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Dr D’Angelo told today’s conference attendees—who included current and former leaders of gender clinics as well as researchers and practitioners from around the world—that the labelling of SEGM as a “hate group” was “a deliberate and damaging misrepresentation of our work.

WHO says that it adheres to standard protocol for its transgender health guideline, but the process has been criticised for lacking transparency and an association with WPATH—an organisation under fire for meddling with its own guideline development.

The review by Hilary Cass, paediatrician and former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, was commissioned by the NHS and built on the findings of Cass’s 2022 interim report.

In October 2023, SEGM held its first official conference in New York, which brought together an array of high-profile speakers, such as Mikael Landén, a psychiatrist and researcher at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, and Sallie Baxendale, a professor of clinical neuropsychology at University College London.

More and more teenage girls are choosing to change gender around the world. In Quebec, the healthcare system responds very quickly to their requests for medical transition by prescribing blockers, testosterone, and mastectomies. These young girls often have several mental health issues, and many are wondering whether enough time is taken to assess everything that’s going on in their minds.

My column on Friday about detransitioners, people who no longer believe they are transgender, was a way to explore some of the problems in how we treat gender-dysphoric youth. One common response from those who favor the current treatment model, which proponents call gender-affirming care, is that very few people detransition.

On Thursday, the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine, or SEGM, issued its second letter criticizing the WHO’s effort, critiquing the guidelines-development process as apparently flawed from the time of its quiet inception two to three years ago.

Recently I attended a conference in New York, hosted by Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine (SEGM), a US-based non-profit, where I was asked to give a presentation on ‘lessons from the largest youth gender clinic in the world’ – for that’s what GIDS was.

For two years in a row, AAP members submitted formal resolutions to the executive board asking “that the academy commit to the principles of evidence based medicine by eschewing narrative and other types of non-systematic reviews as the basis for its recommendations” and either use existing systematic reviews or commission its own.

In June, England’s National Health Service announced that it would restrict the use of puberty blockers to clinical trials because “there is not enough evidence to support their safety or clinical effectiveness as a routinely available treatment.”