Transgender Kids: why doctors are right to be cautious about childhood transition

Jan 13, 2017 by Jill

by Sarah Ditum, New Statesman:

The BBC Two documentary Transgender Kids: Who Knows Best? won’t be broadcast until 9pm this evening, but that hasn’t stopped a lot of people from forming very firm opinions about it. There has been the inevitable petition, and yesterday, the Guardian published a critical article stating that “the transgender community is ‘very scared and very worried’” by a programme that no one interviewed had, as yet, seen. The focus of that concern is a Canadian doctor called Ken Zucker, who, according to his critics, is a discredited proponent of “conversion therapy” who has prevented trans children from obtaining appropriate treatment and was fired for gross misconduct.

But in his decades-long career, Zucker supported hundred of children and adolescents with gender identity disorder (GID), some of whom went on to live happily in their birth sex and some of whom eventually had sex reassignment surgery (SRS). The allegations against him stem from an external review commissioned by his employer, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto (CAMH) – a review which was withdrawn from CAMH’s website after investigations showed that many claims were unsubstantiated and one key charge was demonstrably false. As the journalist Jesse Singal wrote: “it’s hard not to come to an uncomfortable, politically incorrect conclusion: Zucker’s defenders are right. This was a show trial.”

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