Canadian specialist urges MDs to ‘slow down’ in treating transgender patients after U.K. clinic closed

Aug 18, 2022 by Jill

by Tom Blackwell, National Post:

Canadian health care faces similar issues around treating transgender teenagers as a controversial British clinic and needs to “slow down” and not move patients so readily to medical transition, says a leading expert in the field.

As the number of youth presenting with gender dysphoria soars and their demographic make-up changes markedly, the health-care system should examine why those trends are happening while taking a thoughtful, “neutral” approach to each young patient, said Dr. Joey Bonifacio.

Gender health-care made headlines recently with Britain’s decision to close the so-called Tavistock clinic for gender issues and replace it with a network of smaller centres. An independent review suggested it was giving short shrift to patients’ non-gender mental health problems, and that evidence was unclear about the long-term effects of puberty-blocker drugs, often the first step in gender transition.

“I do have the same concerns the Tavistock clinic faced,” said Bonifacio, a pediatrician whose practice at Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital focuses on gender identity.

“I think it just moves us to ‘Let’s slow down and make sense of what is going on,’ ” he said, though Bonifacio opposes closing down any clinics here. “All of these decisions … concerning social, medical or surgical transitions, these are big decisions and they deserve the time, they deserve the respect that’s needed.”

He acknowledged that patients already face long wait times, but stressed that doctors and other professionals must thoroughly address any mental-health issues children experience on top of gender dysphoria — the sense of not belonging to one’s birth sex — before beginning gender transition with hormone treatment and, eventually, surgery.

Read here