The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society, the two most influential US medical societies in pediatric gender medicine, have issued their first known statements on England's Cass Review on the subject, to @WBUR's @OnPointRadio:
STATEMENT FROM AMERICAN ACADEMY OF PEDIATRICS: Statement from American Academy of Pediatrics President, Dr. Ben Hoffman:
“The AAP’s gender -affirming care policy, like all our standing guidance, is grounded in evidence and science. Pediatricians understand the complexities of gender-affirming care and they know how to counsel families. The goal is not a certain treatment or timeline, but instead to listen to the patient and create a safe environment to address their needs. “What we’re seeing more and more is that the politically infused public discourse is getting this wrong — and it’s impacting the way that doctors care for their patients.
Physicians must be able to practice medicine that is informed by their medical education, training, experience, and the available evidence, freely and without the threat of punishment. Instead, state legislatures have passed bills to ban and restrict gender-affirming care, which means that right now, for far too many families, their zip code determines their ability to seek the health care they need. Politicians have inserted themselves into the exam room, and this is dangerous for both physicians and for families.”
Here is the Endocrine Society's statement on the Cass Review, given to @WBUR's @OnPointRadio. In short, "Medical evidence, not politics, should inform treatment decisions."
STATEMENT FROM ENDOCRINE SOCIETY: We stand firm in our support of gender-affirming care. Transgender and gender-diverse people deserve access to needed and often life-saving medical care.
NHS England’s recent report, the Cass Review, does not contain any new research that would contradict the recommendations made in our Clinical Practice Guideline on gender-affirming care.
The guideline, which cites more than 260 research studies, recommends a very conservative approach to care, with no medical intervention prior to puberty. Estimates indicate only a fraction of transgender and gender-diverse adolescents opt to take puberty-delaying medications, which have been used to treat early puberty in youth for four decades.
• The guideline recommends beginning treatment with puberty-delaying medications that are generally reversible.
• As adolescents grow older and can provide informed consent, then hormone therapy can be considered.
• Our guideline suggests waiting until an individual has turned 18 or reached the age of majority in their country to undergo gender-affirming genital surgery.
Medical evidence, not politics, should inform treatment decisions.
Our Clinical Practice Guidelines are developed using a robust and rigorous process that adheres to the highest standards of trustworthiness and transparency as defined by the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine).
Our guideline development panels spend years developing each guideline based on a thorough review of medical evidence, author expertise, rigorous scientific review, and a transparent process.
More than 18,000 Endocrine Society members worldwide have an opportunity to comment on guideline drafts prior to publication.
The Society is in the process of updating the 2017 Clinical Practice Guideline. It was one of six selected for a routine update.
The process will incorporate the latest research and conduct systematic reviews to provide guidance on the safe and effective treatment of gender incongruence and dysphoria from an endocrine perspective.
We agree that increased funding for youth and adult transgender health research programs is needed to close the gaps in knowledge regarding transgender medical care and should be made a priority.
Although the scientific landscape has not changed significantly, misinformation about gender-affirming care is being politicized.
In the United States, 24 states have enacted laws or policies barring adolescents’ access to gender-affirming care, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. In seven states, the policies also include provisions that would prevent at least some adults over age 18 from accessing gender-affirming care.
Cisgender teenagers, together with their parents or guardians, are deemed competent to give consent to various medical treatments.
Teenagers who have gender incongruence and their parents and guardians should not be discriminated against.
Transgender and gender-diverse teenagers, their parents, and physicians should be able to determine the appropriate course of treatment.
Banning evidence-based medical care based on misinformation takes away the ability of parents and patients to make informed decisions.
Medical evidence, not politics, should inform treatment decisions.
The @AmerAcadPeds never responded to @JamesCantorPhD's scathing fact check of its 2018 policy statement on the affirmative care model for gender distressed children. Instead, it reaffirmed the policy statement in Aug 2023 with no changes. ohchr.org/sites/default/…
The AAP is subject to a lawsuit from a detransitioner, as I wrote for the @NewYorkSun: nysun.com/article/lawsui…
The AAP has become increasingly secretive about its work on the subject of gender distressed children. nysun.com/article/sued-o…
In its statement to @WBUR, the Endocrine Society says that "only a fraction" of gender distressed children receive medical transition. This after @WPATH said in a statement responding to the Cass Review that the majority of such children would do better to medically transition.
LEAKED: Trans-Care Training Videos By Beleaguered Top Gender-Clinic Doctor, Part 1
I have obtained 12 hours of videos of top pediatric-gender-clinic physician Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues, including her husband, providing training to mental-health providers on how to treat minors who have gender dysphoria or otherwise identify as transgender or nonbinary.
