Gender-Affirming Care Is Dangerous - I Know Because I Helped Pioneer It

> The academy's unwillingness to host Kaltiala and other likeminded clinicians suggests that even this moderate stance may now be a bridge too far for America's premier child psychiatry association, where even senior officials are raising concerns about ideological capture.

> AACAP has chosen "advocacy over science," Kaliebe said in an email to James McGough, who oversees conference programming, after the second two panels were nixed. In response, McGough conceded that politics likely played a role.

> "I actually share some of your concerns about AACAP ... coming down too heavily on one side of politically charged topics," McGough told Kaliebe in a May email. Decisions about conference programming, he added, are "based on input from various AACAP committees." If the gender committee is "too one sided, the program committee is in a tough spot. Our committees are considered our experts."

> The exchange illustrates how a small group of activist doctors can suppress the viewpoints of clinicians who disagree with them, creating the appearance of medical consensus where none exists.

https://freebeacon.com/campus/they-support-sex-changes-for-c...

> Claim 18: "The psychiatry services were limited and could only serve patients who were 'not too severe,' which meant that many patients were being sent to the already overburdened emergency rooms for suicidal ideations, for self-harm, and for inpatient eating disorder treatment."

> An outpatient clinic does not provide emergency inpatient care. It is normal for patients whose symptoms are severe enough to require emergency treatment to be referred by such a clinic to an ER. The NYT found patients from the Center were referred to the ER. That the ERs were overburdened, and that better options weren't often available for youth in severe crisis, is a sad reality of the U.S. mental health system. It is not something that can reasonably be laid at the feet of an outpatient service for a vulnerable group of young people that everyone agrees is at a higher risk of suicide.

But what the New York Times article (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/23/health/transgender-youth-...) actually said was:

> At the trainings, E.R. staff shared concerns about their own experiences with their young transgender patients, which Ms. Hamon later relayed to her team and university administrators.

> The E.R. staff, she wrote in an email, had been seeing more transgender adolescents experiencing mental health crises, "to the point where they said they at least have one TG patient per shift."

> They aren't sure why patients aren't required to continue in counseling if they are continuing hormones," Ms. Hamon added. And they were concerned that "no one is ever told no."

That is, the ER departments were getting an unexplained increase in presentations from the clinic's patients despite the treatments supposedly working well. Which really does bring into question the idea that affirmation-only treatment significantly improves mental health.

The article talks about youth transitioning. Can't hormone treatment during the early years have lasting, permanent effects?