Considering sex-change treatments for minors

Dear Editor:

Your May 24 editorial (“The decisions we make,” Weekly News) suggests that concerns about sex-change interventions on minors arise from “madness and meanness” and “fear and hate,” spread by the “false prophets” of “a religion of limited vision, of control, fear and intolerance.”

On February 23, the prestigious British Medical Journal published a review by its investigative team of the medical evidence. It found that medical experts and public health authorities in Sweden, Finland, France, Australia, New Zealand and Great Britain are moving away from such treatments for minors, because the evidence for their doing more good than harm is “weak.” Britain’s National Health Service found “scarce and inconclusive evidence to support clinical decision making” for minors with gender dysphoria and said this condition is a “transient phase” for most children who present before puberty. It recommended psychological treatment for these cases and warned about the risks of even “social” transition. These countries are more “unchurched” than the U.S.

The BMJ study notes that in 2021, a “systematic review” by Johns Hopkins researchers found that the strength of evidence for hormonal treatment improving quality of life, depression and anxiety among transgender people is “low,” and that “it was impossible to draw conclusions” about the effect of such treatment on death by suicide.

Claims that there is (or is not) a human soul – and that the soul, if it exists, is (or is not) often mismatched with its body – are matters of belief. So is the claim that gender is socially conditioned, but that this does not apply when children and parents are conditioned by public campaigns inviting children to choose their gender. In my view, these beliefs provide no firm basis for irreversible and potentially harmful hormonal and surgical interventions on children when evidence of clear benefit is lacking.

The editor will disagree with me. That is fine. But discussion is difficult if what we begin with is name-calling.

Richard Doerflinger

La Conner