Image by ChatGPT… that’s NOT Dr. Khatchadourian :)

As Sharon Kirkey reported in last week’s National Post, Ottawa pediatrician Dr. Karine Khatchadourian, one of the first doctors in Canada to provide hormone treatments to transgender-identifying and “gender dysphoric youth”, is now advising caution.

By Dr. Khatchadourian’s count, she’s provided treatment to between 250 to 300 gender-distressed children and teens in the past dozen years. But now, in the face of multiple large reviews that have laid bare the lack of evidence for the drugs-enabled puberty-blocking cross-gender-hormone-administering “gender-affirming” model of care, Dr. Khatchadourian is admitting she may have gotten it wrong.

Not that she’s apologizing, exactly. “Doctors are encouraged to look at emerging data objectively, be open to scrutiny and pivot where necessary,” she now says. And:

“I can say that, with everything I now know, as of now, I would challenge medicalizing the majority of youth that are presenting to clinics.”

Yet what remains mystifying is why doctors ever “pivoted” in the first place to providing such “therapies” to confused children in the utter absence of any evidence to support that approach.

Kirkey describes Dr. Khatchadourian’s “openness” to sharing that her messaging has changed as “remarkable”. But what is truly remarkable is that she has taken so long to see the light. Don’t get me wrong: I’m very glad that she has. But how many children have already been harmed?

One can only hope that her colleagues in the “gender transition” space, and that medical leaders at the Canadian Medical Association and at the Canadian Pediatric Society and at provincial medical associations, will now join her in pulling back from permanently medicalizing confused children; and that the cone of silence that has for so long stifled open debate on this issue—courtesy of concerned but cowed providers frightened of being labeled as “transphobes”—will finally be properly exploded.

And for more of a push—as if any more push should be needed—they’d do well to consider a recent large Finnish study which shredded the notion that “gender affirming care” improves psychiatric outcomes. Below, a short commentary I wrote for the Aristotle Foundation with respect to that study, published in yesterday’s The Epoch Times.

Gender Ideology Takes (Another) Massive Hit

The Epoch Times

April 20, 2026

by J. Edward Les

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

It’s not the first time I’ve quoted Carl Sagan in the context of gender ideology. But Sagan’s dictum bears repeating here, because the claim that it’s possible to transition from male to female (and vice versa) certainly qualifies as extraordinary.

And what is truly extraordinary is the lack of evidence supporting the practice of “gender affirming care,” which involves treatment with puberty blockers, cross-gender hormones (estrogen or testosterone), and in some cases surgery to remove breasts or modify genitalia.

Multiple comprehensive analyses including the United Kingdom’s “Cass Review” and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices” have exposed the thin evidence underpinning this therapeutic model, and have strongly suggested that rather than providing benefit, these practices cause real and lasting harm.

And now we have another large high-quality study recently published by Finnish researchers in Acta Paediatrica, which casts grave doubt on the efficacy of “gender affirming” care.

The Finns reviewed the psychiatric wellbeing of almost 2,100 adolescents and young adults who sought therapy for gender dysphoria between 1996 and 2019 and compared them to age-and-gender-matched controls[u1] .

The findings are startling.

Not only did the gender dysphoria cohort have significantly more mental health problems, but their mental health worsened after receiving “care” at gender identity clinics. For “male to female” patients, mental health problems (such as depression and anxiety) rose from 10 per cent before gender reassignment to 61 per cent afterwards; for “female to male” patients, the increase was from 22 per cent to 55 per cent.

We’ve long been fed the dogma by transgender advocates that “affirming” troubled young people in their cross-gender identities is the only responsible thing to do—that it’s essential to their wellbeing. In many cases, parents of gender-confused youth have been scared into transitioning their children by clinicians mouthing a version of “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a live son?”

But the findings of the Finnish researchers pour ice-cold water on the notion that “gender affirming care” results in improved psychiatric wellbeing. Turns out, just the opposite is true.

It’s worth noting that one of the authors of the Finnish study is Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala, a psychiatrist at Tampere University, who founded one of Finland’s two pediatric gender clinics in 2011. As she documented her observations over the years, Dr. Kaltiala grew increasingly concerned about the harms inflicted by the “gender affirmation” model and she was instrumental in significantly restricting that model’s suggested medical interventions for minors; Finland now instead prioritizes psychological support over puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. Dr. Kaltiala expressed her battle-tested viewpoint in a much-read piece in The Free Press entitled “Gender-Affirming Care Is Dangerous. I Know Because I Helped Pioneer It.”

Various other European jurisdictions have similarly tapped the brakes. On this side of the pond, caution is taking root in the United States. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons, for instance, recently issued a statement (subsequently endorsed by the American Medical Association), which recommends that surgeons delay gender-related breast, genital and facial surgery until patients are at least 19 years old.

In Canada, however, not much has changed (apart from in Alberta where the government has taken flak for restricting medical and surgical interventions in gender-confused youth). The gender affirmation model remains the standard of care for kids in this country, with the full-throated endorsement of the Canadian Medical Association, the Canadian Pediatric Society and provincial medical associations. In light of all we now know about the dangers of this approach, that too is truly extraordinary.

One can choose, as Canadian doctors and medical leaders have inexplicably done, to ignore the facts of human biology and deny the binary nature of our species. But as Aldous Huxley once noted,

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

And we ignore those facts to the detriment of our children.

J. Edward Les is a pediatrician in Calgary and senior fellow at the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy.