The editorial, published Sunday, was headlined "Reason to Worry" about transgender treatments for kids.
The Post took a deeper look at medial questions in United States v. Skrmetti, the Biden administration’s legal challenge to a Tennessee law banning the prescription of such treatments to minors.
According to The Post: “The uncertainty is the result of scientists’ failure to study these treatments slowly and systematically as they developed them. Early studies from a Dutch clinic seemed to show promising results, but the research started with only 70 patients (dropping to 55 in a follow-up study) and no control group."
Often, treatment results that look one way in small groups look very different when larger groups are studied.
"That’s why the Food and Drug Administration generally requires large, randomized controlled trials of drugs: to ensure that encouraging initial results aren’t mere statistical noise," continued the Post editorial.
“I think it’s a realization that the rest of the world is going in a correct direction in protecting these kids,” Dr. Quentin Van Meter, immediate past president of the American College of Pediatricians, said on Washington Watch Monday.
Last week, Great Britain imposed an indefinite ban on the use of puberty blockers on those under 18 years old except in clinical trials.
The move came after an independent commission found “there is currently an unacceptable safety risk in the continued prescription of puberty blockers to children.”
Far too little evidence supported this line of treatment for minors suffering from gender dysphoria, the government-sanctioned Cass Report found in 2023.
Children and teens “are suffering emotionally with this concept in their head, trying to live the life of happiness but not finding it in their current situation. They’re grasping at straws for someplace to go to be happy without realizing that the issue is deep inside of them and that it’s depression and anxiety,” Van Meter told show host Jody Hice.
The Washington Post editorial, while a step in the right direction, failed to consider important elements of the discussion, Carrie Lukas, president of Independent Women’s Forum, wrote in an X post.
“The Washington Post still manages to avoid the real question. It’s not just about efficacy of treatment in terms of mental health but how they create irreversible lasting harms – like sterilization and loss of sexual function – that no child can consent to,” she said.
Massive lawsuit changed views in UK
In the transgender medical discussion, dollar signs are never far away. They are the motivation for Europe’s about-face in its approach to transgender treatments and surgeries for minors, Van Meter says.
Finland and Sweden were among the first countries to question so-called "gender-affirming care" for minors, according to U.S. News and World Report.
Public health officials in Finland in 2020 recommended that minors with gender dysphoria first be provided with psychological support. If they wanted additional treatment they needed to be made aware of the risks. Sweden took similar steps a couple of years later.
In the U.S., the dollar signs can mean big money for physicians who prescribe puberty-blocking drugs and perform the body-altering surgeries.
In the United Kingdom, dollar signs caught the government’s attention in a different way, Van Meter said. It started with a lawsuit against The Tavistock Clinic, a gender-identity development service in the UK.
The lawsuit against The Tavistock Clinic alleges the facility rushed children into treatment and prescribed puberty blockers with harmful side effects.
The clinic adopted an “unquestioning affirmative approach” in siding with the youth’s gender identity wishes, the lawsuit also alleges.
Additionally, a UK law firm in 2022 announced plans for a negligence class-action lawsuit against Tavistock with as many as 1,000 families signing on.
There’s been no announcement that the class action lawsuit has been finalized or settled, according to reports, but it had a chilling effect.
“I think that woke them up to say, well, wait a minute, if there is a lawsuit, we better be on the right side of that case, and they started looking at the data from the Tavistock Clinic in the UK and said, ‘oh, my gosh, look what we found,’” Van Meter said.
Some providers began to have a change of heart, Van Meter said.
“It was really taking these kids into task and possibly hurting them instead of benefiting them," Van Meter explained. "And that kind of dialogue in the background got the sort of the governmental agencies that run these health care systems in these socialized medicine countries to say, ‘Wait a minute, are we on the right side of the issue here? Perhaps we should go look deeply.’”
National Health Service England (NHS) announced the closure of The Tavistock Clinic dues to safety concerns.
In December of 2023, the Cass Report, sanctioned by NHS England, found a lack of high-quality evidence in the field of gender identity services for children and teens.
The report criticized the clinic’s approach and cited over-reliance on untested treatments.
The business of trans surgeries
In the U.S., investigative reporting by Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire revealed that Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, at the urging of Dr. Shayne Taylor, opened a transgender clinic in 2018 because that type of care was a “big money-maker.” That was especially true because the surgeries required a lot of “follow-ups,” Taylor explained in a lecture, according to Walsh.
It was Walsh's reporting that prompted Tennessee lawmakers to pass the protections that the Biden administration now challenges. Walsh spoke outside the Supreme Court earlier this month.
Now, the U.S. is seeing some litigation of its own. Texas Children’s Hospital has one such high-profile case ongoing, as AFN has reported.
“I think in the U.S. we're seeing the litigation that's ahead and the fear of these educational institutions, the lawsuits in Texas with the attorney general suing the individuals who have been doing this under the radar in the in the state of Texas. This becomes an issue where it says, ‘oh, my gosh, we're going to see more and more of these lawsuits, and we better maybe rethink what we're doing,” Van Meter said.
