and it's damned time.
The background to this interview is important. Finland was among the first countries to adopt the “Dutch protocol” for pediatric gender medicine, which prescribes—in certain restricted cases—the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat adolescent gender dysphoria. By 2015, however, Finnish gender specialists, including Kaltiala, were noticing that most of their patients did not match the profile of those treated in the Netherlands and did not meet the Dutch protocol’s relatively strict eligibility requirements for drug treatments. Due to the extremely high rate at which children with gender issues come to terms with their bodies (or “desist”) by adulthood, the Dutch protocol requires patients to have gender dysphoria that begins before puberty and intensifies in adolescence. It also requires them to have no serious co-occurring mental health problems, to undergo at least six months of psychotherapy, and to have the support of their family for hormonal treatments.
Within a few years of their country adopting the Dutch protocol in 2011, however, Finnish researchers noticed a sharp rise in the number of patients referred for services. Most of these patients were teenage girls with no history of dysphoria in childhood, and some 75% had a history of severe psychopathology prior to the emergence of their gender-related distress. During this same time period, the U.K.’s largest pediatric gender clinic, at the Tavistock Centre, witnessed a 3,360% surge in patient referrals between 2009 and 2018. Most of the new patients were females—whose representation in the clinic rose 4,400% during this time frame—with a history of serious psychological problems and no gender dysphoria prior to adolescence. Similar trends were being observed in other countries with pediatric gender clinics, including the United States. In 2018, the American physician-researcher Lisa Littman published a study suggesting that teenage girls with high rates of mental health problems were suddenly declaring a transgender identity, often in friend groups and after prolonged exposure to social media.
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Unlike progressive elites in the United States, who seem to regard social affirmation of “transgender children” as little more than an act of kindness, Kaltiala sees it as a powerful intervention in a young person’s psychosocial development with potential for iatrogenic harm (i.e., harm caused by the treatment itself). Gender self-identification in youth is not a mere clerical “formality.” In Kaltiala’s words, “it’s a message saying that this is the right path for you.” Kaltiala thus concurs with NHS England, which recently noted that social transition—using a child’s preferred name and pronouns—is “not a neutral act” but rather one that can solidify what is otherwise likely to be a passing phase into a more permanent state of mind, or “identity,” and put the minor on a path to drugs and surgeries. The NHS now warns of the risks of social transition in children and recommends it only for adolescents who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria and have provided informed consent.
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Advocates of the American “affirmative” approach tend to ignore the broader trends of mental health collapse among teenagers over the past few decades, a deeply concerning trend that seems to affect girls in particular and is linked to social media use. Utilizing a “minority stress” framework developed in research on homosexuality and borrowed for this purpose, activists insist that co-occurring mental health problems including anxiety, depression, ADHD, and eating disorders are caused by “unaffirmed” gender and can be solved or mitigated through social and medical transition. Autism in particular seems to be especially common in youth who identify as transgender and seek medical transition. A 2019 study on patients at the U.K.’s largest pediatric gender clinic found that 48% were in the autism range. In her book The Gender Creative Child, “gender affirming care” advocate Dr. Diane Ehrensaft suggests that gender transition can even be a “cure” for autism.
Bold mine. When someone starts playing "If you transition it will fix your autism!", you know they're either effing idiots, or an activist who'll try anything to get their way.
I repeat: at some point there's going to be blowback on the people pushing this crap. And it will be nasty.
1 comment:
No there will not. They'll come out like the covidiabs and push for "amnesty".
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