Even a dogmatic Freudian with no clinical experience of treating trans kids, who has no published work on trans people, done no formal research into trans people and who just so happens to have a book coming out outlining his evidence free theories of how to cure gender dysphoric kids with the power of his mighty psycho-analysing skills. And who seems to support Zucker's attempts at conversion therapy which I outlined earlier in the thread - although even Zucker supprts medical transition when gender dysphoria persists into adolescence.
I think articles like this are one of the most depressing aspects of this debate. There's so much of it which doesn't tell the whole story, or ignores inconvenient facts or sometimes just tells bare faced lies. None of the people he cites have any expertise in the field, other than Zucker who he conveniently cherry picks. So many people are setting themselves up as experts on trans kids when half of them have barely ever even spoken to a trans kid and people are accepting it because what they say chimes with their personal hunches about trans people. It would take an essay of equal length to point out the inaccuracies, omissions and obvious biases in that piece by Evans, and I'm not even sure there's any point anymore. What I do know however, is that if they do manage to stop all treatments for trans kids in the UK, these kids will not be thanking all of you who supported it a decade or so later. They will be filled with burning hatred for the rest of their lives over the insistence that people's evidence free pet theories about gender identity superceded their lived experience and understanding of themselves. And if you want to see a taste of that read Ky Schevers and some of the others from the first wave of detransitioners who have subsequently retransitioned - which incidentally is exactly what you'd expect if you read any of the evidence about the experiences of detransitioners:
Ky Schevers – Medium
I will say this. There are no ‘experts’, other than trans people on their lived experience. There are only theories about what causes some people to experience their physical body as at odds with their psychological perception of themselves.
The idea that gender is an ‘essence’ that exists as something separate to biological sex, something that should be discovered by an individual during life rather than ‘assigned’ at birth, is an explanation but it is not a fact. And it cannot be proven or disproven by science. Any more than the idea put forward in the article that littlebabyjesus linked to, that gender dysphoria is linked to the traumatic separation from the primary caregiver (mother). These are psychological theories which are not amenable to scientific proof.
Leaving aside the theoretical explanations of why some people experience gender dysphoria, you can try and use the scientific method to measure whether one medical treatment is better than another. The outcome measure usually a proxy for psychological distress (suicide attempts, or self reported episodes of suicidal ideation). These kinds of measures are fraught with difficulty, and biases within the method, but are the best that science can do. The often low powered studies that exist, provide equivocal evidence overall for medical intervention.
What is a fact is that medicine cannot change a persons biological sex, except at the most crude hormonal and anatomical level. Sex differences between males and females are pervasive genetically, through to physiologically, and anatomically (and not just secondary sex characteristics- everything from skeletal muscle type, bone density, kidney volume distribution, etc pretty much every part of the body has sex based differences), to clinically (much if not most pathology and diseases have sex-biases and present differently).
Even a pre pubertal biological female, given puberty blockers, then testosterone, having their breast tissue surgically removed and a ‘penis’ surgically created out of tissue from other body regions, does not ‘become’ a male medically. And the person has of course been made infertile and will have lifelong sexual dysfunction, and may well also have physical side effects of the medical and surgical treatments (such as osteoporosis, growth retardation, significant scarring etc).
Maybe for some people the modification of the body like this is the best way to treat the psychological distress. Maybe for others, psychological therapy without medical intervention would be best. We just don’t yet know what works best for most yet.
We do know that adolescents (people aged between 10 and 19 years) are already undergoing a period of physical sexual maturation and psychological adaptation. This has long been recognised as a challenging time psychologically for many. We also know that the brain is changing rapidly, and adolescence is a time of differing risk assessment of likely outcomes of behaviours to adults, and heightened vulnerability to risk behaviour. Delaying these processes using puberty blockers will of course effect a young persons physical, psychological, neuro developmental, and psychosexual development.
These are enormously complex decisions. For adults, let alone children. Medicine must be very careful when deciding whether to act. The omission of action can of course also harm, but first,
first, do no harm.