ICYMI, Riittakerttu Kaltiala has an amazing piece up at The Free Press. My response at UnHerd is excerpted here:
Kaltiala noticed early on that her patients did not look or sound like those which other clinics claimed to have treated with such success. More troubled, her patients’ distress often started at puberty rather than early childhood. Starting around 2015, Kaltiala noticed a sudden, unexplained surge in adolescent girls seeking transition. These new patients delivered scripted responses, “telling the same life stories and the same anecdotes about their childhoods, including their sudden realisation that they were transgender”.
Eventually, detransitioners started showing up at the clinic, too: “These were another kind of patient who wasn’t supposed to exist,” Kaltiala notes. She goes on:
But no one was saying anything publicly. There was a feeling of pressure to provide what was supposed to be a wonderful new treatment. I felt in myself, and saw in others, a crisis of confidence. People stopped trusting their own observations about what was happening. We were having doubts about our education, clinical experiences, and ability to read and produce scientific evidence.
Kaltiala set about researching her questions and concerns. What she found helped lead Finland to change course on youth gender medicine, but she observed that, “instead of acknowledging the problems we described, [the field] became more committed to expanding these treatments.”
These dynamics produced the sprawling medical scandal we see today. At the 2022 World Professional Association for Transgender Health conference, clinicians praised themselves and one another for overcoming their reservations and doubts about providing “gender-affirming care” to an ever-widening group of patients. Naturally, the doctors did not put their accomplishments in those terms. Instead, they spoke of “checking their cisgender privilege” and “following [their] patients’ lead”.
One plastic surgeon took the microphone to recount the first time a patient requested “gender nullification” surgery, which initially unsettled him. He wasn’t sure it was wise — or ethical — to fulfil the request. Having overcome his reservations, though, he now performs “lots” of these surgeries. One of his colleagues chirped, “I feel like we’re all just winging it and maybe we can wing it together,” before proposing Pinterest boards as a way to keep track of unconventional surgical desires.
Another doctor lamented the fact that patients may be “forced to choose between dissociative identity disorder and gender dysphoria”, since so many clinicians baulk at operating on patients whose “alters” disagree about which surgical interventions to pursue.
It’s hard to think of another field that has gone so obviously off the rails. To get here, clinicians and medical organisations had to discard everything they knew about medical ethics, child development and literature on desistance. The conference was a fortress, buttressed against all doubts and challenges. Within the walls of the conference centre, no serious questions were raised. I got the sense that clinicians had worked hard to lull something inside themselves to sleep and now feared waking it.
At the European Professional Association for Transgender Health conference in Ireland earlier this year, outgoing president Joz Motmans said, “We respect everyone’s freedom of speech, but we choose not to listen to it.” The packed auditorium broke into applause.
I keep thinking about all the compartmentalizing, mental gymnastics, and stories people are telling themselves to keep ignoring their inner doubts and explain away the problems they see happening right in front of them.
It's like gender ideology isn't just a religion, it's a religion that requires believing in snake handling, speaking in tongues, and healings.
Definitely read the piece Eliza linked to abut attending the 2022 WPATH conference. This is from the end of that piece. I think about this often and how it applies to so many people I know:
"The endpoint of this education in 'allyship' is a person who cannot question what she supports because she cannot see it, because she lacks the language to formulate the question, because she lacks the confidence of her own perceptions, because she has 'problematized' away any ground she might stand on or any principle she might insist on. She looks on real horrors with starry eyes because she must.
Of course the bad feelings don't really go away. The horror doesn't go away. But you lose touch with its true sources. You project it on the only people against whom you're allowed—encouraged—to vent bad feelings: the people trying to warn you you’re causing harm.
The more horror you must sublimate, the more horrible your detractors must become, even if the worst thing they say is simply: look. Look at what you’re doing."
"Instead, [doctors] spoke of “checking their cisgender privilege” and 'following [their] patients’ lead'."
This isn't the language of medical professionals. This is how trans activists talk if they've been influenced by social-justice ideology, which is almost all of them. What ever happened physicians' prime directive to do no harm?
In gender-critical circles considerable effort is being made to understand how individuals, especially youth, arrive at the conclusion they are trans. Among other things, this knowledge aids in distinguishing between true gender dysphoria and cases in which social factors and comorbidities have played a major role. It can also help in prevention and assisting detransitioners.
More attention needs to be paid to identifying the factors that cause doctors and other health-care workers to prioritize the trans cause over the welfare of their patients. It is a fact-gathering exercise to pinpoint where, when and how in the individuals' personal or professional history they were exposed to gender identity ideology and learn what, if anything, predisposed them to capture.
Is there a type who is more susceptible than others to the trans agenda? Are medical professionals picking this up in medical school? Are doctors completely unaware of the arguments against so-called affirmative care or have they developed rationalizations that make the cognitive dissonance tolerable? In what ways do dissident, gender-critical health professionals differ from their no-questions-asked peers? What is the best way to engage an affirmative-care practitioner in order to change their views about appropriate care for gender nonconforming people and individuals claiming to suffer from gender dysphoria?
The purpose of the exercise is to find ways to persuade medical professionals to place the health and well-being of the patient above all other considerations and to be informed by hard science instead of social-justice slogans.