How would a prerequisite of “long standing gender incongruence” help clinicians avoid putting young gay men and lesbians on the path to transition?
Both the Cass Review and Finnish studies, the most complete data available, show that without blockers or cross-sex hormones, ~80 percent of patients at youth gender clinics will resolve their dysphoria during puberty and grow up healthy and same-sex attracted. This rings true for many—perhaps most—gay men and lesbians, who remember wishing throughout childhood we’d been born as the opposite sex. (For me that feeling disappeared in adolescence, when my world expanded and I realized I was happy as a gender-nonconforming girl, exactly as the studies predict.)
To avoid, in the words of clinicians at Tavistock GIDS, “transing away the gay” in young people, gender incongruence needs to be dropped from the criteria for gender medicalization.
In fact, with huge respect for the physicians and scientists who contributed to the Cass Review, can ANY criteria for youth medicalization be written that won’t sweep up children and adolescents who only need time to grow into themselves? Shouldn’t we instead double down on the review’s recommendation and make talk therapy the default treatment for ALL young people struggling to understand their gender issues and the experiences and mental health challenges that lie beneath them?
How would a prerequisite of “long standing gender incongruence” help clinicians avoid putting young gay men and lesbians on the path to transition?
Both the Cass Review and Finnish studies, the most complete data available, show that without blockers or cross-sex hormones, ~80 percent of patients at youth gender clinics will resolve their dysphoria during puberty and grow up healthy and same-sex attracted. This rings true for many—perhaps most—gay men and lesbians, who remember wishing throughout childhood we’d been born as the opposite sex. (For me that feeling disappeared in adolescence, when my world expanded and I realized I was happy as a gender-nonconforming girl, exactly as the studies predict.)
To avoid, in the words of clinicians at Tavistock GIDS, “transing away the gay” in young people, gender incongruence needs to be dropped from the criteria for gender medicalization.
In fact, with huge respect for the physicians and scientists who contributed to the Cass Review, can ANY criteria for youth medicalization be written that won’t sweep up children and adolescents who only need time to grow into themselves? Shouldn’t we instead double down on the review’s recommendation and make talk therapy the default treatment for ALL young people struggling to understand their gender issues and the experiences and mental health challenges that lie beneath them?
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