The Global Pediatric Medicine Field Has a Clear Habit Of Hiding—And Discouraging—Inconvenient Research Findings
The Global Pediatric Medicine Field Has a Clear Habit Of Hiding—And Discouraging—Inconvenient Research Findings
What NYT reported about Johanna Olson-Kennedy sitting on her null findings on puberty blockers is but one such story in a field in which many researchers prioritize the mission over honest science.
Some of the biggest names in the pediatric gender medicine field are part of an entrenched global trend in which they prioritize the transgender advocacy mission over honest and direct science. They hide inconvenient research findings. And they seek to prevent other researchers from even asking questions that might yield inconvenient answers. Supporting them is a cabal of activists and LGBTQ nonprofits standing at the ready to bully and cancel any scientists or journalists who might bring to light any of the more questionable aspects of pediatric gender medicine.
This pattern is not just limited to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles’ Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy. If you haven’t already heard, according to reporting in The New York Times, this major leader in the pediatric gender medicine field has been sitting on null findings from her National Institutes of Health–funded study of puberty blockers for gender dysphoric children because, she said, publishing them would prove politically inexpedient. (I wrote about an undercover video of her talking about mastectomies here.)
Where have we heard this story before?
Let’s take a trip across the pond to the British National Health Service’s now-shuttered pediatric gender clinic, GIDS. (I encourage you to read all about this troubled clinic in Hannah Barnes’ book Time to Think. Make sure to get the new 2024 U.S. paperback, which has a vital new epilogue.) After it was founded in 2011, GIDS’s leaders sought to recreate the findings of the original Dutch protocol that was first cultivated in the mid-1990s and that ultimately gave rise to the global pediatric gender-transition treatment movement during the 2000s and 2010s.
But the British team failed. They did not find a substantial benefit from providing puberty blockers to gender dysphoric children by following the Dutch protocol. So did these researchers alert the world to their troublesome findings? Did they send a word of caution to a field that by then was circumnavigating the globe, setting up what would soon be hundreds of pediatric gender-clinic outposts?
No, they kept their failure secret.
It wasn’t until Oxford sociologist Michael Biggs became suspicious and ultimately rooted out the truth that the GIDS clinicians finally owned up and published their failed study.
Also in England, the NHS’s Cass Review, which was published in April after a four-year effort to assess pediatric gender medicine at home and worldwide, sought to assess the long-term outcomes of the wider population of former GIDS patients. But the adult NHS gender clinics refused to share their de-identified data on those now-adult patients, providing only specious reasons for their refusal.
Now it seems as if the NHS will ultimately force them to do so. But for now, the world is poorer for not having that data. Because this entire field is compromised by a woeful lack of long-term data, in particular about the more recent cohorts of gender-dysphoric adolescents who have undergone gender-transition treatment, and whose profiles are vastly different from those kids who entered the original Dutch study.
After the Cass Review came out, activists went into overdrive to tell wild falsehoods about it, as I reported at the time. Hilary Cass, the pediatrician lead author of the report, was appalled, and told a reporter that those activists were harming children.
There are also plenty of examples of academics being discouraged from even asking research questions that might lead to an answer that would prove inconvenient for the pediatric gender medicine movement. Take, for example, the trio starting a long-term study to assess whether rapid-onset gender dysphoria is a true phenomenon. These three seasoned investigators have had to self-fund their research and are subject to persistent derision and scorn by trans activists for daring to ask difficult questions about this medical field and about the reasons for the recent surge in trans identification in natal girl adolescents in particular.
Controversial Gender Researchers Launch Long-Term Study of Gender Dysphoric Youth and Their Parents
One of those three investigators, physician-researcher Dr. Lisa Littman, spoke to me for my article on The Trans Tipping Point in the New York Post. She said of the activists who attack her: “It’s as if their loyalty is to the transition interventions and not to the long-term health and well-being of transgender-identified young people.”
Here’s another example. When UCL neuropsychologist Sallie Baxendale sought to obtain peer review for her review paper about what scientists know—and don’t know—about the neuropsychiatric impacts of puberty blockers, here was what happened, according to what she wrote in Unherd:
None of the reviewers identified any studies that I had missed that demonstrated safe and reversible impacts of puberty blockers on cognitive development, or presented any evidence contrary to my conclusions that the work just hasn’t been done. However, one suggested the evidence may be out there, it just hadn’t been published. They suggested that I trawl through non-peer reviewed conference presentations to look for unpublished studies that might tell a more positive story. The reviewer appeared to be under the naïve apprehension that studies proving that puberty blockers were safe and effective would have difficulty being published. The very low quality of studies in this field, and the positive spin on any results reported by gender clinicians suggest that this is unlikely to be the case.
Another reviewer expressed concerns that publishing the conclusions from these studies risked stigmatising an already stigmatised group. A third suggested that I should focus on the positive things that puberty blockers could do, while a fourth suggested there was no point in publishing a review when there wasn’t enough literature to review. Another sought to diminish an entire field of neuroscience that has established puberty as a critical period of brain development as “my view”.
