{"id":273459,"date":"2025-11-20T11:45:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T11:45:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/273459\/"},"modified":"2025-11-20T11:45:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T11:45:09","slug":"revised-hhs-trans-report-exposes-moral-failures-in-gender-medicine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/273459\/","title":{"rendered":"Revised HHS trans report exposes moral failures in gender medicine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Within President Trump\u2019s Executive Order 14187<\/a>, \u201cProtecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation\u201d, was a directive. The Department of Health and Human Services had 90 days to conduct \u201ca review of the existing literature on best practices for promoting the health of children who assert gender dysphoria, rapid-onset gender dysphoria, or other identity-based confusion\u201d.<\/p>\n

That report<\/a>, which first came out on 1 May, 2025, was originally published anonymously, and without peer review due to time constraints. Many proponents of gender-affirming care ignored the report\u2019s important takeaways about science and medical ethics, and criticised it for the anonymity and lack of peer review.<\/p>\n

Today, the report has been re-released with peer reviews, responses, minor changes to the text, and the names of the authors revealed.<\/p>\n

Those authors include self-identified liberals such as bioethicist Moti Goren and healthcare researcher Evgenia Abbruzzese, along with the centre-right political scientist Leor Sapir, and the more conservative endocrinologist Michael Laidlaw. In other words, this is not a MAGA team, but rather a diverse group of experts, including an MIT philosopher and a research methodologist.<\/p>\n

Seven of the reviews were solicited from doctors, nurses, bioethicists and others. They evaluated the report\u2019s methodology and generally found it to be sound, and its conclusions to be reasonable. In fact, at least one of them had already tried to raise awareness about the lack of science supporting gender-affirming care, even before the HHS Review.<\/p>\n

University of Iowa professor of paediatrics, psychiatry, neuroscience and pharmacology Lane Strathearn was an editorial board member for the Journal of Pediatrics. In August 2024, an editor at the journal had approved him to write an editorial about the discrepancy between what was often claimed about the field \u2014 that it was evidence-based and life-saving \u2014 and the reality of its \u201climited evidence base.\u201d The piece, \u201cWhat We Know and What We Don\u2019t: Evaluating the Evidence for Gender-Affirming Care in Pediatrics\u201d raised \u201cmany of the same concerns\u201d as the HHS report\u201d, Strathearn wrote. But because peer reviewers vehemently objected to it, the Journal of Pediatrics never published it.<\/p>\n

That is, some people critiqued the original HHS report for not having been peer reviewed. But that peer review process had weeded out the information and point of view in this report. The peer review process has essentially shut the door on dissent and questioning within the medical field.<\/p>\n

As important as the peer reviews are, it\u2019s what\u2019s not there that might matter the most. The HHS Report authors sought peer reviews from both the Endocrine Society and American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), medical advocacy groups that have both supported the gender-affirming model.<\/p>\n

The AAP had denounced<\/a> all 409 pages of the initial report, mere hours after publication, asserting that it \u201cmisrepresents the current medical consensus\u201d. It insisted that the report \u201cprioritizes opinions over dispassionate reviews of evidence\u201d.<\/p>\n

According to Sapir, the AAP had agreed to offer a review \u2014 as opposed to the attack it had led with before. But not long before publication, it backed out, insisting that it should have been included all along. The Endocrine Society refused to review it altogether.<\/p>\n

In reality, the report reflected the truth \u2014 that, in contrast to what the AAP asserted, there was no medical consensus. The HHS report contained an \u201cumbrella review\u201d, which gathers the relevant systematic evidence reviews and evaluates their claims. This is the highest point on the pyramid of \u201cevidence-based medicine\u201d. And what it found was \u201clow-certainty\u201d evidence: whatever the conclusions of various studies claiming puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for youth had alleviated mental distress, the real outcomes might be quite different. The studies were too poorly conducted for anyone to really know.<\/p>\n

The report also made the case that youth gender medicine does not meet the basic moral principles<\/a> of ethical healthcare. With no clear benefit, and some known bodily harms from blockers, hormones, and surgeries, the field promised neither non-malfeasance \u2014 the obligation to avoid harm \u2014 nor beneficence. The report authors think that because of this, there is no ethical way to even conduct further research on young people.<\/p>\n

Rather than offer a defence of continuing to socially and medically transition young people, and a basis for continuing research, the AAP and other medical groups simply stuck to insisting that they must operate \u201cfree from political interference\u201d and thus condemned the report. These medical groups don\u2019t seem to realise their own hypocrisy, or how they project politics onto science, just as they accuse others of doing.<\/p>\n

The AAP and other proponents of gender-affirming care should actually read the report and engage with its ideas and suggestions, rather than projecting onto it the sins they\u2019re guilty of themselves. They are the ones who\u2019ve misrepresented the medical consensus, and prioritised opinions over dispassionate reviews of evidence. With the names revealed, and the peer reviews in place, they no longer have reason to ignore this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Within President Trump\u2019s Executive Order 14187, \u201cProtecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation\u201d, was a directive. The Department…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":273460,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[102,86734,2960,1354,112382,56,1955,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-273459","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-health-and-human-services","10":"tag-healthcare","11":"tag-trans","12":"tag-trans-guidance","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-uncategorized","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=273459"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273459\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/273460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=273459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}