Oct 22, 2022 – Wesley Yang
“Prior to 2018, I had maybe one trans patient. This is a thing that occurred in TWO OUT OF TEN THOUSAND CHILDREN. It was a thing a pediatrician can go their entier career and never see. And so the first time I had a patient who told me that ever since they were two or three, they knew they were actually a boy, I was like ‘oh —’that’s transgender.” I’ve heard of that…there’s a gender clinic over at the children’s hospital, I’ll send you. And that’s how I was, but then there was another one…and another one…and another one… and that was in late 2018. So…one in twenty years…and then they started to come every few months and then more often…”
“I worry about the AAP because the Endocrine Society put out guidelines in 2017 and they were very careful in the guidelines — one, to put out that the evidence was of low or very low quality, and they also said in the guidelines that they have no idea how you identify which kids are trans and require this treatment. So they were sort of like — we’re just technicians and we’ll just tell you, if you have a trans kid, we’ll tell you how to do the transition. And then American Academy of Pediatrics the next year just leapt into that void and said ‘Ooh, we’ll tell you how you know which kids are trans…you ask them…and if they say they’re trans, then they’re trans.”
“It was only later when I started asking questions, like wait, every single kid I send to the gender clinic gets put on puberty blockers or cross sex hormones, generally at the first visit…. a 12-year old was offered puberty blockers at the first visit. It was happening immediately. And so I started to get worried that they weren’t acting like a proper subspecialist clinic where they are doing a significant evaluation and figuring out, ‘Is this kid going to benefit from this treatment or does this kid have something else going on.?” As soon as I figured out that was happening, then I didn’t want to send anybody to the gender clinic anymore.”
“When I started looking into this, I found James Cantor’s paper which is titled ‘Fact Checking the AAP,’ and…because he’s a sexologist and is familiar with the literature, he was reading it and seeing a statement that says ‘conversion therapy has been proven to be terrible for trans kid (13, 14, 15)’… and he goes and looks at references 13, 14 and 15, and hes like…wait, I know those references! Those aren’t about kids! Those aren’t even about transgenderism or transsexualissm! Those are about conversion therapy for adult homosexuals…and this happens all the time in the literature surrounding pediatric gender transition. You need to check every reference —because often the reference does not say what they are implying that it says…”
