Mick Hartley

Eliza Mondegreen at UnHerd on the Finnish psychiatrist now blowing the whistle on "gender-affirming care":

On Monday in the Free Press, Riittakerttu Kaltiala issued a warning to US gender clinicians: “Gender-affirming care is dangerous. I know because I helped pioneer it.”

Kaltiala serves as chief psychiatrist in the department of adolescent psychiatry at Tampere University in Finland, and is the head of one of the country’s two nationalised gender services for youth. In the Free Press piece, Kaltiala describes her disillusionment with a “gender-affirming” approach to gender-distressed youth, starting with her initial scepticism about “being told to intervene in healthy, functioning bodies simply on the basis of a young person’s shifting feelings about gender”. 

Kaltiala noticed early on that her patients did not look or sound like those which other clinics claimed to have treated with such success. More troubled, her patients’ distress often started at puberty rather than early childhood. Starting around 2015, Kaltiala noticed a sudden, unexplained surge in adolescent girls seeking transition. These new patients delivered scripted responses, “telling the same life stories and the same anecdotes about their childhoods, including their sudden realisation that they were transgender”.

Eventually, detransitioners started showing up at the clinic, too: “These were another kind of patient who wasn’t supposed to exist,” Kaltiala notes….

It’s hard to think of another field that has gone so obviously off the rails. To get here, clinicians and medical organisations had to discard everything they knew about medical ethics, child development and literature on desistance….

At the European Professional Association for Transgender Health conference in Ireland earlier this year, outgoing president Joz Motmans said, “We respect everyone’s freedom of speech, but we choose not to listen to it.” The packed auditorium broke into applause.

The speech these organisations “choose not to listen” to is speech like Kaltiala’s, who comes bearing clear evidence of medical harm, regret, and detransition. “Medical organisations are supposed to transcend politics in favour of upholding standards that protect patients,” she writes. “However, in the US these groups […] have been actively hostile to the message my colleagues and I are urging.”

Kaltiala’s personal story is a remarkable one. It’s never easy to admit that one has taken a wrong turn, even without facing harassment and threats from trans activists for doing so. In the United States, the embattled mentality of gender clinicians and the ideological capture of medical professional associations makes it unlikely such a reckoning will come from the inside. But warnings and revelations from across the ocean may yet wash up on their shores.

From Kaltiala's article in the Free Press:

Medicine, unfortunately, is not immune to dangerous groupthink that results in patient harm. What is happening to dysphoric children reminds me of the recovered memory craze of the 1980s and ’90s. During that period, many troubled women came to believe false memories, often suggested to them by their therapists, of nonexistent sexual abuse by their fathers or other family members. This abuse, the therapists said, explained everything that was wrong with the lives of their patients. Families were torn apart, and some people were prosecuted based on made-up assertions. It ended when therapists, journalists, and lawyers investigated and exposed what was happening.

We need to learn from such scandals. Because, like recovered memory, gender transition has gotten out of hand. When medical professionals start saying they have one answer that applies everywhere, or that they have a cure for all of life’s pains, that should be a warning to us all that something has gone very wrong.