Leading American pediatric group says enabling child sex changes is 'huge priority'

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) says that fighting laws that seek to ban “gender-affirming care” for minors, or in other words laws that seek to ban doctors from performing experimental sex changes on children, is a “huge priority” for the professional association.

The comments were made by Jeff Hudson during a presentation given as part of the Wisconsin AAP Annual Meeting in May this year.  Hudson said the AAP is “heavily involved” in supporting challenges to these laws and policies. Hudson is the AAP's manager of Child Welfare Initiatives. 

Hudson showed a map of the U.S. to indicate how many proposed bans on “gender-affirming” care there currently are, and stated that if each one were to pass, that would amount to almost 60,000 children losing access to “evidence-based medical care.”

“[It] is really unheard of that such a population would be denied best practice medical care,” Hudson explained.

However, many experts challenge the notion that so-called gender-affirming care for minors is “evidence-based.” The AAP released a position statement supporting the affirmative model of care in 2018, claiming that affirmation and medical transition were best practice for the treatment of children who experience discomfort with their gender identity, and suggesting that the watchful waiting approach of the past was outdated and harmful.

But in 2019, Canadian sexologist James Cantor published a scathing rebuttal, debunking the AAP’s statement point by point, saying that the activist-led subcommittee responsible for producing the document “told neither the truth nor the whole truth, committing sins of commission and omission, asserting claims easily falsified by anyone caring to do any fact-checking at all.”

“AAP is advocating for something far in excess of mainstream practice and medical consensus. Problems do not constitute merely a misquote, a misinterpretation of an ambiguous statement, or a missing sentence or two. Rather, the AAP statement is a systematic exclusion and misrepresentation of entire literatures. Not only did AAP fail to provide the evidence at all. Indeed, AAP’s recommendations are despite the existing evidence,” concluded Cantor.

Earlier this year, a group of five pediatricians published a document urging the AAP to perform a systematic review of the evidence for affirmation and puberty blockers for minors, as has been done in Sweden, Finland, and England resulting in each nation changing track and moving back to a more cautious psychotherapeutic approach to the care of these vulnerable young patients. 

The AAP responded by preventing doctors from commenting on the proposed resolution.

"I'm really disappointed the AAP is being driven by ideology, rather than evidence," pediatrician Julia Mason told the Daily Mail at the time. Mason is a member of the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine (SEGM) and was one of the authors of the resolution.

"They're embarrassed that they've let young activist doctors get them on record in support of gender-affirming care, and now they can't backtrack. They've suppressed my efforts and come up with new rules to hide what we're trying to say from rank-and-file pediatricians."