The more than 400-page report from the office of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. comes as a rebuke of the Biden administration’s stance on medical, ethical, and procedural issues related to gender dysphoria for youth, including the support of using puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries.
The report, a meta-review on existing medical literature, alleges that the most influential U.S. clinical guidelines on treating gender dysphoric youth from the Endocrine Society and World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH, do not have sufficient scientific support and were developed under political pressure rather than medical evidence.
Evidence was uncovered last summer that officials within former Deputy HHS Secretary Rachel Levine’s office pressured professionals at WPATH to remove age recommendations for children with gender dysphoria to receive surgical transition treatments. Levine underwent a male-to-female surgical transition in adulthood.
The new HHS report also highlights that U.S. medical associations “played a key role” in creating the illusion of professional consensus in support of medical transition for minors when, in reality, there was “suppressed dissent and stifled debate” among the associations’ respective memberships.
“While no clinician or medical association intends to fail their patients–particularly those who are most vulnerable–the preceding chapters demonstrate that this is precisely what has occurred,” reads the conclusion of the massive report.
National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya said in a press release about the report that the medical community’s responsibility is to “follow the gold standard of science, not activist agendas.
“Our duty is to protect our nation’s children — not expose them to unproven and irreversible medical interventions,” Bhattacharya said.
Although the intention of the report is not to make official recommendations about changes in treatment protocols, the concluding section of the report outlines how psychotherapy techniques have been shut out from the discussion on treating youth with gender dysphoria.
Psychotherapy, also known as talk therapy, has been a well-documented form of treatment for mental health conditions that are also often present in youth struggling with gender dysphoria, such as depression, anxiety, eating disorders, self-harm, and suicidality.
Adverse mental health conditions in teenagers and young adults have been on the rise since 2010, with some studies suggesting that diagnoses of depression and anxiety have more than doubled, says the report.
But in treating youth with gender dysphoria, however, the report argues that the negative association with conversion therapy, or using talk therapy to change the sexual orientation of gay and lesbian individuals, has put “significant pressure” on therapists not to use psychotherapy to treat mental health issues in patients with gender dysphoria.
“This pressure may cause clinicians to overlook the significant possibility that in some patients, [gender dysphoria] has arisen from trauma, ‘primary’ mental health concerns, or neurodevelopmental conditions,” reads the report.
The press release says that the contributors to the report include medical doctors, medical ethicists, and a methodologist, but names of contributors are initially being withheld “in order to help maintain the integrity” of the peer review process to commence in the coming days.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, chairman of the medical advocacy group Do No Harm that advocates against medical transition for minors, praised the report on social media Thursday morning.
“It is clearer now more than ever that we must end this misguided practice and replace it with evidence-based treatment for gender confused kids,” Goldfarb said.
According to Do No Harm’s database, which uses insurance information to identify the number of children receiving medical interventions for gender transition, nearly 14,000 minors in the United States underwent medical sex change treatments between 2019 and 2023.
TRUMP’S 100-DAY EXECUTIVE BLITZ SHIFTS TO LAND MINES AHEAD
That includes more than 5,700 undergoing surgeries and nearly 8,600 receiving puberty blockers and hormone treatments.
Casey Pick, director of policy at the LGBTQ+ youth advocacy group The Trevor Project, told USA Today that the report is deeply troubling and urged the Trump administration “to respect and support people for who they are — and to let families and doctors make decisions based on what keeps people healthy, not government ideology.”
