Quite a good paper from Australia on Gender Dysphoria

Thank you for posting this.

This paper is significant in that it acknowledges the importance of positioning the child's distress within the context of their development, environment and family etc. As such it indicates the need for a move away from the medical/deficit model focussed solely on 'correcting' the child whose body is the site of the issue/s rather than recognising the contributory /causative factors of distress around the child.

(extract)
"Our study also found that despite the high rates of family conflict, relationship breakdowns, parental mental illness, and maltreatment (see Table 3)—and our own clinical perspective that both individual and family work were indicated for the majority of families—few families rated themselves as being in a clinically severe range on self-report (SCORE-15). Coupled with the dominant sociopolitical discourse—the gender affirmative model that prioritizes the medical treatment pathway—it is not surprising that the large majority of children and families were not motivated to engage in or to remain engaged in ongoing therapy. These data bring three important phenomena into focus. First, when children and families were given the space and structure to tell the child’s developmental story—nested in the story of the family—they were able to identify and provide a detailed narrative of the key issues that had contributed to the child’s presentation and distress. Without this space and structure, the issues remain undeclared and unaddressed. Second, some families—but also some clinicians—function within a non-holistic (non-biopsychosocial) framework where the child’s developmental experiences are disconnected from their clinical presentation. This non-holistic framework is likely to promote a healthcare delivery model that dehumanizes the child (by not examining the child’s and family’s lived experience) and that promotes medical solutions (correcting the identity/body mismatch) for a problem that is much more complex. Third, as noted earlier, our experience suggests that, insofar as the gender affirmative model is taken as equivalent to medical intervention, clinicians (including ourselves) who work in gender services are coming under increasing pressure to put aside their own holistic (biopsychosocial) model of care, and to compromise their own ethical standards, by engaging in a tick-the-box treatment process. Such an approach does not adequately address a broad range of psychological, family, and social issues and puts patients at risk of adverse future outcomes and clinicians at risk of future legal action." (continues)

Ongoing therapeutic work- yes!
Holistic models of care - yes!
Trauma informed model of care - yes!

Silly old me guessed this years ago! That's why I obtained the above care for my dysphoric minor at significant expense, while receiving significant abuse for not jumping straight to affirmations and transition.

Good to see it validated in the literature.

Yes, good article explaining what everyone knows, gender dysphoria is a mental health problem.