According to a new paper published in the Pediatrics & Child Health, the flagship journal of the Canadian Paediatric Society, Canadian pediatricians should push “full steam ahead” with sex change “treatments” for minors.
These “treatments” are referred to as “gender-affirming care,” an Orwellian phrase which contains the premises of gender ideology under the guise of neutrality and ensures that coverage of the debate surrounding these “treatments” is prejudiced towards the transgender agenda.
As I’ve noted several times before, as far as the Canadian establishment is concerned, the four-year long Cass Review, initiated by the UK National Health Service, simply does not exist. The Cass Review found that transgender “treatments,” particularly for minors, produced dubious results and that the use of puberty blockers was essentially experimental. As a result, the Tory government passed an emergency ban on puberty blockers; the ban was made permanent by the new Labour government.
The authors of the new paper ignored the Cass Review entirely, as did the vast majority of the Canadian press corps.
Instead, as the National Postnoted, the paper “suggests that parents who don’t unquestionably affirm their child’s expressed gender risk harming their child,” and “advises pediatricians to offer parents of gender-questioning children advice on social transitions and the many benefits of an affirming environment, and to ‘support menstrual suppression’ using medications such as hormone blockers for a gender dysphoric 12-year-old ‘if appropriate and desired by the patient.’”
The Cass Review found that even social transitioning could be dangerous for the psychological health of children—but despite that, Calgary pediatrician Darrell Palmer told the Post, the authors of the paper are “essentially advocating for socially transitioning children.” Pam Baffone of the parent organization Canadian Gender Report had a similar reaction, noting that the paper “is extremely biased” and omits “inconvenient truths.”
When contacted by the Post, the BC Children’s Hospital insisted that “research conducted over many decades supports the safety and accessibility of gender-affirming care in this province” and that the authors of the paper consulted the Cass Review—but if that is the case, they clearly ignored its findings. As the Post reported:
But several pediatricians said the Canadian practice advice presents gender identity in a very young child as a “fait accompli” and presents information on suicide in a misleading way, citing data from a 13-year-old study of 84 Ontario trans youth that reported strong parental support significantly reduces suicide attempts.
A recent Finnish study based on the health records of more than 2,000 young people who sought care at a gender service over a 20-year time span found that while gender dysphoric youth have higher rates of suicide than peers without gender dysphoria (0.5 per cent versus 0.3 per cent) the differences were not statistically significant after researchers took a history of psychiatric treatments into account. “Gender dysphoria, per se, does not seem to predict neither all-cause nor suicide mortality in gender-referred adolescents,” the Finnish team wrote.
While stressing that it’s crucial to identify and treat mental disorders in youth experiencing gender dysphoria to prevent suicide, medical gender reassignment “does not have an impact on suicide risk,” the authors concluded.
The Canadian paper, conversely, “reported that 35 per cent of youth who described their parents as strongly supportive said they had considered suicide in the past year, compared to 60 per cent of youth whose parents weren’t described as strongly supportive. Among the latter 60 per cent, more than half (57 per cent) said they had attempted suicide, compared to four per cent with “strongly supportive” parents.”
“At the end of the day, if you tell parents if they’re supportive it reduces suicide attempts from 57 per cent to four per cent, that’s just putting a tonne of pressure on parents with data that are likely to be highly inaccurate,” Dr. Darrell Palmer stated. Dr. Ian Mitchell, professor emeritus at the University of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine, concurred. “Any consent process involves telling people about harms and benefits and what the evidence is,” he told the Post. “This is an enormous procedure, to change someone’s whole identity. This is not a little intervention.”
Indeed, the study’s authors present their case as if a debate over transgender “treatments” simply doesn’t exist. “There is no mention of the fact that there is any disagreement between professionals about this,” said Dr. Joanne Sinai, a clinical associate professor and psychiatrist at the University of British Columbia. “It does not suggest the fact that gender dysphoria could be a symptom of many other psychological issues or psychiatric diagnoses, whether it’s trauma, whether it’s developmental issues, whether it’s the autism spectrum, whether it’s depression or anxiety.”
“This is clinical advice and my concern is that from the get-go it just assumes gender affirming care is the way to go,” Sinai added.“ It approaches (gender dysphoria) as a fait accompli that just needs to be affirmed by the parents, and if you are not actually supporting the children in a way that affirms them, then the suggestion is that you are a bad parent and a bad pediatrician. It’s just ‘full steam ahead. This is what we’re doing.’”
