🚨🚨🚨 IMPORTANT UPDATE 🚨🚨🚨

A new peer-reviewed article shows the fatal weaknesses of the Dutch studies and their inapplicability to current pediatric gender care.

I will be writing about this issue in depth, but here's a very quick 🧵

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0092623X.2022.2150346

The Dutch research is considered the gold standard even by American "gender affirming" docs and orgs. Recall Dr. Aron Janssen (@LGBTDoc) saying that the Dutch research is "the best we have" and that American clinics are practicing the Dutch protocol.

WPATH Standards of Care v. 7, which was the operative version when "gender affirming care" was disseminated, also recognized the Dutch research as the best available evidence. Even SOC-8 implies that the Dutch research is the best we've got.

The new article is therefore hugely significant, as it goes to the heart of the entire pediatric medical transition enterprise. It explains in detail why the Dutch studies are fatally flawed and anyway inapplicable to the current clinical scene.

Medical gender transition for minors is an example, the authors explain, of "runaway diffusion."

This refers to "the phenomenon whereby the medical community mistakes a small innovative experiment as a proven practice, and a potentially nonbeneficial or harmful practice 'escapes the lab,' rapidly spreading into general clinical settings."

The authors also discuss how activist researchers "spin" nonfindings or negative findings to mislead the public about risks and benefits. A good example is Tordoff, 2022.

If even the Dutch studies and protocol, which (on paper at least) require a) months of psychotherapy before drugs and b) prepubertal-onset of GD, cannot justify medical transition for minors, all the more so with the U.S. affirmative model, which doesn't require these.

The US affirmative model's reliance on the "minority stress" framework is especially unsubstantiated and pernicious given how it assumes that co-occurring mental health problems must be because of unaffirmed "gender identity" and social hostility.

Given its contribution to "diagnostic overshadowing," minority stress is a recipe for no medical safeguarding, as Dr. Hilary Cass explained in her report to the NHS. It is also the clearest evidence for how ideology infiltrates and corrupts medical research and clinical care.

American gender docs like Jack Turban and Meredithe McNamara frequently resort to eminence-based rather than evidence-based arguments. They point to the fact that most US medical orgs endorse "gender affirming care," as if that settles the matter.

Eminence-based arguments obscure the deeper question of whether these orgs are following the best available evidence. Medical orgs have been wrong in the past, and there's no a prior reason to assume they can't be wrong again now. There's no replacement for reading the studies.