Re: LGBTQIA+ Gender-affirming care for transgender kids is going to backfire: experts

[Lock Them Up!]

In article <t0au0g$2bei1$5...@news.freedyn.de>
<governo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> ...Queers should not be allowed near children.
> LGBTQIA+ monkeypox is a fucking gay disease, so stop lying about it.
>

When her biological daughter Alex* came out as transgender at
the age of 12, Anna* offered her support instantly — but she
also had concerns. The New York City-based mom knew her child
also suffered from autism, severe depression and self-harm, and
hoped that any psychologist exploring a transition with her
child would consider all those conditions as part of the
treatment.

Instead, she says her child was offered puberty blockers after a
10-minute evaluation at “the best possible clinic” for
transgender care in New York. “My child’s autism was completely
overlooked,” Anna told The Post.

Although Anna needed to give consent for Alex to start the
puberty blocker treatment (which she denied), she said she and
her husband felt pressured to give her the hormones. “From the
first moment we told her counselor that our child said she was
trans, they told us the standard of care is to affirm. That was
it. No questions. I thought we have to trust the science, we
have to trust the medical professionals. But I now know they
have little understanding of what’s truly going on,” she said.

In the three years since Alex has identified as transgender, the
teen has been hospitalized multiple times for mental health
reasons and has attempted suicide once. Now Anna worries that
therapists sent her family down the wrong path.

“There was no real exploration as to what does it mean to be
trans,” Anna said. “What does she mean she feels like a boy? Why
do you think you’re not a girl? Tell me more. How does that
feel? How do you know? And what does that mean to you? There was
no exploration of that.”

Many parents of children with gender dysphoria feel just like
Anna right now, being told they must support their kids’
transitions at all costs. In June, President Biden promised to
ensure access to gender-affirmative care for all American trans
youths via executive order. But that same approach was recently
called into question in the UK, where the country’s only clinic
treating trans minors is closing next year following a damning
report.

In July, Britain’s National Health Service announced plans to
shutter the Gender Identity and Development Service (GIDS) at
the Tavistock clinic in London, where thousands of young
patients have been treated since 1989. According to an
independent report, patients found that their full range of
mental-health issues were “sometimes overlooked” and staffers
felt under pressure to adopt an “unquestioning affirmative
approach.”

A “significant increase of referrals” — from 138 in 2010 to
2,383 in 2020 — and a two-year waitlist also incentivized GIDS
staffers to rush children through their transitions, according
to the report by Dr. Hillary Cass. GIDS also failed to collect
data about the treatments offered at the clinic or their long-
term outcomes, Cass wrote.

One young patient, Keira Bell, a biological female who medically
transitioned to a male at GIDS, went so far as to sue the
clinic, writing in a post, “The consequences of what happened to
me have been profound: possible infertility, loss of my breasts
and inability to breastfeed, atrophied genitals, a permanently
changed voice, facial hair. When I was seen at the Tavistock
clinic, I had so many issues that it was comforting to think I
really had only one that needed solving: I was a male in a
female body. But it was the job of the professionals to consider
all my co-morbidities, not just to affirm my naïve hope that
everything could be solved with hormones and surgery.”

GIDS is now scheduled to close in spring of 2023, and the NHS
will shift its gender identity services to smaller regional
centers better equipped to treat patients holistically, as
recommended by the report.

Former Tavistock executive Marcus Evans told The Post he feels
“vindicated” by Cass’ report.

Evans was Clinical Director of Adult and Adolescent Services at
the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, which oversees GIDS, but
stepped down from his role on the Board of Governors in 2019
after he grew concerned about children being rushed through
medical transitions.

“There is no research that justifies our current approaches.
We’re in the dark, and we’ve just been putting children on a
medical conveyor belt,” he said. “It’s as if the whole Trust has
gone off into the area of political activism, and Hilary Cass is
pulling it back. It’s absolutely extraordinary.”

Britain is just one European country pumping the brakes on
medicalizing transgender youth. In March, France’s National
Academy of Medicine advised caution on gender affirming care for
young people. In February, Sweden — a progressive country
previously on the cutting edge of providing medical services to
transgender youth — also reversed course. The Swedish National
Board of Health and Welfare updated its guidelines for treating
trans youth, scaling back the use of puberty blockers and cross-
sex hormones, saying there hasn’t been enough research on their
efficacy or side effects.

