Category: Topic Reviews

The Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has released a report on transgender healthcare, which has been widely criticized for its lack of scientific rigor and reliance on pseudoscience.

The report, commissioned under Trump’s executive order, promotes conversion therapy for transgender youth and redefines social transition as medical treatment. It also suggests that transgender healthcare should be judged based on employment status and romantic relationships rather than patient well-being.

Medical experts, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, have condemned the report as misleading and inaccurate. It ignores established research showing the benefits of gender-affirming care and instead pushes an ideological agenda. The report also falsely claims that European countries are pulling back on transgender healthcare, despite recent medical guidelines in France, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland supporting gender-affirming care.

Here we have collected some articles analyzing the report and its consequences.

Trump’s HHS urges therapy for transgender youth, departing from broader gender-affirming health care (PBS)

Gender transition care for #trans children and teens lacks evidence of benefits and poses risks, according to a new report released by Trump. Medical experts describes it as poor quality research that threatens access to care. (Washington Post)
Archive

Fact Check: Trump’s HHS Review On Trans Care Filled With Pseudoscience, Pushes Conversion Therapy (Erin in the Morning)

RFK Jr.’s HHS releases controversial report on gender-affirming care. Here’s what it says. (USA Today)

Dr. Susan J. Kressly, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said in a statement that “this report misrepresents the current medical consensus and fails to reflect the realities of pediatric care.”

RFK Jr.’s HHS report pushes therapy, not medical interventions, for trans youth (Washington Blade)

Inside the HHS Review on Trans Youth: Facts, Fears, Fallout (Transvitae)

New HHS Report Urges ‘Exploratory Therapy’ for Transgender Youth (Time)

“Though the report argues that this “exploratory therapy” is not the same as the long practice of “conversion therapy”—which is a practice of attempting to change someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity—advocates see little difference.”

Time

Administration condemns gender-affirming care for youth in report that finds “sparse” evidence of harm (19th)

What does the HHS gender-affirming care report mean for trans rights? (Transitics)

Trump HHS tiptoes around endorsing conversion therapy for transgender minors (Healthcare Dive)

Trump administration releases 400-page review of gender dysphoria treatment for youths but won’t say who wrote it (CNN)

“Gender dysphoria is a term that mental health professionals use to describe clinically significant distress someone feels because their sense of their gender does not match the sex they were assigned at birth. It is an official diagnosis in the DSM, a book published by the American Psychiatric Association that classifies mental disorders, but not everyone who identifies as transgender or gender-diverse has this diagnosis.

Gender-affirming care is a wide range of treatments offered by a multidisciplinary team that is tailored to the individual.

For years, major mainstream medical associations – including the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the Endocrine Society, the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry – have affirmed the practice of gender-affirming care and agree that it’s clinically appropriate care that can provide lifesaving treatment for children and adults.”

CNN

Trump administration HHS gender dysphoria report (Wikipedia)

HHS Releases Comprehensive Review of Medical Interventions for Children and Adolescents with Gender Dysphoria (HHS)

Image: Getty

Ray Blanchard’s “autogynephilia” theory states that lesbian trans women are men who are sexually attracted to their own inner female. The hypothesis is used actively by transphobes to invalidate trans women as “paraphiliacs” or sexual perverts. The fact is, however, that the theory has been thoroughly debunked by both trans people and science.

On this page, we give you a selection of articles and papers that give you the history of Blanchard’s model of “transsexuality”, documentation on why it is misleading, information on how it hurts trans women and how it is used by transphobes today.

We also presents links to articles that covers J. Michael Bailey’s book on the topic: The Man who would be Queen.

We hope this resource page may be of help to trans and nonbinary people who reach for this theory when trying to explain their own sexuality and gender variance. The theory is based on 19th century concepts of sexuality and gender, so it feeds easily into internalized transphobia and homophobia among those who have been raised in a traditionalist culture.