Dr. Baxendale ultimately published her vital review paper, which concluded: “Critical questions remain unanswered regarding the nature, extent and permanence of any arrested development of cognitive function associated with puberty blockers. The impact of puberal suppression on measures of neuropsychological function is an urgent research priority.”
Meanwhile, the American Academy of Pediatrics has assured the public in its 2018 policy statement on the gender-affirming care method that puberty blockers are “reversible.” Twenty Republican attorneys general recently sent a stern, probing letter to the AAP, suggesting that that claim, which they assert is false, violates consumer protection laws. A lawsuit is likely imminent. The AAP is already being sued by a detransitioner over the statement. The original legal complaint lambasts the AAP for never responding to Canadian sex researcher James Cantor’s scathing fact check and critique he published of the policy statement in 2019.
Personally, I don’t think the claim that puberty blockers are reversible is definitively false, given what science is able to tell us at this time. But on the flip side, we also know that it is not definitely true either. As Dr. Baxendale’s paper demonstrates, there remain too many substantive and unanswered questions about how using drugs that throw vital human development processes out of synch might impact a young person, possibly for the rest of their lives.
The AAP announced in August 2023 that it was going to conduct a systematic literature review of the evidence behind pediatric gender medicine—and then never said another word about it. The authors of such reviews are expected to publish their methodology in advance, and the there is no sign that the AAP has done so.
Then there’s the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH, which as the Alabama attorney general’s subpoenas have revealed and Jesse Singal reported for The Economist in June, suppressed systematic literature reviews about this field that it commissioned from Johns Hopkins. And after a Biden Health official and the AAP strong armed WPATH into removing the age restrictions on gender-transition treatment and surgeries in the update to its trans-care guidelines in 2022, WPATH president Dr. Marci Bowers coordinated for the leadership to lie about why they had done so. All of this is detailed in scathing, unsparing detail in the Alabama AG’s amicus brief to the Supreme Court, which argues that the court should uphold Tennessee’s law banning pediatric gender-transition treatment.
And in the wake of today’s news about Dr. Olson-Kennedy, we have an example of yet another front in this battle over pediatric medicine: the sheer denial and deflection coming from transgender activist Ari Drennen of Media Matters and the LGBTQ “media watchdog” GLAAD. As you can see from the tweet below, all they could do in the face of such a damning report was deflect.
This makes me wonder: What exactly is GLAAD’s endgame? This is the same nonprofit that had the temerity to condescend to the New York Times last year and falsely claim that the “science is settled” on pediatric medicine with their protest truck they drove around the Times building in Midtown Manhattan.
The science is, of course, not settled. No science is. It is always evolving, in particular in this tempestuous and troubled field of pediatric gender medicine. And there are many people in this wider movement who are seeking to suppress the full, ever-changing truth from coming to light.
At the center of this story is a burgeoning population of very troubled children. They are owed the best science possible. They are owed the truth, whatever that might be.
I am an independent journalist, specializing in science and health care coverage. I contribute to The New York Times, The Guardian, NBC News and The New York Sun. I have also written for the Washington Post, The Atlantic and The Nation. Follow me on Twitter: @benryanwriter. Visit my website: benryan.net
"[A]nother article about trans health care that quotes 0 trans people, ignores context . . ."
This is so 2020, when the "lived experience" of members of marginalized identity groups displaced expertise in decision making. How did that work out?
What's the point of quoting trans activists when they're incapable of communicating except through thought-ending rhetorical phrases such as "the current climate of anti-trans fearmongering"? One would think they receive training in Trump mentor and lowlife attorney Roy Cohn's three rules: 1) attack, attack, attack; 2) admit nothing and deny everything; and 3) claim victory and never admit defeat.
Genderists' demand for a seat at the table is rich. The capture of our institutions by gender identity ideology was profoundly undemocratic. The public were never allowed to have a say on whether the medical profession, the educational establishment, government or other powerful organizations embraced and implemented gender ideology through their policies and programs.
For that matter, the trans activists and their allies who were instrumental in seeding genderism throughout society were never required to first explain their agenda to all stakeholders, answer their questions and critiques or obtain prior approval from a numerical majority of the public before proceeding.
Moreover, the pitch that trans activists made to the bodies that ultimately authorized them to proceed came with a cast of undisputed heroes and villains. "Trans youth" are always the vulnerable targets of "transphobes" whose sole mission is to prevent them from being the person they were meant to be. One of the principal reasons sex realists find it so difficult to find platforms from which to disseminate their argument is that trans activists have prejudiced liberals and progressives against gender critical voices.
For all these reasons, trans people in general and trans activists in particular get to sit out the current conversation about Johanna Olson-Kennedy's act of strategic self-censorship. If trans operatives expect lenience from sex realists, they had better rectify the gross imbalance in their own charity toward the gender critical position first.
No-one disagrees that young people with gender incongruity deserve healthcare. The dispute is whether experimental and cosmetic treatments belong within the definition of healthcare. For example tattoos are important to some people, but we don't call them healthcare.