Top medic: ‘Dangerous groupthink on gender transition harming kids’

An ideologically-driven agenda is harming gender-confused children in the US, a top European psychiatrist has warned.

In an article published by the American online news outlet The Free Press, Finnish-born Professor Riittakerttu Kaltiala hit out against the “widespread transitioning of gender-distressed minors” in the States.

In 2020, Finland’s national public health service recognised the “experimental” nature of the ‘gender-affirming model’ and recommended sex swaps be postponed “until adulthood.”

Activists

Dr Kaltiala, who heads up psychiatric care for adolescents at Tampere University Hospital, wrote: “Over the past dozen or so years there has been a dramatic development in my field.

“A new protocol was announced that called for the social and medical gender transition of children and teenagers who experienced gender dysphoria—that is, a discordance between one’s biological sex and an internal feeling of being a different gender.”

At the same time, she explained, “there arose an activist movement that declared gender transition was not just a medical procedure, but a human right”.

Tasked with pioneering ‘gender-affirming’ care in Finland, Dr Kaltiala recalled her disquiet at “being told to intervene in healthy, functioning bodies simply on the basis of a young person’s shifting feelings about gender”.

Social contagion

She continued: “As the service got underway starting in 2011, there were many surprises. Not only did the patients come, they came in droves. Around the Western world the numbers of gender-dysphoric children were skyrocketing.”

Advocates of the protocol had led clinicians to expect “a small number of boys who had persistently declared they were girls”, instead, Dr Kaltiala said many were teenage girls “with multiple psychiatric problems”.

Poor outcomes following “hormonal interventions”, evidence of “social contagion–linked gender dysphoria” and “growing concern about the harms of transition on vulnerable young patients”, ultimately led to the ‘new protocol’ being abandoned.

Dr Kaltiala stated: “When you are a physician who sees something is not working, it is your duty to organize, research, inform your colleagues, inform a big audience, and stop doing that treatment.”

Ideological capture

Consequently, she wrote, “I felt an increasing obligation to patients, to medicine, and to the truth, to speak outside of Finland against the widespread transitioning of gender-distressed minors.

“I have been particularly concerned about American medical societies, who as a group continue to assert that children know their ‘authentic’ selves, and a child who declares a transgender identity should be affirmed and started on treatment.”

While medical organisations are “supposed to transcend politics in favor of upholding standards that protect patients”, it is evident, she argued, that they are “not immune to dangerous groupthink that results in patient harm”.