The Dec. 19 AP article [“HHS further restricts gender-affirming care”] flagrantly misrepresents the guidelines proposed by HHS for care of gender dysphoria: the guidelines follow the policies of the National Health Services of Sweden, Finland, England, Norway, and Denmark. All five nations abandoned “Affirmative Care,” a model that assumes anyone, even a minor, reporting to be born the wrong gender, is an immediate candidate for puberty blockers, cross sex hormones and surgical transition. Ten years ago, medical professionals began to reassess the “Affirmative Care” model and determined that both hormone therapies have significant clinical evidence of being extremely dangerous. Lacking any assurance to the contrary, reliance on them was tantamount to medical experimentation on children.
The reassessment of “Affirmative Care” also recognized that transition surgeries are irreversible, require life-long medical interventions, are fraught with medical complications, and had established no reliable evidence of having consistent positive physical or psychological outcomes. In fact, Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, monitoring the outcomes of transition over decades, found that 10 years after transition, suicidality and referrals for in-patient psychiatric care for that population increases twenty fold over their age peers.
Over the past five years, those countries each abandoned “Affirmative Care,” no puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones or surgical interventions in the treatment of gender dysphoric minors. Those medical communities have returned to a protocol for treating gender dysphoric minors that maintained an impressive success rate for many decades. Through a process of social/psychological counseling, physicians were able to help 85-95% of gender dysphoric children come to terms with their bodies by adolescence.
The AP authors deliberately muddy what, in the world medical community, are strikingly clear waters. They use deliberately inflammatory language: ”imperil access,” “threaten … care,” and “restricting transgender rights.” How is it “restriciting transgender rights” to follow best medical practice, one based on the Hippocratic oath — to do no harm? What these guidelines are restricting is a set of protocols in which children are mere pawns, clearly in danger of being deeply, permanently harmed.
The appropriate care of gender confusion among children is a medical issue. The weight of medical opinion is profoundly in support of abandoning the protocols of “Affirmative Care.” That the AP has posted so slanted a treatment of this issue should give those of us on the left pause, if not chills. We are being manipulated just as vigorously as our neighbors who listen to Fox News. Refusing to report the weight of world medical opinion on this issue, and to pretend instead that opposition to “Affirmative Care” is just some right-wing hang up, is disgraceful, especially for an organization that once prided itself on being a model for the news industry.
Stephen Hussey lives in Greenfield.