This is the first of 12 installments I will post during the coming weeks of these videos. Subscribe to my newsletter (link in bio) to receive all of them as I publish them.
A 19-year veteran of the pediatric gender medicine field and one of its leading physician-researchers and advocates, Dr. Olson-Kennedy is the medical director of the gender clinic at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. According to figures she provided during this particular video, annual referrals to her clinic surged from just 25 in 2010 to 436 in 2022—following a similar pattern seen in clinics throughout the Western world.
The past six months have been challenging for Dr. Olson-Kennedy, to say the least.
Dr. Olson-Kennedy is the principal investigator on a National Institutes of Health grant for a long-running research project concerning pediatric gender-transition treatment, one that has received over $10 million to date. In October, The New York Times reported that she has withheld null findings from a study of puberty blockers funded by this grant, doing so for political reasons. The grant is now the subject of a probe by congressional Republicans. In November, however, she asserted in a sworn deposition in a civil case that the Times had mischaracterized her words.
In December, Dr. Olson-Kennedy was sued by a former patient, Clementine Breen, who reported that the gender doctor prescribed her puberty blockers at age 12—on her first appointment, without a psychological assessment—and testosterone at age 13, and then referred her to receive a double mastectomy at age 14. Ms. Breen, now 20, has since detransitioned, reverting to presenting and identifying as a woman.
The Trump administration has unleashed an onslaught against the field of pediatric gender medicine, seeking to wipe it off the map. In recent weeks, the NIH has been canceling research grants related to transgender people, including those conducted with animal models. There is currently a preliminary injunction in place to block the president’s executive order that would freeze federal funds to hospitals that provide gender-transition interventions to those under age 19. Prior to the injunction, Dr. Olson-Kennedy’s clinic had “paused” new cross-sex hormone treatments for youth, only to lift the pause a couple of weeks later.
It remains unclear whether the grant for which Dr. Olson-Kennedy is the top investigator has been canceled. But it is no longer listed on the NIH site where active grants are described.
I reached out to Dr. Olson-Kennedy and her co-principal investigators on the grant to ask about its status. I did not hear back.
Prior to the October Times article, Dr. Olson-Kennedy was perhaps best known by the general public for a previous leaked video in which she was giving a training in 2018 to mental health care providers on how to write referral letters for minors seeking gender-transition surgeries. In the video, she expresses exasperation with what she sees as hand wringing over whether natal girls will later regret having their breast removed during adolescence. (At least 1,000 such surgeries have been conducted annually in recent years.)
She says: “What we do know is that adolescents actually have the capacity to make a reasonable, logical decision. And here’s the other thing about chest surgery. If you want breasts at a later point in your life, you can go and get them!”
Ms. Breen recently reported that she was undergoing reconstructive surgery to provide herself with new breasts. However, it is very unlikely she will ever be able to breastfeed should she have children.
Dr. Olson-Kennedy is also newly the president of USPATH, the U.S. branch of the medical-activist group the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. WPATH, which despite is name is largely a U.S.-based organization, has been besieged by damaging publicity over the past year, in particular after internal documents subpoenaed by Alabama’s attorney general revealed that its leadership was aware that the evidence behind pediatric gender medicine was weak and sought to paper over this fact.
12 hours of leaked Olson-Kennedy training videos
The 12-hour training in what is known as the gender-affirming care method for minors who identify as trans or nonbinary took place in late April 2024—a few weeks after Britain published the Cass Review, which found that this medical field is based on “remarkably weak evidence.” The training was led by Dr. Olson-Kennedy; her husband, Aydin Olson-Kennedy, who has a doctorate in social work and is a transgender man; and licensed clinical social worker Darlene Tando.
I obtained the videos a few months ago.
The training videos are a window into not just the methods of these individuals, but their overall attitudes about gender dysphoria and transgender and nonbinary identification in children. A prevailing attitude they share is one of indignation and irritation with a medical system that demands that children betray a substantial level of distress before they are granted gender-transition medications. Overall, these three favor less gatekeeping and less pathologizing of the mental states and internal lives of the children in their care. If a gender-incongruent child arrives in their care absent any particular distress about their identification as the opposite sex, they believe that that child should be granted the opportunity to medically transition by taking puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones if the family wishes.
I have edited the videos to snip or crop out images that would identify the participants in the training, whether because of Zoom-chat questions that pop up in the right-hand corner of the screen, or moments when a matrix of the participants is visible. You can watch the video at the beginning of this Substack. Otherwise, I wrote a summary below:
LINK:
LEAKED: Trans-Care Training Videos By Beleaguered Top Gender-Clinic Doctor, Part 1 benryan.substack.com/p/leaked-trans…
I am publishing 12 hours of videos of Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy and colleagues in which they train mental-health providers on treating children who have gender dysphoria or otherwise identify as trans.
