[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by Yeah_Baby

There is a lot of misinformation in there.
What you primarily don't seem to understand is that getting a physician to approve any sort of gender affirming care is an extremely lengthy process.

It used to be. But standards have been dramatically lowered in recent years.

In interviews with Reuters, doctors and other staff at 18 gender clinics across the country described their processes for evaluating patients. None described anything like the months-long assessments de Vries and her colleagues adopted in their research.

At most of the clinics, a team of professionals – typically a social worker, a psychologist and a doctor specializing in adolescent medicine or endocrinology – initially meets with the parents and child for two hours or more to get to know the family, their medical history and their goals for treatment. They also discuss the benefits and risks of treatment options. Seven of the clinics said that if they don’t see any red flags and the child and parents are in agreement, they are comfortable prescribing puberty blockers or hormones based on the first visit,depending on the age of the child.

It’s much the same here in Canada:

Another Trans Youth Can! survey found that five of 10 clinics do not have psychologists or psychiatrists assess patients before prescribing puberty blockers or hormones.

But Lawson said those five still have social workers or other professionals do mental-health screening. At CHEO, such assessments are followed by two or more doctor appointments and then a two-hour session with an endocrinologist like her, she said.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada...ender-children

This is a far cry from the 6+ month of assessment that was the standard 15 years ago when protocols for gender dysphoria were first being established.

Gender care experts themselves have raised alarms bells about rapidly declining standards of due diligence.

Dr Marci Bowers, a surgeon specializing in transgender procedures who became WPATH’s president in September, said in an interview that the organization is trying to find a middle ground between “those who basically would have hormones and surgeries available at a vending machine, let’s say, versus others who think that you need to go through all sorts of hoops and hurdles.”

This is a highly-politicized issue. And while the views of firebrand conservatives aren’t supported by science, neither are those of trans activists.

Originally Posted by Yeah_Baby

No one, absolutely no one, is getting top or bottom surgery in Canada if they're a legal minor. That's why that portion of Smith's policy indicates that it's rooted misinformation and fear mongering. It doesn't happen. In large part because of some of your concerns and what I've outlined above.

Not to mention the waitlist for Top surgery in Alberta right now is about 3 years. Folks aren't walking into a clinic one day and getting surgical procedures.

Correct. Smith is pandering and fear-mongering on that issue.

Originally Posted by Yeah_Baby

Puberty blockers def can be reversed. If someone goes off them the changes occur. Which is why it's important for teens to have access to them, under medical supervision.

Things aren’t anywhere near that clearcut.

Puberty blockers and sex hormones do not have U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for children’s gender care. No clinical trials have established their safety for such off-label use. The drugs’ long-term effects on fertility and sexual function remain unclear. And in 2016, the FDA ordered makers of puberty blockers to add a warning about psychiatric problems to the drugs’ label after the agency received several reports of suicidal thoughts in children who were taking them.

More broadly, no large-scale studies have tracked people who received gender-related medical care as children to determine how many remained satisfied with their treatment as they aged and how many eventually regretted transitioning. The same lack of clarity holds true for the contentious issue of detransitioning, when a patient stops or reverses the transition process.

The National Institutes of Health, the U.S. government agency responsible for medical and public health research, told Reuters that “the evidence is limited on whether these treatments pose short- or long-term health risks for transgender and other gender-diverse adolescents.” The NIH has funded a comprehensive study to examine mental health and other outcomes for about 400 transgender youths treated at four U.S. children’s hospitals. However, long-term results are years away and may not address concerns such as fertility or cognitive development.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates...ansyouth-care/

The latest meta-studies in Europe have also not shown any conclusive evidence on the safety and efficacy of hormone-blockers, prompting Finland and Sweden to halt their use for minors, and the Netherlands and UK to impose tighter restrictions on them.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuac...h=38327b3b7efb

Originally Posted by Yeah_Baby

This government clearly has no faith in the professionalism and expertise of experts like Physicians and chooses to be willfully ignorant on the heaps of peer reviewed research in several areas, be it this one, curriculum development, harm reduction etc.

Again, it’s experts in the field who are raising concerns about the haste with which medical interventions in minors are often being carried out today.

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/963269?form=fpf

Smith and the people she’s pandering to are idiots. But to date, there simply isn’t enough data to make confident assessments about the safety of hormone blockers in minors.

I hope Canada follows the prudent European route of gender care grounded in empirical data and doesn’t get sucked into the politicized American approach. We can support gender affirmation without abandoning the rigorous assessment process that used to be standard, or ignoring the questions around the long-term effects of medical interventions in minors.