An unexpected concession by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) reveals dishonesty in the American gender-medicine establishment.
Yet another important Leor Sapir article.
One of the main public relations strategies of “gender-affirming care” advocates is to deny that the model of treatment being used in American clinics differs in any significant way with the one now used in European clinics. Over the past two years, and following systematic reviews of evidence, health authorities in Sweden, Finland, and the U.K. have agreed that no evidence exists that the benefits of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones outweigh the risks. All three countries have since imposed measures to reduce drastically the accessibility of these drugs to teenagers.
Just two weeks ago, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH)—a U.S.-based promoter of “gender affirmation” that now recognizes “eunuch” as a valid childhood “gender identity”—was still insisting that Europe’s only change was a decision by health authorities to conduct “more studies” and gather data. But with evidence of the actual changes increasingly hard to deny, WPATH has now finally had to reckon with reality. On November 25, it chose to air its grievances—and tacitly concede its previous disinformation campaign—about Europe’s change of direction when it criticized England’s National Health Service.
Back in October, the NHS released draft guidance based on a February report by the former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. In that report, physician Hilary Cass noted the “affirmative” model, which “originated in the USA,” as likely responsible for insufficient child “safeguarding” at the now-discontinued Tavistock clinic gender service. Tavistock staff, Cass wrote, “have told us that they feel pressure to adopt an unquestioning affirmative approach and that this is at odds with the standard process of clinical assessment and diagnosis that they have been trained to undertake in all other clinical encounters.” The NHS’s draft guidance calls for a restoration of careful and lengthy mental-health assessments before prescribing drugs.
In its November 25 statement, WPATH condemned the NHS in terms that reveal the organization’s strong preference for the affirmative model. The NHS, it complained, is emphasizing “careful exploration of a child or young person’s co-existing mental health, neuro-developmental and/or family or social complexities,” which WPATH deemed an “alarming” practice of “outdated gatekeeping.”
[emphasis mine]
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Institutional Decay
