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On the Front Page of the Weekend Australian today

27 replies

NotYourCisterinAus · 18/02/2023 11:07

There's article headlined "Doctor scrutiny of gender clinic reveals legal, safety fears".

It's a long article behind a paywall, so if has an archive link, please share! Meanwhile, quoting some of the pertinent bits:

"Senior physicians at the NSW Children's Hospital Westmead have studied the physical and mental health of 79 patients in a rare academic study of the outcomes of children who presented with gender distress and gender dysphoria. The findings cast doubt on the scientific basis of the gender-affirming approach followed by the nation's other children's hospitals.

In an open access academic paper, CHW psychiatrists, endocrinologists and other physicians, and a senior medical ethics expert, called for a "much more nuanced and complex approach" as analysis revealed 88 per cent of children presenting at Westmead's gender clinic had at leas one co-morbid mental health condition, with more than 50 per cent diagnosed with behavioural disorders or autism. One in five children who consulted the clinic with gender-related distress had these feeling resolved, and almost one in 10 with a formal diagnosis of gender dysphoria, some who had taken puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, later discontinued transitioning...

One of the central justifications for gender-affirming medicine - that it alleviated psychological distress - was not borne out in the experience of the young people studied, with 44 out of 50 patients diagnosed with gender dysphoria reporting ongoing mental health concerns four to nine years after presentation at the gender clinic, many after transitioning...

The study comes as the approach of doctors practising gender-affirming medicine comes under scrutiny in court, as parents seeking to block prescription of puberty blockers to their children call expert witnesses to challenge the evidence."

There's also a half-page (broadsheet, 8 columns) on the Tavistock, and a brief article about a detransitioner who had undergone a "chest masculinisation surgery, i.e. a double mastectomy ("Elizabeth's chest surgery was a disaster, with her right nipple graft "chronically leaking a watery fluid, while voids in her scarred left nipple graft accumulated a smelly past that had to be regularly squeezed out".")

There's also an editorial and a feature article in the "Inquirer" section of the paper. With luck this will help start a conversation in Australia.

OP posts:
PriOn1 · 18/02/2023 11:38

This is the study, I presume:

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/26344041211010777

A section from the abstract that serves as quite a good summary:

“The developmental stories told by the children and their families highlighted high rates of adverse childhood experiences, with family conflict (65.8%), parental mental illness (63.3%), loss of important figures via separation (59.5%), and bullying (54.4%) being most common. A history of maltreatment was also common (39.2%). Key challenges faced by the clinicians included the following: the effects of increasingly dominant, polarized discourses on daily clinical practice; issues pertaining to patient and clinician safety (including pressures to abandon the holistic [biopsychosocial] model); the difficulties of untangling gender dysphoria from comorbid factors such as anxiety, depression, and sexual abuse; and the factual uncertainties present in the currently available literature on longitudinal outcomes.”

I have only skimmed it for now, but it gives an interesting insight into how difficult it is to treat these children in the current climate, where the children to a huge extent, as well as the parents in many cases, arrive at the clinic with strong expectations about what will happen and the pathway they want to follow, which makes it incredibly difficult for the medics to do their job.

Whatwouldscullydo · 18/02/2023 11:19

Wow.

I mean ultimately we all want the same thing at the end of the day dont we?

And that is for everyone to receive the best care possible which has been proven through all appropriate channels to be the most effective /have the nest outcomes.

The only reason to shut down/obstruct research and/or refuse to discuss to be able to target what went wrong where and how best to avoid in the future , is if you know that its not going to result in what you want to hear.

Of all the treatment options available for anything and everything else , never has one patients choice of not having surgery/taking medication been used to explain why its offensive that someone else chose differently. Until gender affirming care. Where treatment must validate everyone else.

I hope this does lead to more discussion and research in Australia because care cant improve/move on until everything both positive and negative can be openly discussed.