That children cannot smoke, get tattoos, vote, drive, or buy guns should be a clue that changing their hormones and lopping off body parts is a bad idea. Nevertheless, the Rainbow Mafia insists we’re “bigots” for saying so. Still, the science they claim to love so very much refutes their arguments, as the Discovery Institute’s Wesley Smith recently detailed.

The United States has become the world’s most adamant promoter of what is called “gender-affirming care” for children and adolescents who identify as being other than their sex. This approach ranges from “social affirmation” (the use of preferred pronouns, for example) and “medical affirmation” such as puberty blocking to radical “surgical affirmation,” meaning mastectomies, facial feminization or masculinization, cosmetic procedures, and, in a few cases, even genital removal and refashioning.

Beginning to “transition” kids while they are still immature remains intensely controversial. But the increasingly woke medical establishment claims that the gender-affirming approach is “settled science” and the only efficacious approach to treating these children.

Despite the lectures from scientific publications and the echo chamber of the mainstream media, this simply isn’t true. Other nations seem to have figured that out, and various health authorities, Smith says, conclude “the scientific data do not unequivocally support the gender-affirming approach, gender incongruence in youth is often transitory, and, further, medical interventions such as puberty-blocking and surgeries may cause more harm than good.”

In the midst of this growing unease about gender affirmation, an important peer-reviewed analysis of relevant studies (93 citations) about the effects of transitioning — both in youth and adults — was just published in the professional journal Current Sexual Health Reports. Authored by Case Western Reserve Clinical Professor of Psychiatry Stephen B. Levine and E. Abbruzzese, a scholar at the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, the paper details the paucity of reliable data establishing the benefits of beginning gender transitioning during a patient’s youth. The authors also outline potential significant harms.

The paper doesn’t limit its analysis to the care of children. Adult gender transitions have been studied for decades, so, as a way of extrapolating potential outcomes for youth, Levine and Abbruzzese review the literature to see what benefits or harms have accrued among patients who have previously transitioned.

The news is not good: “Long-term data do not show that hormonal and surgical transitions result in lasting mental health improvements in transgender-identified individuals, and some evidence even suggests the possibility of treatment-associated harms.”

Smith also highlights Swedish and Dutch studies concluding essentially the same thing. The long and short of it is that, while we’re told “gender-affirming care” is what’s best for kids, but there’s little evidence it improves anything or anyone. In fact, Smith says, “patient satisfaction from gender-affirming procedures and interventions may not last.” He concludes:

The Levine/Abbruzzese study of studies does not prove — nor does it attempt to— that gender-affirming care offers no benefit to young patients. But when its findings are added to similar conclusions by health authorities in Sweden, the U.K., Finland, and France — as well as the British Medical Journal study quoted above — it is clear that the science on gender-affirming care is far from settled, and indeed, efforts by ideologues to push affirmation as the exclusive approach is not only unscientific, but ill-advised. At the very least, this heterodox perspective belongs at the center of our ongoing discussions about how to best care for anguished children who believe that their “true self” is other than their sex.

Read the whole thing here.