Jesse Singal in the NY Times:

Medical Associations Trusted Belief Over Science on Youth Gender Care

What even is “gender care”? I know what they mean by it, of course, but it’s so silly.

American advocates for youth gender medicine have insisted for years that overwhelming evidence favors providing gender dysphoric youth with puberty blockers, hormones and, in the case of biological females, surgery to remove their breasts.

It didn’t matter that the number of kids showing up at gender clinics had soared and were more likely to have complex mental health conditions than those who had come to clinics in years earlier, complicating diagnosis.

And there’s another thing: these younger kids grew up in a culture that was increasingly steeped in the rhetoric of trans ideology. Ideas can be contagious, and trans ideology is nothing but a set of ideas, most of them absurd. Those ideas were not stored in a vault somewhere, they were and are up in our faces all day every day. It’s hardly surprising that the number of kids showing up at gender clinics had soared: the ideology has been hard at work making the number soar all this time.

 “The science is settled.” The Human Rights Campaign says on its website that “the safety and efficacy of gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary youth and adults is clear.”

What kind of “efficacy” are we talking about? It can’t be making people who call themselves trans more calm, reasonable, thoughtful, slow to anger.

The reason these advocates were able to make such strong statements is that for years, the most important professional medical and mental health organizations in the country had been singing a similar tune: “The science” was supposedly codified in documents published by these organizations. As GLAAD puts it on its website, “Every major medical association supports health care for transgender people and youth as safe and lifesaving.”

Well obviously people who claim to be trans should have health care. Or do they mean health care specifically to “treat” gender dysphoria? Of course they do, but is that really even health care? Especially when it includes amputation of breasts and genitals, cross-sex hormones, and other adventurous appearance-tweaks? Singal says some of this is getting through.

But something confounding has happened in the last few weeks: Cracks have appeared in the supposed wall of consensus.

After expressing concerns about the evidence base in 2024, on Feb. 3, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons became the first major American medical group to publicly question youth gender medicine since its widespread adoption. The organization published a nine-page “position statement” advising its members against any gender-related surgeries before age 19 and noting that “there are currently no validated methods” for determining whether youth gender dysphoria will resolve without medical treatment. 

And, again, can elective amputation of healthy body parts for the sake of gender-belief really be called medical treatment? Are we sure?

The next day, the American Medical Association — which has long approved of such procedures — announced that “in the absence of clear evidence, the A.M.A. agrees with A.S.P.S. that surgical interventions in minors should be generally deferred to adulthood.”

Do we suspect that being able to say “agrees with A.S.P.S.” made it a lot easier and safer to say that? “Don’t hit us, we’re just agreeing with the plastic surgeons!”