Gender Chutzpah

The gall of Canadian "gender-transition" doctors is appalling.

In October 2023 the Canadian Pediatric Society (CPS) issued a position statement on “gender-affirming care”, authored by adolescent medicine specialist Dr. Ashley Vandermorris and endocrinologist Dr. Daniel Metzger.  It was “intended as a resource to guide paediatricians and PCPs [primary care providers] in implementing an affirming approach to routine health care provision for all youth.”

Five months later, in an explosive exposé known as the WPATH Files (WPATH being acronym for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health), Dr. Metzger was outed as openly admitting that gender clinicians are “often explaining these sorts of things to people who haven’t even had biology in high school yet,” and that “most of the kids are nowhere in any kind of a brain space to really, really, really talk about it in a serious way.” 

Then in April of 2024 the Final Report of the Cass Review, the culmination of a painstaking four-year investigation commissioned by Britain’s National Health Service, laid bare the lack of evidence underpinning gender-affirming care” practices in the U.K. and the consequent harms that had been visited upon children — harms which had already led Finland and Sweden to severely curtail the use of puberty blockers and cross-gender hormones in young people.

In the aftermath of the Cass Review a tidal wave of caution with respect to youth gender care consumed Europe; it seemed inevitable that it would sweep across the pond to envelop North America as well.

Alas, that wave didn’t do much to dampen Canada’s enthusiasm for “transitioning” children. As the Aristotle Foundation reported last July, Canada remains far more “permissive” (read: reckless) in its youth gender policies compared with Europe.

But there are glimmers of hope. For the first time, a group of respected pediatricians in Canada have collectively raised concern.

In an October letter to the editor of Pediatrics and Child Health (the official journal of the CPS), in which the Metzger/Vandermorris position statement appeared), three Calgary pediatricians — Drs. Ian Mitchell, Roxanne Goldade, and Darrell Palmer — joined Ontario psychologist and researcher Dr. Chan Kulatunga-Moruzi in asking why the CPS hasn’t altered its “gender-affirming-care” position. They write:

“The Cass Review represents the new international standard of care. Given that the current Canadian model parallels the UK’s prior gender-affirming care model, the findings of the Cass Review are pivotal. Canadian youth deserve the same protection of evidence-based guidelines as children in Finland, Sweden, and the UK.”

Given the thick veil of silence that has cloaked the medical community on these issues, cowed as it is by the risk of condemnation from fellow professionals — not to mention the dark shadow cast by Canada’s recently legislated “conversion therapy ban”, which threatens heavy fines and even jail time for those who dare to challenge present gender practices — it’s remarkable that three pediatricians dared to jointly raise their heads above the parapet.

And not just any pediatricians. Drs. Palmer and Goldade are highly regarded and seasoned community pediatricians in Calgary; in 2013 Dr. Goldade was recognized with the “Distinguished Alumna” award from the Faculty of Medicine. And Dr. Mitchell, currently Professor Emeritus at Cumming School of Medicine, has spent a long and illustrious career as a much-decorated champion of medical bioethics.

The response to their well-articulated letter? Well, Dr. Metzger and his colleagues doubled down. In dismissing the pediatricians’ concerns as misguided and overwrought, they leaned heavily on a grossly flawed critique of the Cass Review authored in part by long-time transition enthusiasts Drs. Jack Turban and Johanna Olsen-Kennedy. As Dr. Leor Sapir exposed in devastating detail in the City Journal last November, Dr. Turban — a child psychiatrist and director of the Gender Psychiatry Program at the University of California in San Francisco — has demonstrated only a passing acquaintance with the basic tenets of evidence-based medicine. Dr. Olsen-Kennedy, medical director of the Center for Trans-youth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, is “famous” for dismissing concerns of post-transition regret by stating:

“Here’s the thing about chest surgery: if you want breasts at a later point in your life you can just go and get them.”

No doubt it’s difficult for physicians to admit when they get things wrong; and particularly on this file, where to admit being in error would mean that you’ve presided over the irreversible medicalization, and in many cases, surgical mutilation, of innocent children.

As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, it’s an example of what Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle, commenting on the now discredited but once widespread practice of frontal lobotomies, has described as “The Oedipus Trap”: a scenario in which “it can be so psychologically devastating to discover you’ve made a mistake…that you will do everything in your power to avoid recognizing it.”

Nonetheless, it’s long past time that Dr. Metzger and his collaborators wise up to what the rest of the world already knows: that medical and surgical interference with gender-confused children is based on the flimsiest of evidence, and that the” gender-affirming care” model is best consigned to the medical dustbin of history — immediately, before more children are harmed.

It’s one thing to be caught with one’s head in the ideological sand; it’s another entirely to insist on keeping it there. Yet that’s what Dr. Metzer and Co. are doing — and for that they deserve our condemnation.

Drs. Mitchell, Goldade, Palmer, and Kulatunga-Moruzi, on the other hand, deserve our sustained applause.