Approved HHS Gender Medicine Review Stands Firm After Peer Scrutiny, Reaffirms Evidence of Harm

By Greg Piper | Just the News

Social scientist Lisa Littman put a target on her back seven years ago by documenting “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” in youth, prompting her to leave Brown University after the Ivy League school tried to discredit her research by implying her study was retracted rather than slightly revised. 

Another publisher retracted a subsequent ROGD paper under threat of an academic boycott and a demand to fire the journal’s editor, gender dysphoria research pioneer Kenneth Zucker, claiming it lacked “informed consent” for its use of opt-in survey data.

Now advocates for giving healthy children puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries to remove breasts and genitals have a fresh target: the newly identified authors of a “pediatric gender dysphoria” systematic review commissioned by the Trump administration, which concludes global evidence does not support such interventions.

The final report Wednesday made “fairly minor edits” to the original published this spring, gender medicine journalist Ben Ryan said in the New York Sun, documented in the 3-page errata now attached to the report. 

One notable correction: The authors forgot to qualify that a “statistically significant” finding of small improvement on “transgender congruence” from treatment was only “in males.”

There’s also a new 241-page supplement with peer reviews of the report recruited by the Department of Health and Human Services, most prominently by the American Psychiatric Association, and authors’ replies to each.

HHS emphasized that the American Academy of Pediatrics and Endocrine Society – strong supporters of so-called gender-affirming care for minors – turned down its invitations. 

It praised the APA, another GAC supporter, for participating as the only institutional peer reviewer among nine. APA’s four-page review said the “underlying methodology lacks sufficient transparency and clarity for its findings to be taken at face value” and “key elements … are either underexplained or absent.”

The American Medical Association and AAP “peddled the lie that chemical and surgical sex-rejecting procedures could be good for children,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Wednesday, using the same confrontational tone as when his agency released the original.

“They betrayed their oath to first do no harm” and “inflicted lasting physical and psychological damage on vulnerable young people,” which is “malpractice,” he also said. 

The authors’ findings discredit “pediatric sex-rejecting procedures” and affirm the Make America Healthy Again Commission’s findings, that “unnecessary procedures and long-term health risks such as infertility are the byproduct of the overmedicalization of children,” HHS said.

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