As is happening with disastrous Covid policies, former enthusiasts for the equally disastrous fad of “transgenderism” are starting to walk back their previous confidence that chemically castrating and surgically mutilating children is the best “care”. Or if it should even be dignified as “care” at all.
But, is “Oopsie, my bad” really good enough?
First, the mea culpa.
Dr. Susan Bradley, a Canadian psychiatrist and pioneer in child gender dysphoria treatment, came out against the popular model of affirming children’s transgender identities and putting them on puberty blockers — a practice she was once involved in — in an interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
As it happens, Bradley started off solidly in the realm of medical sanity.
Bradley started a pediatric gender clinic in 1975 aimed at treating children with gender dysphoria — a deep sense of discomfort with one’s body and biological sex — in which she offered a therapy-focused approach; most patients outgrew their feelings of being transgender over time, she told the DCNF.
Then, it all went pear-shaped.
Around 2000, the clinic began prescribing puberty blockers to gender-dysphoric children as a way to alleviate their distress, a model which has since become widely adopted by medical establishments around the world, including in the U.S.
Bradley, who is now in her early eighties, expressed regret that the clinic had participated in the administration of puberty blockers for gender dysphoria, which she now believes can cement a child’s sense of confusion out of which they would likely otherwise grow. She also expressed concern about the drugs’ side effects.
“We were wrong,” she said. “They’re not as reversible as we always thought, and they have longer term effects on kids’ growth and development, including making them sterile and quite a number of things affecting their bone growth” […]
“We thought that it was relatively safe, and endocrinologists said they’re reversible, and that we didn’t have to worry about it. I had this skepticism in the back of my mind all the time that maybe we were actually colluding and not helping them. And I think that’s proven correct in that, once these kids get started at any age on puberty blockers, nearly all of them continue to want to go to cross sex hormones,” Bradley said.
Making kids sterile, damaging their growth, and screwing with their minds — those are pretty major things to get wrong.
Especially when doctors not in the stultifying grip of lunatic transgender ideology were trying to tell them all along.
She also produced research, along with other clinic doctors, showing that 87.8% of boys referred to their clinic for gender identity issues eventually “desisted,” meaning they stopped believing they were actually girls and came to terms with their sex.
Bradley came to believe that most child patients who identified as transgender were actually on the autism spectrum or suffering from borderline personality disorder, which she believes should be classified as part of the autism spectrum. Autistic adolescents are particularly prone to obsessive thinking and body image issues, and they struggle to change their minds once convinced something is true, all of which make them more vulnerable to being convinced they are actually the opposite sex and should seek medical interventions such as puberty blockers or hormones.
Daily Caller
Well, no shit, Dr Frankenstein.
It’s all very well to smack your forehead and exclaim, “Oh, boy… did we get that wrong”, when you’re leaving behind a generation of permanently mutilated young adults, rendered sterile, if they haven’t already had their genitals and breasts hacked off.
People need to be held accountable, not just shrug and shuffle off into comfortable retirement.