The Department of Health and Human Services recently released a report documenting “serious concerns about medical interventions, such as puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries, that attempt to transition children and adolescents away from their sex.” The report confirms what many professionals who work with gender-confused youth, including myself, have been saying for years: A fast-tracked, affirmation-only approach to gender dysphoria harms far more than it helps.
That’s why I find it so concerning that the American Academy of Pediatrics has chosen to ignore HHS’s findings, which are backed by a 100-plus page bibliography of evidence and will undergo a full peer review in the coming days, and instead continue promoting medical interventions that lack the same scientific backing.
AAP President Susan Kressly claimed in a statement that the HHS report “misrepresents the current medical consensus and fails to reflect the realities of pediatric care.” But the only ones misrepresenting the reality of so-called “gender-affirming care” are Kressly, the organization she leads, and other medical groups that continue to push medicalization.
In fact, the growing consensus among researchers and medical professionals in much of the rest of the Western world is that “gender-affirming care” has been a disaster. The Cass report, released in the United Kingdom last year, found after three years of research that the evidence used to back medical and chemical interventions in children was “remarkably weak” and more often than not “exaggerated or misrepresented” by gender ideologues such as Kressly.
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