Evidence over Ideology: Gender-Distressed Children Deserve Nothing Less
by Jill Simons, Public Discourse:
When it comes to children’s health, ideology should never override evidence. Children who are distressed about their biological sex need evidence-based care that facilitates their journey to adulthood, keeping them mentally and physically intact.
Once again, the United Kingdom is leading the way in choosing evidence over ideology for gender-distressed kids. Over the summer, the UK’s high court deferred to science over activism and upheld an emergency ban on puberty blockers for children under age eighteen.
Many European countries—like Norway, Denmark, England, Wales, Scotland, Sweden, and Finland—are moving away from life-altering hormonal and surgical interventions for children experiencing distress over their biological sex. Their systematic reviews revealed insufficient evidence that these experimental protocols help vulnerable kids. On the contrary, the evidence indicates such protocols actually harm the overwhelming majority of children experiencing distress over their sex.
These countries have shifted their focus to the evaluation and treatment of underlying mental health conditions for gender-dysphoric youth and now recommend psychotherapy as the first-line treatment. The European Society for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry has publicly stated that medical professionals should “not . . . promote experimental and unnecessarily invasive treatments with unproven psycho-social effects, [but should instead] adhere to the ‘primum-nil-nocere’ (first, do no harm) principle.”
To “do no harm,” children’s healthcare must be evidence-led. Europe is headed in the right direction, but the United States is an outlier. In the US, the medical industry is ignoring the evidence that gender transitions are deleterious to young children’s mental, physical, spiritual, emotional, and relational well-being. Too often, ideology trumps biology—and activism and financial incentives trump evidence of what is truly best for children. Gender facilities offering controversial hormones and surgeries to gender-dysphoric children have multiplied in the US in the last decade, and once-reputable medical organizations are endorsing experimental drugs and irreversible procedures for children (like mastectomies on physically healthy girls). These once-reputable medical organizations are disregarding the growing disagreement among medical professionals in the US and worldwide. They are also refusing to confront the clear evidence that hormones and surgeries impact a child’s future fertility and can cause permanent sterilization.
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