Approved, until it wasn’t
A talk to familiarise Australian family doctors with a safer treatment approach to youth gender dysphoria will not go ahead as planned after a medical college buckled to activist pressure.
The well-subscribed March 10 webinar presentation by Finnish psychiatrist Riittakerttu Kaltiala—a leading clinician and researcher in the international shift away from routine “gender-affirming” medicalisation of minors—had been approved and advertised since the New Year by the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP).1
GP Louise Kirby, who was among the more than 200 subscribers who signed up for the RACGP event, told GCN—
“We’ve reached a point where presenting outcome data is called harmful, and where speaking out to protect children from irreversible, damaging interventions is incorrectly framed as an attack on children. That inversion should alarm every clinician”.
Professor Kaltiala set up paediatric gender services in Finland 15 years ago on the strength of promising results reported by the famous Amsterdam gender clinic, which pioneered the puberty blocker-driven “Dutch protocol” of gender reassignment for minors.