Europe Flees Gender-Affirming Care As Biden Pushes It for Political Reasons

By
M Dowling
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The U.S. is becoming an outlier among many Western nations in the way its national medical institutions treat children suffering from distress over gender identity, reports the Wall Street Journal.

As Joe Biden touts gender-affirming care, claiming anything else is discrimination, Europe is moving away from it quickly. There’s no evidence that it does more good than bad. Someone needs to send a memo to Joe Biden and his odd staff. He’s ramping it up for political reasons. He has politicized treatments for children that could ruin their lives. The medical community makes a lot of money from it and lives in an echo chamber.

The Story

While the US healthcare industry is defending medical interventions such as puberty blockers for children with gender disorders, the European medical community it’s moving away from it.

Do you really have to be a doctor to know this is a terrible idea?

It started in The Netherlands, and they now have doubts.

The about-face by these countries concerns the Dutch protocol, which many clinicians have for at least a decade viewed as the gold-standard approach to care for children and teenagers with gender dysphoria.

Kids on the protocol are given medical and mental-health assessments; some take medicines that block their natural puberty and, when they’re older, receive cross-sex hormones and eventually surgery. But in Finland, Sweden, France, Norway, and the U.K., scientists and public-health officials are warning that, for some young people, these interventions may do more harm than good.

Children in the US say they are not given assessments or clear information on what it actually means.

This month, the U.K.’s publicly funded National Health Service officially banned puberty blockers for minors. There are some rare exceptions.

Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare has issued a national policy update regarding hormonal interventions for gender-dysphoric minors here. It follows the changes adopted by The Karolinska Hospital.

The Karolinska Hospital in Sweden, a most esteemed hospital, recently issued a new policy statement regarding treating gender-dysphoric minors. This policy, affecting Karolinska’s pediatric gender services at Astrid Lindgren Children’s Hospital (ALB), has ended the practice of prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to gender-dysphoric patients under 18.

This is a watershed moment, with one of the world’s most renowned hospitals calling the “Dutch Protocol” experimental and discontinuing its routine use outside of research settings.

According to the ”Dutch Protocol,” which has gained popularity in recent years, gender-dysphoric minors are treated with puberty blockers at age 12 (and in some interpretations, upon reaching Tanner stage 2 of puberty, which in girls can occur at age 8), and cross-sex hormones at the age of 16. This approach, also known as medical “affirmation,” has been endorsed by the WPATH ”Standards of Care 7” guideline.

“These countries have done systematic reviews of evidence,” said Leor Sapir, a fellow who studies transgender care at the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute think tank. “They’ve found that the studies cited to support these medical interventions are too unreliable, and the risks are too serious.”

Many countries, including Canada, Spain, and Australia, still allow puberty blockers as a clinical option. Some in those countries also are urging curtailment.

In Italy, for example, the president of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society wrote a public letter to the Italian prime minister Georgia Meloni in January expressing “serious concerns” over the use of puberty blockers.

A recent poll by the Washington Post and KFF, an independent polling and research firm, showed 68% opposed to using puberty blockers in children ages 10 to 14. The poll, published in May, was conducted late last year.

According to the Journal, countries like Canada, Australia, and Spain still allow puberty blockers, but some are sounding the alarm.

Since then, well over a dozen GOP-run states have restricted medical interventions as part of transgender care. Health providers in Texas, for example, risk losing their medical licenses if they provide puberty blockers, surgeries, or hormone treatments to most transgender minors under a GOP-led law that goes into effect in September.

The US medical community is still going ahead with so-called affirming gender care.

Last week, New York introduced new public school guidance that allowed teachers to keep secret a child’s social transition, in which students change their name or pronouns to reflect an identity other than the gender at birth.

California is a sanctuary for anyone wanting a child to receive puberty blockers or surgeries to change identities. Michigan is following suit.

Given as a shot or an implant, the drugs can lead to less development of genital tissue, complicating future gender-transition surgeries. Other side effects may include hot flashes, weight gain, headaches, decreased bone density, and mood changes. They may also affect later fertility.


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1 COMMENT

  1. There are lots of severe effects of transitioning. Those include suicide, infections, mental illness, … Alex Jones discusses the details and they are sickening. No decent nation allows a Biden to be in charge.

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