The Shaky Foundation of Childhood Gender Transition

The debate around childhood “gender transition” has become so toxic as to render calm and rational discussion nearly impossible. Each side is quick to smear their opponents as malevolent or ignorant—or both.
Yet as Abbruzzese et al. detail in their paper, the Dutch experiment “escaped the lab”; the small, flawed study diffused rapidly through the international medical community as justification for puberty suppression of gender-confused children as a prelude to cross-sex hormones and surgical modification. And despite the lack of proper evidence, those practices were adopted by WPATH as the “standard of care.”
That, coupled with the social-media-enabled explosion in adolescents identifying as transgender in the mid-2010s, led directly to where we are today: science replaced by full-blown ideology.
In the files, Dr. Daniel Metzger, a pediatric endocrinologist in B.C. and a co-author of the Canadian Paediatric Society’s position statement on gender-affirming care for youth in Canada, openly admits that gender clinicians are “often explaining these sorts of things to people who haven’t even had biology in high school yet,” and “most of the kids are nowhere in any kind of a brain space to really, really, really talk about it in a serious way.”
Fellow WPATH member and child psychologist Dr. Dianne Berg, co-author of the child chapter of WPATH’s “Standards of Care,” confesses that for children and adolescents it’s “out of their developmental range to understand the extent to which some of these medical interventions are impacting them.” And worse, even parents aren’t sufficiently health-literate to comprehend the effects of treatment protocols proposed for their gender-confused children.
Per Dr. Berg: “What really disturbs me is when the parents can’t tell me what they need to know about a medical intervention that apparently they signed off for. … [This is] not what we need to be doing ethically.”
Yet a lack of ethics is on full display. Gender transition of children with coexisting autism, developmental delay, or other mental health challenges is openly encouraged. Fertility concerns are downplayed or dismissed. The long-term harms of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and irreversible surgeries are shunted aside.
WPATH has been long considered the leading authority on the care and treatment of individuals with gender dysphoria, and is frequently cited by organizations like the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, and the Canadian Pediatric Society as the basis for their policies of “gender affirming care.” WPATH, in turn, points to these organizations as lending credence to their own Standards of Care.
It’s the very definition of circular reasoning.
Except that in this case it’s a circular firing squad—and it’s kids who are taking the bullets. If that isn’t wicked, I don’t know what it is.