Endo Society to undertake 3 year review of gender affirming care

[DerekFaker]

From Genspect:

"BIG NEWS! 🧵US-@TheEndoSociety told CNN yesterday that it has initiated a 3-yr review of its clinical guidelines for "gender-affirming care". The recommendations for adolescents in their current guidelines, published in 2017, all rank "low" or "very low" according to the GRADE system of determining evidence quality & making recommendations. Yet they are considered the "gold standard" within the US medical community! "

"The committee revising the guidelines is led by activist-clinician & @WPATH endocrinologist, Dr. Joshua Safer, executive director of the Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine & Surgery in NY. Are all the members of the committee, like Safer, clinicians whose careers and reputations depend upon the continued success of "'gender medicine"? Financial conflicts of interest are a major concern here!

Will this be a rigorous, independent review? If so, it MUST align with the systematic reviews already conducted by Florida, Sweden, Finland, the UK, and now, Germany. (Spoiler alert: these ALL found that evidence doesn't support the off-label use of puberty blockers and/or cross sex hormones for youth gender dysphoria!)"

https://twitter.com/genspect/status/1762609815417692565?t=7iQ8Jh56-Ju7J0OOJzm58w&s=19

Links follow

What does "activist-clinician" mean? Surely an activist in the area being researched is the worst possible person to head this up?

LINKS: @TheEndoSociety's current clinical guidelines for gender dysphoria (2017):

https://www.endocrine.org/clinical-practice-guidelines/gender-dysphoria-gender-incongruence

About GRADE: bestpractice.bmj.com/info/us/toolki…

Article 1- by @LeorSapir: city-journal.org/article/stacki…

Article 2- The Hill: thehill.com/policy/healthc…

Article 3- Kaiser: kffhealthnews.org/morning-breako…

Article 4- CNN: cnn.com/2024/02/26/hea…

I've just looked him up. He thinks gender identity is the same as sex and is biologically determined. This is one of the things he posted on a reddit thread:

"Indeed transgender treatment is so overwhelmingly the right choice for those trans people who come forward seeking it, that it seem problematic to discuss it in terms of "relieving dysphoria".
Our agenda should be to recognize gender incongruence and then treat it in a way that works for the individual patient. Why wait for dysphoria? Like others have posted below regarding other medical conditions, we would not leave a known situation untreated until a person becomes dysphoric as the standard .. that would be cruel."

Excellent, WPATH gets to rewrite transgender healthcare plans - what could possibly go wrong?

Another thing he said:

"The key point is that gender identity is biological reality .. a transgender person recognizes the mismatch between the gender identity and the external anatomy. .. that is a real recognition."

And another:

"Myth: gender identity is a construct
Truth: gender identity is biological (at least mostly)."

"As insurance gets more oriented to the actual existence of transgender people, having the "wrong" organs for your listed sex should go away as problem."

Good news that a big medical organisation, the Endocrine Society, is investigating this. But stunningly weird that, if they want to find facts, they’ve appointed someone so totally invested in current practice to lead it.

Like asking the Pope to investigate the benefits of religion.

Like asking the Pope to investigate the benefits of religion.

Yep - a very apt analogy on multiple levels 😆

It's exactly like asking Purdue Pharma if OxyContin is addictive.

So many people now are making money from 'gender affirming care' that they are incredibly invested in not letting the truth come out that this 'care' frequently does more harm than good.

"Hormone treatments in general are very, very safe. So compared to the known harm of doing nothing (40% suicide attempt rate), the small long term risk of hormones is very ethical."

Re. Laurel Hubbard:

"In a weight based sport (like weight lifting), the fact that a trans woman has bigger bones may be a disadvantage.
Hormone therapy typically decreases testosterone for trans women and therefore muscle mass. However, bones would not be changed significantly. Thus a trans woman following a typical regimen would have big bones and would have less muscle in the same weight class as a non trans woman with smaller bones."

Question:
Do you have any insight on why male to female transgender patients do so much better than female born women in athletic competitions?

Answer (DrJoshSafer):
I don't know this to be true. It could also depend on the sport. The only study out there is a small study of 8 trans female long-distance runners who ranked the same among women after their transition as they had among men before their transition.
In a weight based sport, trans women with bigger bones wasting their weight might be at a disadvantage.

Sorry, why does Genspect seem so happy about this apparent conflict of interest? What am I missing?

I do not know!

I'm not getting the sense that Genspect are happy about this, they're phrasing the announcement quite neutrally.

They also ask if the rest of the committee will be made up of people who have built careers and livelihoods on pushing gender 'medicine'.

Yes I think you're right.

I can't imagine what they're going to do for 3 years when they've probably made up their minds already.