Does transitioning actually help? Does banning puberty blockers actually harm? Helen Lewis asks some questions.

Advocates of the open-science movement often talk about “zombie facts”—popular sound bites that persist in public debate, even when they have been repeatedly discredited. Many common political claims made in defense of puberty blockers and hormones for gender-dysphoric minors meet this definition. These zombie facts have been flatly contradicted not just by conservatives but also by prominent advocates and practitioners of the treatment—at least when they’re speaking candidly. Many liberals are unaware of this, however, because they are stuck in media bubbles in which well-meaning commentators make confident assertions for youth gender medicine—claims from which its elite advocates have long since retreated.

And also because deviating from the Approved View is such a straight road to pariahdom.

Many of the most fervent advocates of youth transition are also on record disparaging the idea that it should be debated at all. Strangio—who works for the country’s best-known free-speech organization—once tweeted that he would like to scuttle Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage, a skeptical treatment of youth gender medicine. Strangio declared, “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.” Marci Bowers, the former head of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the most prominent organization for gender-medicine providers, has likened skepticism of child gender medicine to Holocaust denial.

And it’s not just a matter of dying on hills, it’s also shooting at everyone who gets anywhere near your hill. Trans dogma is fiercely guarded by raging zealots who punish dissenters with every weapon they can find.

After England restricted the use of puberty blockers in 2020, the government asked an expert psychologist, Louis Appleby, to investigate whether the suicide rate for patients at the country’s youth gender clinic rose dramatically as a result. It did not: In fact, he did not find any increase in suicides at all, despite the lurid claims made online. “The way that this issue has been discussed on social media has been insensitive, distressing and dangerous, and goes against guidance on safe reporting of suicide,” Appleby reported. “One risk is that young people and their families will be terrified by predictions of suicide as inevitable without puberty blockers.”

Yes, it is, and that’s quite the risk.

In 2022, Alabama passed a law criminalizing the prescription of hormones and blockers to patients under 19. After the Biden administration sued to block the law, the state’s Republican attorney general subpoenaed documents showing that WPATH has known for some time that the evidence base for adolescent transition is thin. “All of us are painfully aware that there are many gaps in research to back up our recommendations,” Eli Coleman, the psychologist who chaired the team revising the standards of care, wrote to his colleagues in 2023. Yet the organization did not make this clear in public. Laura Edwards-Leeper—who helped bring the Dutch protocol to the U.S. but has since criticized in a Washington Post op-ed the unquestioningly gender-affirmative model—has said that the specter of red-state bans made her and her op-ed co-author reluctant to break ranks.

Brilliant. “Oh no, the evidence for our drastic recommendations is weak, therefore we must hide that evidence so that we can carry out our drastic recommendations.”

The Alabama litigation also confirmed that WPATH had commissioned systematic reviews of the evidence for the Dutch protocol. However, close to publication, the Johns Hopkins University researcher involved was told that her findings needed to be “scrutinized and reviewed to ensure that publication does not negatively affect the provision of transgender health care.” This is not how evidence-based medicine is supposed to work. You don’t start with a treatment and then ensure that only studies that support that treatment are published.

And especially you don’t do that when the “treatment” is as drastic and life-altering as trying to swap puberties.

The Alabama disclosures are not the only example of this reluctance to acknowledge contrary evidence. Last year, Olson-Kennedy said that she had not published her own broad study on mental-health outcomes for youth with gender dysphoria, because she worried about its results being “weaponized.”

Arrgghh!! We mustn’t publish anything that casts doubt on the safety of “trans health care” because people might stop using dangerous forms of bogus “health care”! Any findings that our treatments are harmful must be buried so that we can continue to do harm.

Not how this is supposed to work!