Media

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.”

The effectiveness and side-effects of the most common treatments are not well understood.

Doctors who question the orthodoxy won’t be allowed to set up a booth at its annual conference.