Concerns about gender affirming care

By Mathew Goldstein

Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala was the chief psychiatrist in Finland at one of the first clinics devoted to the treatment of gender-distressed young people. She recently went public with her opposition to the gender affirming protocol where adolescents self-diagnose themselves that she claims originated in the United States and is still widely practiced in the United States with the ongoing support of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Both organizations arrogantly deny credentialed experts within the profession who are dissenters an opportunity to argue in favor of adopting more guardrails at their conferences. Read her article Gender-Affirming Care Is Dangerous. I Know Because I Helped Pioneer It. 

Scientists and public-health officials in Finland, Sweden, France, Norway, and the U.K. are warning that, for some young people, gender transition medical interventions may be doing more harm than good. Handing off the responsibility for deciding how to proceed to self-diagnosing pre-adolescents and adolescents and their parents is arguably more a self-serving shirking of responsibility than an act of benevolence by the medical establishment. Medical treatment policies should be set to match the available evidence regarding what works best regardless of the agenda of activists. To reduce the substantial risk of doing harm clinicians should adopt a more skeptical, restrained, conservative approach to gender transitioning medical interventions, including hormone blockers, when treating young people.