shutting their doors, even while litigation proceeds

Up to 13 pediatric gender clinics at university hospitals could close or scale back by the end of the year, as a result of Republican-led states restricting doctors from removing healthy organs or injecting hormones into minors who are confused about their gender.

Source: The College Fix

A good start.

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Love Refuses To Affirm Confusion

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Treatment Harm in Gender Medicine

A recent article from the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, Iatrogenic Harm in Gender Medicine,1“iatrogenic” – relating to illness caused by medical examination or treatment. clarifies the risks of Transgenderism.

The author wants us to consider “the increasing number of young detransitioners.”

Published June 19,2023. Author Sarah C. J. Jorgensen.

ABSTRACT
Although transition regret and detransition are often dismissed as rare, the increasing number of young detransitioners who have come forward in recent years to publicly share their experiences suggests that there are cracks in the gender-affirmation model of care that can no longer be ignored. In this commentary, I argue that the medical community must find ways to have more open discussions and commit to research and clinical collaboration so that regret and detransition really are vanishingly rare outcomes. Moving forward, we must recognize detransitioners as survivors of iatrogenic harm and provide them with the personalized medicine and supports they require.

Many proponents of youth gender transition downplay regret as vanishingly rare (Astor, Citation2023; Coleman et al., Citation2022; McNamara, Lepore, & Alstott, Citation2022; Respaut, Terhune, & Conlin, Citation2022), and it’s easy to understand why: if young people can be mistaken about their gender identity and regret their decision to transition, then the diagnostic approach endorsed by many gender-affirming clinicians, which is based upon the premise that young people “know who they are,” (Ehrensaft, Citation2016, p.114) and adults should “[follow] their lead” (Ehrensaft, Citation2016, p. 54), is clearly failing some patients. The processes of differential diagnosis and clinical assessment that clinicians perform in all other patient encounters have been recast as unnecessary “gatekeeping” under the gender-affirming care model (Amengual, Kunstman, Lloyd, Janssen, & Wescott, Citation2022; Ashley, Citation2019; Cass, Citation2022). Many detransitioners report not receiving sufficient exploration of psychological and emotional problems before being offered hormones or surgery (Gribble, Bewley, & Dahlen, Citation2023; Littman, Citation2021; Pullen Sansfaçon et al., Citation2023; Vandenbussche, Citation2022). “Minority stress,” (i.e., the theory that external forces, such as sigma and discrimination related to gender non-conformity, are the drivers of co-occurring mental health problems) is often evoked to explain away self-harm, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and even autism (Coleman et al., Citation2022; Kingsbury, Hammond, Johnstone, & Colman, Citation2022; Rood et al., Citation2016; Turban & van Schalkwyk, Citation2018), despite evidence demonstrating high rates of mental illness and neurodiversity before the onset of gender-incongruence 

Source: Taylor & Francis Online

Companion Post

Review: Gender-Affirming Therapy Fails To Show Credible Improvements In Mental Health

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