Leor Sapir Profile picture
Jul 13, 2023 12 tweets 3 min read Read on X
BREAKING:

21 leading experts on pediatric gender medicine from 8 countries have written a Letter to the Editor of @WSJopinion expressing disagreement with the @TheEndoSociety and its new president @StephenHammes over the treatment of youth gender dysphoria.

This is huge. 🧵
Although they have commented on the problems of the American "affirming" model in the past (e.g., Cass Report), this is the first time international experts have publicly weighed in on the American debate over "gender-affirming care."
Among the intl' experts is Dr. Riita Kaltiala, chief psychiatrist at Tampere University gender clinic, author of numerous peer-reviewed articles on trans medicine, and Finland's top authority on pediatric gender care.
The letter follows an illuminating exchange between @donoharm and @TheEndoSociety @StephenHammes in the pages of @WSJopinion.

The letter states that while Endocrine Society president and "gender-affirming care" practitioner Dr. Hammes’ may think his own clinical experience and existing research support his position, his belief "is not supported by the best available evidence."
It mentions that (unlike U.S. medical associations) health authorities abroad have relied on systematic reviews of evidence for the benefits of hormonal interventions and found these benefits to be without reliable evidence.
To recall, the main value of systematic reviews is that they don't just summarize the available studies but assess their strengths and weaknesses. This is key, because proponents of child sex trait modification frequently just mention individual studies.
Dr. Hammes' claim that "gender-affirming care" is a suicide prevention measure, the intl' experts say in their WSJ letter, "is contradicted by every systematic review."
Dr. Kaltiala had previously called the affirm-or-suicide narrative "purposeful disinformation" and its promotion (given the contagious nature of suicide) "irresponsible."

tabletmag.com/sections/scien…
"The politicization of transgender healthcare in the US is unfortunate," write the intl' experts. "The way to combat it is for medical societies to align their recommendations with the best available evidence—rather than exaggerating the benefits and minimizing the risks."
Read the letter here: wsj.com/articles/trans…
For an analysis of how and why the U.S. and Europe are diverging:

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More from @LeorSapir

Dec 13
NEW: The Deposition of Eli Coleman

For the first two articles in this series, I covered the depositions of @Jack_Turban and Meredithe McNamara.

Today’s article in @CityJournal is all about the chair and lead author of @wpath’s latest “standards of care." 🧵Image
Dr. Eli Coleman, a professor emeritus at @UNM_MEDS and founder of U of M's @Human_Sexuality, which was renamed in his honor, submitted to an 8-hour deposition at the hands of Roger Brooks of @ADFLegal in the context of Boe v. Marshall, the Alabama age restriction lawsuit.Image
Coleman's most important admissions had to do with conflict-of-interest management in the development of SOC-8. More on that in a moment.
Read 23 tweets
Dec 7
One benefit of the new lawsuit against Johanna Olson-Kennedy is that newspapers will have little choice but to report on it, and on her, and will inevitably reveal to the public one of the darkest and most twisted figures in “gender medicine.”

It is truly something to behold.
Read 4 tweets
Dec 6
BREAKING: Johanna Olson-Kennedy, perhaps the top name in pediatric "gender-affirming care" in the U.S., is being sued by a former patient.

@jessesingal reports in @TheEconomist 🧵 Image
JOK does not believe in mental health assessments, Singal reports. "I don't send someone to a therapist when I'm going to start them on insulin," she once explained.

The @ChildrensLA doctor has referred children as young as 12 and 13 for, respectively, hormones and mastectomy.
JOK is also recipient of the largest @NIH grant to study the off-label use of puberty blockers & cross-sex hormones. Recently, the @nytimes revealed that she refused to publish outcome data on puberty blockers, fearing that the unimpressive results would be cited by critics. Image
Read 9 tweets
Oct 23
NEW: Azeen Ghorayshi reports in the @nytimes that prominent gender clinician Johanna Olson-Kennedy of @ChildrensLA has refused to publish data from a study on puberty blockers, fearing that the unimpressive results will be "weaponized" by critics of "gender-affirming care." 🧵 Image
Olson-Kennedy told the Times that the kids didn't improve because their mental health was "in really good shape" at the start of the study.

As Ghorayshi notes, this seems to contradict what Olson-Kennedy et al. reported in 2022 about the study's cohort at baseline. Image
Olson-Kennedy fears the study's results could be cited by critics of pediatric sex "change" in court cases. She doesn't seem to think that, as a medical researcher and clinician, her primary responsibility is to her current and future patients.

Doctors as agents of lawfare. Image
Read 11 tweets
Oct 15
NEW: On behalf of @ManhattanInst, @ishapiro @JKetcham91 and I filed an amicus brief in support of Tennessee in U.S. v. Skrmetti, the Supreme Court case dealing with state age restrictions for sex trait modification procedures ("gender-affirming care").

🧵Image
2/ Our brief is a rebuttal to the amicus brief submitted by "Expert Researchers and Physicians" (McNamara et al.), which is a version of the Yale Integrity Project's white paper, which criticizes the Cass Review. Image
3/ We argue that McNamara et al. misrepresent the Cass Review, principles of evidence-based medicine, the findings of key studies, and the consistency of pediatric "gender-affirming care" with the wider field of pediatrics on the question of low- or very low-quality evidence. Image
Image
Read 10 tweets
Oct 9
🚨NEW DOCUMENTS in the Alabama lawsuit over sex "change" age restrictions.

Some very interesting facts now coming to light. 🧵
1/ @wpath sought but did not receive the American Academy of Pediatrics’ (@ameracadpeds) endorsement for its eighth “Standards of Care” (SOC8).

In private emails to WPATH a colleague, SOC-8 lead author Eli Coleman said that this was “highly confidential.” Image
2/ Coleman appears to admit that it is misleading to claim that medical groups writing amicus briefs against age restriction laws means these groups endorse SOC-8. WPATH tried but failed to get endorsements. (Exhibit #190) Image
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Read 10 tweets

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