Reflections from the SEGM Conference
Last week I attended a conference in New York City hosted by the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine (SEGM). It brought together professionals from across the globe, ranging from the US to the UK and from Finland to Sweden, to review evidence, present new research, and engage in discussions with each other on how to best approach clinical practice with young gender dysphoric patients.
Tonight, I saw that each of the conference speakers had been listed on Transgender Map, a website run by an activist named Andrea James, and labeled “anti-trans activists.” The attempts to intimidate professionals into silence happen quickly! Of course, none of the speakers were activists. They were professionals who have devoted their careers to the wellbeing of gender dysphoric people who lead with compassion and sensitivity in their work.
If you only read articles written online by activists about SEGM prior to attending the conference, you might expect it to be full of people who hold discriminatory attitudes towards trans people and you’d be bracing yourself to hear harmful anti-trans rhetoric for four consecutive days. However, it would quickly become clear to you that the activist claims you read of SEGM were entirely inaccurate.
I think it’d mostly be run home by the diversity of the audience and speakers. This was a group of professionals who spanned a wide range of ages and social positionalities, including a large portion of LGBT professionals.
Notably, several young professionals spoke alongside older professionals in the field, indicating that a new generation of clinicians, dedicated to ensuring that an evidence-based path forward is forged and maintained, have started to follow in the footsteps of this field’s pioneers.
The discordance between the reality of SEGM and the way the organization’s public image has been slandered was stark. It mostly highlighted for me the dangers that come from activists like Andrea James making such extraordinary accusations. Her rush to label SEGM and the speakers at their conference “anti-trans” has real consequences.
The field gets further entrenched in mistrust and a divisive atmosphere and this makes it difficult for professionals to engage in constructive dialogue about issues related to gender dysphoric youth. It slows down progress, hindering the development of best practices, and ultimately hurts the very people that activists like Andrea James purport to care about.
But with their conference, SEGM demonstrated what’s possible to accomplish within this highly fraught landscape. Professionals can gather together and intimidation tactics don’t have to constrain the way they show.
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Thank you for this. Some months ago, I had an unusually productive discussion with my trans-identified daughter. Afterwards, she went to the internet to check whether some of the things I said had any validity. She found SEGM's statements about some of the negative impacts on health from so-called gender affirming care, but she also very quickly found (in Wikipedia and elsewhere) that SEGM is labeled anti-trans. This gave her the ammunition she was looking for to completely reject every point I made that, at the time I made it, she acknowledged was important to consider.
These activists' labels have real life consequences. Not only do these labels have a chilling effect on the actual research and care of those suffering with gender dysphoria or other mental distress that appears to be gender dysphoria, making the professionals understandably less willing to speak publicly about these issues or report their findings, but they also have the effect of preventing young vulnerable people from seeing the truth about the medical interventions involved. Young people like my daughter simply dismiss anything written by organizations like SEGM as prejudiced nonsense.
Thanks very much for reporting on the conference and the James angle. Everything old is new again! If people haven't read Alice Dreger's Galileo's Middle Finger, now is the time.