Some highlights (documentation below):

• Trans people, like cis people, are sexual beings with sexual fantasies, and for some trans people, especially those who have not transitioned, dreams about becoming their target sex may be eroticized. Such transformations open up for scenarios where they can have a sex life in harmony with their true selves.
• Such fantasies are not limited to lesbian trans women. Many straight trans women and trans men have them too. Such fantasies have also been found among people who consider themselves cis.
• The idea that there are two completely separate categories of trans women have been debunked by science.
• Feeling sexy is not a sexual perversion, neither among cis people nor among trans people.
• Lesbian trans women are perfectly capable of being attracted to other women.
• Ray Blanchard, the man who came up with the autogynephilia hypothesis has never published any proof of his theory. Indeed, his own data debunks that there are two completely distinct categories of trans women. He is now actively helping “gender critical” transphobic “feminists” and white supremacists in their attacks on trans women.

From our network

All you need to know about “autogynephilia”

Autogynephilia defined

Trans woman: Am I a woman or is it just “autogynephilia”?

Imane Khelif is a cis (non-transgender) woman who is very good at boxing . In spite of all this she has become the target of a viscous transphopic attacks where people like JK Rowling tells the world she is a man beating up cis women under the Paris Olympics .

We have gathered a collection of articles and opinion pieces for you that throws light upon what is really going in here.

The takeaway is:

• Imane Khelif is a cis woman, not a man.
• The attacks against her reflects toxic transphobic attitudes.
• The implicit goal of these attacks is to force all women to follow narrowly defined sexist ideas about what a proper woman should be and to uphold a clear divide between the two traditional genders.
• This transphobia is mixed up with a racism that implies that strong Black women are a threat to white women and that they must therefore be classified as men.

“Over time, people have looked at genitalia, they’ve looked at chromosomes, they look for a specific gene, they’ve looked at testosterone. And what we end up with is the understanding that there’s really no clear cut definition of sex, because each of these iterations of testing has kind of collapsed under its own weight,” says Jaime Schultz, a professor with Penn State University’s department of kinesiology.

That is the problem, isn’t it? In order to police the gendered behavior, presentation and self understanding of men and women, the fundamentalists cannot live with a world where gender and gender presentation are ambiguous.

The Imane Khelif Story, Selected Articles and Videos

Olympic boxer Hergie Bacyadan has explained why his trans identity is valid despite his decision not to take hormones.

• https://www.thepinknews.com/2024/08/05/hergie-bacyadan-paris-olympics-trans

Anti-transgender activists are making a lot of noise about trans people regretting transitioning and detransition rates. The fact is that only a tiny minority of trans people who have transitioned regret their decision, and most of those who do express regret do so because of social harassment.

Indeed, evidence suggests that less than 1% of transgender people who undergo gender-affirming surgery report regret. Keep in mind that 14.4% of the broader regret similar surgeries.

A meta-study of existing research gave the following summary back in 2021:

“A total of 27 studies, pooling 7928 transgender patients who underwent any type of GAS [gender-affirmation surgeries], were included. The pooled prevalence of regret after GAS was 1% (95% CI <1%–2%). Overall, 33% underwent transmasculine procedures and 67% transfemenine procedures. The prevalence of regret among patients undergoing transmasculine and transfemenine surgeries was <1% (IC <1%–<1%) and 1% (CI <1%–2%), respectively.” 

We have collected some must read resources documenting what we know about regret rates. The links are gathered from our Essential Transgender Reading Flipboard Magazine.

Not all who transition do get gender-affirming surgeries, so keep that in mind when you look at the following articles and papers. The numbers are not always directly comparable.

More people regret having children than having gender-affirming care, study finds.

• https://www.thepinknews.com/2024/05/01/transition-regret-detransitioners/

Landmark Systematic Review Of Trans Surgery: Regret Rate “Remarkably Low”.

• https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/landmark-systematic-review-of-trans

A thematic analysis of disinformation in gender-affirming healthcare bans in the United States.