But, here in the United States, the affirming care model is
still embraced with open arms.

In January, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) doubled
down on its 2018 policy advocating gender affirming care for
minors, including the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex
hormones. According to the AAP, “youth who identify as TGD
(transgender and gender diverse) [should] have access to
comprehensive, gender-affirming and developmentally appropriate
health care.”

Two months later, a group of five pediatricians signed a letter
calling on the AAP to reconsider these guidelines. “We want our
children to be affirmed as whole human beings,” the authors
wrote. “And we want them to be treated with evidence-based
interventions which ensure that benefits outweigh the risks.”
But, so far, their calls for greater moderation have fallen on
deaf ears.

Dr. Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist specializing in
gender, sexuality and identity, agrees the affirmative care
model has gotten out of control. A transgender woman herself,
Anderson advocates an exploratory, methodical approach that
emphasizes a full mental health evaluation prior to any medical
intervention.

“[Exploratory care] has been the standard of care in the United
States but in some circles is being ignored, much to my
chagrin,” she told The Post. “Many parents contact me . . . and
rather than getting a full comprehensive individualized
psychosocial evaluation, they are told, ‘Here’s the pathway to
hormones.’ ”

While parental consent is required before trans youths under 18
undergo a medical transition, many moms and dads feel pressured
into treatment. And Anderson worries that kids are being hurt by
this swift affirmative care approach, both in the US and at GIDS.

“In the haste to treat these kids, they’ve taken some shortcuts,
and those shortcuts aren’t going to look good in the long run. I
think we’re going to have an increased number of kids who don’t
do well transitioning on medicine and ultimately detransition.”

Already, young American detransitioners are speaking out.

In July, Brian Wagoner, 31, told The Post how he decided to
return to his biological gender after years of living as a woman
on estrogen treatment. “Transition made all my problems worse,”
he said. “There’s a lot of money to be made by doctors here.
They see the dollar signs, and in the end, money talks.” And
Chloe Cole, who had a double mastectomy to live as a man before
detransitioning back to a woman, is campaigning for a Florida
rule that will block Medicaid funds from paying for medical
interventions in cases like hers.

“I really didn’t understand all of the ramifications of any of
the medical decisions that I was making,” Cole, now 17, said at
a recent hearing. “I was unknowingly physically cutting off my
true self from my body, irreversibly and painfully.”

Complicating matters in New York and other blue states are laws
that make all kinds of “conversion” therapy illegal — including
any attempt to change a person’s gender identity. The vagueness
of the law has put some therapists in limbo, worried that
questioning their patients’ feelings about gender dysphoria
could jeopardize their careers or even open them to legal action.

“For some who are afraid of being accused of doing conversion
therapy — even though they don’t think they are, and they don’t
call it that — these laws could be intimidating,” Anderson said.

This legal ambiguity has also left parents like Anna feeling
left out of their own children’s transitions. “The government,
the schools, and the president are all talking about affirmation
all the time and trying to drive a wedge between children and
their parents,” Anna said. “I really feel like we’re trapped in
this deep blue state where affirmation is the only legal option
for care.”

For anything to change, Evans said the transgender treatment
industry must stop its “political culture and reestablish a
clinical culture in which people can challenge and discuss and
look at things from different points of view.”

Anderson agrees. “I actually think it’s gender affirming to do
exploratory therapy,” she said. “It’s just what therapists do.
‘Tell me more, I want to understand and explore all the factors
that might be related.’”

Until we can establish such a culture, Anna takes heart from the
news about Europe’s more moderate approach.

“It gives me a tremendous amount of hope,” said Anna, who added
that her child is finally in a better place with improved
overall mental health. “As more and more of these stories of
vulnerable young people who feel betrayed by the care they got
come out, it will be impossible to ignore.”

* Names have been changed to protect the identities of these
sources.

https://nypost.com/2022/09/03/gender-affirming-care-for-
transgender-kids-will-backfire-experts/