The year 2020 has been pivotal in the field of gender medicine. Earlier this month, in a landmark decision, the UK High Court ruled that children under 16 are unlikely to be able to consent to the use of puberty blockers, which the Court deemed to be an experimental treatment. Rather than a “pause button,” the court recognized puberty blockers as the first step in a largely irreversible pathway of medical transition.

In 2018 Andrea Davidson’s 12-year-old daughter, Meghan, announced she was “definitely a boy”. Ms Davidson says her child was never a tomboy but the family doctor congratulated her and asked what pronouns she had chosen, before writing a referral to the British Columbia Children’s Hospital (BCCH). “We thought we were going to see a psychologist, but it was a nurse and a social worker,” says Ms Davidson (both her and her daughter’s names have been changed).

The Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) maintains that treatments for gender-dysphoric people should be supported by high quality evidence. We commend the thorough process undertaken by the UK High Court to assess the ability of young people to consent to treatment that has serious side effects and lacks adequate supporting evidence.

In September 2019, JAMA Psychiatry published an article, Association Between Recalled Exposure to Gender Identity Conversion Efforts and Psychological Distress and Suicide Attempts Among Transgender Adults. The article concluded that therapies that did not "affirm" an individual's transgender identity (which the article refers to as "gender-identity conversion efforts / "GICE") lead to severe distress and even suicide attempts. These findings have been used to promote legislative bans on non-affirmative therapies worldwide.

In October 2019, the American Journal of Psychiatry (AJP) published a study from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, and the Yale School of Public Health which reported that “gender-affirming" surgeries for gender dysphoric patients are associated with improved mental health outcomes (1). Looking at mental health utilization in the year 2015, a retrospective analysis showed that the more time passed since surgery, the fewer mental services were utilized by patients, with an average 8% reduction in