Rachel (formerly Richard) Levine, the assistant secretary for health, told NPR that “there is no argument among medical professionals — pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, etc., — about the value and importance of gender-affirming care.”
This is an egregious falsehood. Whichever side of the debate one comes down on, it is a statement of spectacular mendacity or ignorance to say, “there is no argument.”
To anyone following this issue, in recent years there has been an unmissable and international debate within the medical profession.
As a result of this, much of Europe is moving in a more cautious direction. Whistleblower clinicians at Britain’s main gender youth clinic have warned of rushed evaluations and the wrongful transitions of autistic and same-sex attracted adolescents. Even in the United States, some specialists in medicalized gender transition — who, like Levine, also identify as transgender — have started to express their doubts. An editorial in the British Medical Journal said that “extreme viewpoints, either liberal or conservative, do not help the arguments or promote science.”
In claiming a consensus, Levine pointed to medical organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics. Yet the official position of the AAP does not represent a consensus among its tens of thousands of members. Rather, it represents the views of the handful of authors of its policy statements and the committee members who rubberstamped their endorsement of “gender-affirming care.”
In 2018, Susan Bradley, a child psychiatrist with 40 years of clinical experience and research in gender dysphoria, who founded the Toronto Gender Identity Clinic at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, told National Review that:
There is no professional consensus on medical treatment of gender-dysphoric children and young adolescents. . . We do not know the long-term effects of medical transition in young people; these effects are mostly irreversible and include sterility and sometimes impaired sexual function. Watchful waiting, which was the treatment of choice for many years, has been dismissed as false and harmful with no evidence for this assertion.
Why say there is a consensus when there obviously isn’t one? One explanation is rhetorical. If there isn’t a consensus, then you’re forced to acknowledge that these treatments are medically controversial and experimental. Obviously, that makes them unjustifiable. Especially when the alternative, watchful waiting, worked so well.