Subscribe to my newsletter to receive all the videos as I publish them.
Video number 1: Johanna Olson-Kennedy on the gender basics benryan.substack.com/p/leaked-trans…
Dr. Olson-Kennedy opens the video by charting the recent shift in transgender visibility in popular media, which she says has improved dramatically in recent years. Previously, transgender people were frequently presented as sex workers, according to at GLAAD analysis. But these days, TV has benefited from the likes of Jazz Jennings and shows like Transparent and Pose that center on the transgender experience, Dr. Olson-Kennedy says. Having stories about youth in the media in particular, she says, has influenced the seeking of gender-transition treatment by young people.
She expresses concern that the trans kids whose stories have been told in the media are generally white. This is reflective, she says, of the disproportionately white patient population at gender clinics in the U.S. and Europe. “It is important for all of us to think about what those barriers to care are for other communities and work really hard to dismantle those barriers.”
This remark speaks to a common dichotomy among advocates in this medical field: They will at once characterize the number of children receiving these treatments as low (as Dr. Olson-Kennedy does a bit later in the video), emphasizing that the political firestorm over this population is disproportionate to its size, while also decrying how few kids are receiving the treatment.
Since 2021, Dr. Olson-Kennedy says, we’ve seen a “problematic” visibility of trans youth as states have moved to ban these treatments. She shows a Google search she conducted of “transgender youth care” the night before. “All of these six headlines, and there’s many more,” she says, “are negative, and they speak to moves being made to ban access to care.”
Research indicates that even after undergoing lengthy testosterone suppression and estrogen treatment, natal males who identify as female hold a competitive advantage in women’s sports. This is not just about height. It’s about muscle strength, shoulder and hand size, oxygen processing, etc.
And there are teenage boys who can bear Katie Ledecky, one of the most unbeatable long-distance swimmers in history.
The difference between the trans sports question and past battles over interracial and same-sex marriage is that there was never any rational scientific support for opposition to those rights. But research does indicate that trans women maintain a competitive advantage in women’s sports. @mattyglesias @drvolts
So is it “morally repugnant” as @drvolts claims, for @mattyglesias to back trans-girl exclusion from girls’ sports if their inclusion is unfair to c-s girls, per scientific research? Is inclusion more important than fairness?
I would be very interested to know why David Roberts thinks it is fair to include trans girls and women in girls and women’s sports.
$544,000-a-Year, Newly Nonbinary @ACLU Executive Makes Incorrect Claims About Pediatric Gender Medicine: Will This Impact Landmark Supreme Court Case?
🧵👇I report for the @NewYorkSun: Hired in 2019 as the ACLU’s first DEI chief, AJ Hikes has also emerged at the center of a labor-rights case against the nonprofit that deemed it illegally fired a staffer on unsubstantiated claims of racism.
GIFT LINK: $544,000-a-Year, Nonbinary ACLU Executive Makes Incorrect Claims About Pediatric Gender Medicine: Will This Impact Landmark Supreme Court Case? nysun.com/article/544000…
Hired in 2019 as the ACLU’s first DEI chief, AJ Hikes has also emerged at the center of a labor-rights case against the nonprofit that deemed it illegally fired a staffer on unsubstantiated claims of racism.
The @ACLU's 4th highest-paid staffer, AJ Hikes, who was hired in 2019 as its first DEI officer, whose 2023 salary exceeded $540K, and who wields considerable influence as a close advisor to the executive director, has drawn unflattering attention to the storied legal group.
Leaked: LGBTQ Groups' Memo On Combatting Trump's Attack On Pediatric Gender Medicine
🧵👇I report: The secret memo, which is meant to help backers of pediatric gender medicine fight for the field in the court of public opinion, discourages focusing on the quality of the related scientific evidence.
Leaked: LGBTQ Groups' Memo On Combatting Trump's Attack On Pediatric Gender Medicine
The secret memo, which is meant to help backers of pediatric gender medicine fight for the field in the court of public opinion, discourages focusing on the quality of the related scientific evidence.benryan.substack.com/p/leaked-lgbtq…
One of the authors of the talking-points memo about how to advocate for pediatric gender-transition treatment is Kellan Baker, of the Whitman-Walker Institute. Dr. Baker was on the WPATH team that suppressed the Johns Hopkins systematic literature reviews of trans care that they had commissioned when they didn’t like the results. So it is notable that he is now instructing other advocates of pediatric gender-transition treatment not to discuss the scientific evidence in this field, but is claiming that those who ask about the evidence only do so in bad faith. benryan.substack.com/p/leaked-lgbtq…