The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), a leading pediatric medicine group, is calling for a “systemic review” of their guidance on sex changes for kids.
The board members of AAP voted to reaffirm their 2018 guidance recommending sex changes for gender dysphoric youth during a meeting in Itasca, Illinois, The New York Times reports, but the group also added a recommendation for further review of their medical guidance, as multiple European countries move to restrict sex changes for children.
“The board has confidence that the existing evidence is such that the current policy is appropriate,” said Mark Del Monte, the CEO of AAP. “At the same time, the board recognized that additional detail would be helpful here.”
The AAP’s 2018 guidance recommends that youth who identify as transgender be met with a “nonjudgmental approach that helps children feel safe in a society that too often marginalizes or stigmatizes those seen as different.” (RELATED: Scandal-Ridden BLM Activist Shaun King Will Pay $75,000 For Calling DA Candidate A ‘Real-Life Supervillain’)
“The gender-affirming model strengthens family resiliency and takes the emphasis off heightened concerns over gender while allowing children the freedom to focus on academics, relationship-building and other typical developmental tasks,” the standards read.
The AAP also recommends that insurance plans cover surgical and other medical interventions to transition underage patients to appear as the opposite sex.
States across the nation — including Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee and Oklahoma — are cracking down on child sex-change treatments. AAP has publicly opposed these bans.
At the same time, detransitioners are suing the doctors who performed provided them with puberty blockers, hormones and sex-changes surgeries when they were minors.
The AAP will commission a systematic review of the evidence backing transition care for minors, while reaffirming its 2018 statement of support for such treatment. UK and Sweden’s reviews have found the evidence backing such treatment is of low quality. https://t.co/iZikTds9cR
— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) August 3, 2023
Travistock Clinic, which operated with a policy of unquestioningly affirming children who expressed gender identities that did not align with their biological sex, has been ordered to shut down by England’s National Health Service (NHS). Sweden has backtracked on a previous policy touting cross-sex hormones as “safe” and has banned sex-change treatments for minors in all but limited circumstances because “the risks outweigh the benefits currently.” The Norwegian Healthcare Investigation Board (NHIB) recommend that puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries for children be classified as “experimental.”
The pediatric guidance for transgender-identified youth was authored by two transgender activists without medical degrees, and the group has encouraged the Department of Justice to investigate critics of “gender affirming care.”