Here is the Westmead Gender Clinic raising alarms at the number of children and teens coming into the clinic that have been fed misinformation and pre-primed with answers to gain their desired diagnosis. 'Desired' because lobby groups and well meaning others have led them, either directly or indirectly, to believe what is the appropriate treatment plans for them and how to get that treatment.
This study is well worth a read.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/26344041211010777
Published April 22, 2021
Kasia Kozlowska, Georgia McClure et al
Australian children and adolescents with gender dysphoria: Clinical presentations and challenges experienced by a multidisciplinary team and gender service
Part of the conclusion
Our findings indicate that engagement with families, a trauma-informed model of mental health care, and ongoing discourse pertaining to the effects of unresolved trauma and loss need to be part of all gender dysphoria clinics and the services with which they collaborate. Because of their impact on subjective well-being and the development of the self, specific loss and trauma events present crucial opportunities for both long-term psychotherapy and more immediate, targeted treatments. The move to a more comprehensive, holistic model of care—one that takes into account the individual’s developmental history and the experiences that make up that history—has also been echoed in the work of other clinician-researchers (D’Angelo, 2020a; Entwistle, 2019; Giovanardi et al., 2018; Kozlowska et al., 2021; Williamson, 2019).
Our study found that the children and families who came to the clinic had clear, preformed expectations: most often, children and families wanted a diagnosis of gender dysphoria to be provided or confirmed, together with referral to endocrinology services to pursue medical treatment of gender dysphoria. Parents (vs. children) also largely came with the same expectations, though they were more likely to be interested in incorporating holistic (biopsychosocial) elements, including treatment of mental health comorbidities, family support/therapy, and long-term psychotherapy for the child. It was our impression that these expectations had been shaped by the dominant sociopolitical discourse—the gender affirmative model. It will be interesting to track the expectations of children and families in the years to come as sociopolitical discourses become more varied and diverse and as the voices are heard of both those who have done well and those who not done well via the medical pathway.
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.