Research suggests gender-affirming medical care results in better mental health.
Jack Turban MD MHS
Psychology Today – January 24, 2022
KEY POINTS
Sixteen studies to date have examined the impact of gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth.
Existing evidence suggests that gender-affirming medical care results in favorable mental health outcomes.
All major medical organizations oppose legislation that would ban gender-affirming medical care for transgender adolescents.
NOTE: This post was updated on October 11, 2022. In discussions of studies 5, 7, 8 and 10, the final sentence was appended to include further information about the study.
I’m a physician-scientist who studies the mental health of transgender and gender diverse youth. I also spend a lot of time on Twitter. And yes I know, that’s my first mistake. I’ve noticed there seem to be hundreds if not thousands of Twitter accounts that will repeatedly post that there is no evidence that gender-affirming medical care results in good mental health outcomes for transgender youth…
Researchers Found Puberty Blockers And Hormones Didn’t Improve Trans Kids’ Mental Health At Their Clinic. Then They Published A Study Claiming The Opposite. (Updated)
A critique of Tordoff et al. (2022)
Singal-Minded – Jesse Singal – April 7 2022
An article called “Mental Health Outcomes in Transgender and Nonbinary Youths Receiving Gender-Affirming Care” was published in JAMA Network Open late in February. The authors, listed as Diana M. Tordoff, Jonathon W. Wanta, Arin Collin, Cesalie Stepney, David J. Inwards-Breland, and Kym Ahrens, are mostly based at the University of Washington–Seattle or Seattle Children’s Hospital.
In their study, the researchers examined a cohort of kids who came through Seattle Children’s Gender Clinic. They simply followed the kids over time as some of them went on puberty blockers and/or hormones, administering self-report surveys tracking their mental health. There were four waves of data collection: when they first arrived at the clinic, three months later, six months later, and 12 months later.
The study was propelled into the national discourse by a big PR push on the part of UW–Seattle. It was successful — Diana Tordoff discussed her and her colleagues’ findings on Science Friday, a very popular weekly public radio science show, not long after the study was published…
The University of Washington Is Putting Trans Kids At Risk By Distorting Suicide Research
This has been a shameful episode
Singal-Minded – Jesse Singal – Sept 2022
Anyone who has read my work knows that I am not a fan of harm inflation. I don’t like the tendency to treat more and more things as “harmful” or even “violent,” because I think this is usually a derailing tactic employed by individuals who don’t want to engage in conversation or argument.
But it’s obviously true that in some cases, the propagation of some types of information can be reasonably described as harmful or even potentially dangerous. Few of even the free-speechiest of free speech bros would deny this. And I genuinely think what the University of Washington School of Medicine is doing — has been doing, since April — could put trans kids at risk.
For those late to this: In April I published a very long post laying out the severe flaws in a study about puberty blockers and hormones University of Washington researchers published in JAMA Network Open, and how they exaggerated the results when describing them to the media and to UW’s own PR apparatus. The very short version is that the study has so many flaws that it does not provide us with any evidence whatsoever supporting the idea that kids who went on gender-affirming medicine (GAM) experienced beneficial outcomes relative to the kids who did not…
The Distortions in Jack Turban’s Psychology Today Article on ‘Gender Affirming Care’
Turban’s public statements on pediatric gender medicine have been less than honest.
Reality’s Last Stand – Leor Sapir – 8 Oct 2022
For those not following the debate over pediatric gender medicine, Dr. Jack Turban is one of the leading proponents of the controversial protocol known as “gender affirming care” and has been outspoken in the American media promoting puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to manage gender-related distress in youth. He is quoted widely and frequently by mainstream, left-of-center outlets including the Washington Post and the New York Times. This, despite the fact that he is fresh out of his residency and has far less clinical experience than many of the experts with whose more cautious approach to managing gender dysphoria in youth he disagrees.
One of Turban’s most widely cited articles is the one published by Psychology Today back in January of this year. The article, it should be noted, was published after health authorities in Sweden, Finland, and the U.K. had conducted systematic reviews of evidence for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and concluded, unanimously, that the risks and uncertainties outweigh any known benefits. Sweden and Finland have already severely limited the practice, and the U.K. seems to be moving in the same direction following the damning Cass Report. Medical authorities in France and New Zealand have also sounded the alarm, with France’s National Academy of Medicine now urging “the greatest caution” when using hormones to treat gender-related distress in minors.
Turban has thus far chosen to ignore these developments. In the case of the U.K., he has misleadingly suggested that the decision to shut down the country’s gender clinic (which was also the largest gender clinic in the world at the time) was prompted only by concern over long wait times and that the NHS was still on board with the “affirmative” model of care. Even a cursory reading of the Cass Report shows that this is demonstrably false. Cass explicitly cites the “affirmative model,” which “originated in the USA” and pressures clinicians not to question a minor’s gender self-identification and desire for transition, as a probable reason behind the lack of child “safeguarding” and the rushing of minors to medicalization.…(see more)…
CITATION TRACING TOOLS
