Dr. Stephen B. Levine helped establish a gender clinic at Case Western Reserve in 1974 and served as a chair of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). He does not support medical interventions for children.
"In medicine, we have a history of many medical misadventures."
Here are the 13th claims made by transgender activists that are Dr. Stephen B. Levine identifies are not true:
1. A trans identity once established is immutable, unchangeable, unchanging.
2. Trans identities are primarily caused by prenatal biologic forces.
3. Sexual orientation is entirely independent of gender identity. You often see that the first manifestation of gender dysphoria in someone attracted to the same sex
4. It is not true is that no form of gender identity is an abnormality and no form of gender identity is a symptomatic reflection of some other problem.
5. Gender dysphoria is a serious medical condition and it requires medical intervention only if the patient wants it. So there is some inherent paradox in that idea. It's a serious medical condition that implies that we should treat it, but we should only treat it if the patient wants it.
6. The associated emotional problems are primarily due to living in a discriminatory world, even though many of the children who were diagnosed with gender dysphoria eventually previously had been diagnosed with other problem.
7. No effective alternative approaches to affirmative care exist. This is the only thing that will save your child.
8. Attempts to provide psychotherapy are unethical versions of conversion therapy and should be outlawed. Any attempt to help the child is called conversion therapy, and people are urging that to be outlawed in various jurisdictions.
9. Affirmative care improves mental health and social function. This is the justification for the treatment, even though we don't have long-term studies at all that demonstrate that.
10. Affirmative care reduces the rates of suicidal ideation and prevents suicide. This is the most powerful and coercive untruth that parents of teenagers are told.
11. Teens, even very young teens know best what will make them happy in the future. In other situations, it is obvious that children don't always know what's best for them.
12. Meeting diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria predicts a good outcome to affirmative care.
13. Regret and detransition are rare among these patients. When people assert that regret is rare, it's because they're defining regret as telling their original therapists that they wish they didn't undergo this or asking to have their body rechanged back to their original form, which is a very limited concept of what regret represents.
"If ideas that underpin intervention are not true, how can we trust the intervention itself?"
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