Fri, 8 Jul 2022 07:26:39 +1000
Andrew Pam <xanni [at] glasswings.com.au>
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/15/magazine/gender-therapy.html
"Scott Leibowitz is a pioneer in the field of transgender health care. He has
directed or worked at three gender clinics on the East Coast and the Midwest,
where he provides gender-affirming care, the approach the medical community has
largely adopted for embracing children and teenagers who come out as
transgender. He also helps shape policy on L.G.B.T. issues for the American
Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. As a child and adolescent
psychiatrist who is gay, he found it felt natural to work under the L.G.B.T.
“umbrella,” as he put it, aware of the overlap as well as the differences
between gay and trans identity.
It was for all these reasons that Leibowitz was selected, in 2017, to be a
leader of a working group of seven clinicians and researchers drafting a
chapter on adolescents for a new version of guidelines called the Standards of
Care to be issued by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health
(WPATH). The guidelines are meant to set a gold standard for the field of
transgender health care, and this would be the first update since 2012. What
Leibowitz and his co-authors didn’t foresee, when they began, was that their
work would be engulfed by two intersecting forces: a significant rise in the
number of teenagers openly identifying as transgender and seeking gender care,
and a right-wing backlash in the United States against allowing them to
medically transition, including state-by-state efforts to ban it.
During the last decade, the field of transgender care for youth has greatly
shifted. A decade ago, there were a handful of pediatric gender clinics in the
United States and a dozen or so more in other countries. The few doctors and
therapists who worked in them knew one another, and the big debate was whether
kids in preschool or elementary school should be allowed to live fully as the
gender they identified as when they strongly and consistently asserted their
wishes.
Now there are more than 60 comprehensive gender clinics in the United States,
along with countless therapists and doctors in private practice who are also
seeing young patients with gender-identity issues. The number of young people
who identify as transgender nationally is about 300,000, according to a new
report by the Williams Institute, a research center at U.C.L.A.’s law school,
which is much higher than previous estimates. In countries that collect
national data, like the Netherlands and Britain, the number of
13-to-17-year-olds seeking treatment for gender-identity issues has also
increased, from dozens to hundreds or thousands a year."
Via Bill Daul.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
"Scott Leibowitz is a pioneer in the field of transgender health care. He has
directed or worked at three gender clinics on the East Coast and the Midwest,
where he provides gender-affirming care, the approach the medical community has
largely adopted for embracing children and teenagers who come out as
transgender. He also helps shape policy on L.G.B.T. issues for the American
Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. As a child and adolescent
psychiatrist who is gay, he found it felt natural to work under the L.G.B.T.
“umbrella,” as he put it, aware of the overlap as well as the differences
between gay and trans identity.
It was for all these reasons that Leibowitz was selected, in 2017, to be a
leader of a working group of seven clinicians and researchers drafting a
chapter on adolescents for a new version of guidelines called the Standards of
Care to be issued by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health
(WPATH). The guidelines are meant to set a gold standard for the field of
transgender health care, and this would be the first update since 2012. What
Leibowitz and his co-authors didn’t foresee, when they began, was that their
work would be engulfed by two intersecting forces: a significant rise in the
number of teenagers openly identifying as transgender and seeking gender care,
and a right-wing backlash in the United States against allowing them to
medically transition, including state-by-state efforts to ban it.
During the last decade, the field of transgender care for youth has greatly
shifted. A decade ago, there were a handful of pediatric gender clinics in the
United States and a dozen or so more in other countries. The few doctors and
therapists who worked in them knew one another, and the big debate was whether
kids in preschool or elementary school should be allowed to live fully as the
gender they identified as when they strongly and consistently asserted their
wishes.
Now there are more than 60 comprehensive gender clinics in the United States,
along with countless therapists and doctors in private practice who are also
seeing young patients with gender-identity issues. The number of young people
who identify as transgender nationally is about 300,000, according to a new
report by the Williams Institute, a research center at U.C.L.A.’s law school,
which is much higher than previous estimates. In countries that collect
national data, like the Netherlands and Britain, the number of
13-to-17-year-olds seeking treatment for gender-identity issues has also
increased, from dozens to hundreds or thousands a year."
Via Bill Daul.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
