You’d think child psychiatrists would want to help troubled children, and you’d be right. But the medical association that represents these doctors is suppressing open discussion of the best care for gender-distressed adolescents.
Respectful discourse among doctors regarding treatment of vulnerable children should trump emotions, personal opinions and politics.
Yet our foiled attempt to invite physician input on gender interventions suggests that ideology is winning the day.
At first, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry approved a request by our organization, Do No Harm, to run a booth at its annual conference next week. But AACAP last month turned around and revoked that approval.
We simply wanted to give doctors a chance to discuss the dangers of transgender treatments for children, just as we did in May at the American Psychiatric Association conference.
These discussions are important because medical organizations like AACAP continue to trumpet support for gender interventions that mounting evidence shows are potentially harmful.
Meanwhile, the same organizations ignore the increasing number of patients who regret their transitions.
They offer no guidance on how to best treat those seeking to detransition, wean them off hormones or receive hormone replacement for surgically removed sex organs.
In fact, our health-care system treats patients who buck the gender-ideology narrative as nonexistent: The system has no diagnosis codes to allow for tracking and research of this poorly understood population.
They are a lost cohort with medical and psychological needs that have been shunned by the medical establishment.
And now we’ve been shunned too.
All the conference organizers would say is they’re “already addressing the issue of pediatric medical transition in a balanced way via [the Academy’s] peer-reviewed scientific program.”
But even a cursory look at this association exposes its full-throated support for child sex changes over objective consideration of the evidence.
The academy unequivocally declares “all children and adolescents” deserve “gender-affirming health care,” which includes everything from puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to surgeries that permanently remove a child’s sex organs and characteristics.
Yet these treatments are not only experimental, they’re generally irreversible and have a high likelihood of creating additional physical and mental-health challenges.
AACAP’s resistance to open discussion on this topic underscores its bias.
In past years, the association also canceled three panels that featured European psychologists planning to discuss why many European countries have moved away from sex-change treatments for children, based on available data.
Rather than allowing a simple discussion of the evidence, the academy prevented its members from even hearing about it.
Such discussion could be vital for dealing with issues such as obtaining informed consent from minors for these life-altering interventions — an ethical morass.
A physician and World Professional Association for Transgender Health member confessed that talking to an adolescent about fertility preservation is like “talking to a blank wall.”
Factor in the impossibility of correctly diagnosing a child with transgenderism that will persist into adulthood, and the issue is fraught with uncertainty before any evidence about treatment is even introduced.
Medical organizations that stifle discussions about the best care for gender-distressed children have forced state legislators to take matters into their own hands.
More than half of US states now restrict sex-change treatments for minors.
Yet when the Supreme Court sided with those states this year, the academy doubled down by “reaffirm[ing]” its “commitment to gender-affirming care.”
For AACAP, it’s gender interventions or bust.
Which is why our booth is needed — a single island of objectivity in a sea of pro-transition ideology.
And while the academy claims it’s better to discuss the medical evidence elsewhere, that argument rings hollow.
After all, pharmaceutical companies will be allowed to hawk their products at the conference, even though there may be better places to discuss the science that justifies their use.
Most important, none of this benefits child psychiatrists, nor the distressed children they are tasked to help.
Censoring open discussion about any clinical condition hinders advancements and hurts patients.
We would’ve been respectful, earnest and fully grounded in the best scientific evidence—evidence that’s decisively on the side of protecting children.
Maybe that’s what the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry fears most: that psychiatrists may learn the truth about how sex-change therapies harm kids.
Dr. Aida Cerundolo is an emergency medicine physician and senior fellow at Do No Harm. Dr. Kurt Miceli is a psychiatrist and medical director there.