A Letter to the Canadian Medical Association
a response to "creating safe spaces for youth to explore + express gender"
Dear Dr. Ross,
We read the statement published by the Canadian Medical Association “CMA encourages safe spaces for youth to explore, express gender identity” with disappointment and also resolve. We write this letter on behalf of Canadians— parents, teachers and allied paediatric professionals, together with the legislators who represent them across Canada. We have grave concerns and seek to gain an understanding of the mental health crisis sweeping through the nation’s paediatric population. We feel disheartened at the decision of the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) to politicise paediatric health care and to take a vague public position that leaves the public and medical professionals with more questions than it answers.
In its statement, the CMA wrote, gender identity is a health issue, and every step should be taken to ensure that all children and youth can achieve optimal health. Exploring and determining one’s sexual orientation and gender is part of normal childhood and adolescent development. This should be encouraged by creating safe environments in which children and youth can express themselves, absent of barriers, prejudice and restrictive conditions that can lead to harm and stigma.
Dr. Ross, opposing the application of reasonable limits on paediatric social transitioning in schools thwarts parental inclusion, and strains rather than promotes the natural and necessary child-parent attachment. It creates conditions that increase the child’s risk of exposure to harm. Allowing schools to transition children in secret from parents places confused children at risk, as in the story of Sage, the girl who inspired Sage’s Law. Socially transitioning in secret from parents placed Sage in the hands of traffickers. Removing children from the care of parents who question rather than affirm gender identity hastens rather than prevents their death by suicide, as in the story Yaeli Martinez. Socially transitioning Yaeli and removing her from her mother’s care caused rather than relieved her suffering and led to her suicide death. We question the motives of the CMA in publishing this statement a week after UR Pride Centre, supported by Egale and represented by McCarthy-Tetrault LLP, filed an application with the Saskatchewan Court to suspend The Parental Inclusion Policy. We urge the CMA to take steps to combat the dangerous politicisation of paediatric health care by aligning its recommendations with the best available evidence. Rather than crafting vague statements in support of an experimental care model, rather than using your social media platform to mislead the public by promoting exaggerated benefits and minimised risks—we urge the CMA to acknowledge what every systematic review conducted on Gender Affirming Care thus far has done. Dr. Ross, the current model of Gender Affirming Care requires pubertal suppression with GnRHa, a chemical castration hormone that happens to be on the Hazardous Drug list. Pubertal chemical castration comes with significant risk, including sterility, lifelong dependence on medication and the anguish of regret. A growing number of European countries and international professional organizations now recommend psychotherapy and revising social media behaviour in favour of healthier connection choices, rather than hormones and surgeries as the first line of treatment for gender-dysphoric youth.
The WSJ recently published a letter written by 21 clinicians and researchers from nine countries:
Every systematic review of evidence to date, including one published in the Journal of the Endocrine Society, has found the evidence for mental-health benefits of hormonal interventions for minors to be of low or very low certainty. By contrast, Dr. Hammes’s [president of the Endocrine Society] claims about the state of evidence, ie. that gender transition reduces suicides is contradicted by every systematic review, including the review published by the Endocrine Society, which states, “We could not draw any conclusions about death by suicide.” There is no reliable evidence to suggest that hormonal transition is an effective suicide-prevention measure.
Trans-friendly research demonstrates that social transition, (defined as a child taking opposite sex preferred pronouns and name and living as the opposite sex socially), undeniably locks a child into the sex reassignment path: 94% of kids who socially transition end up chemically castrated and cross-sex hormone sterilised. A growing number of young people with high ACE scores report regretting their transition, and feeling the adults around them failed to challenge their belief in their identity. Detransitioners live with significant levels of iatrogenic damage from Gender Affirming Care, as well as trauma from the process, in addition to the childhood trauma which gender and sex reassignment never resolved. This points to the repeated refusal of the paediatric medical community to address the developmental needs of children, the primary one being the integrity and stability of the family unit and its natural attachments. The Province of Saskatchewan crafted the Parental Inclusion Policy for five fundamental reasons: (1). safety and bodily integrity of the child, (2). to restore reason, (3). to err on the side of watchful waiting, and (4). to ensure parents have awareness of their child’s mental and emotional health needs so they can take steps to meet them, as is their duty and responsibility to do, (5). as is the child’s right.
Dr. Ross, we believe every child has a fundamental right to gender affirming care that helps them learn to feel safe in their body, helps them learn how their body works and why it responds the way it does. Every child has a right to have an education and social culture and access to paediatric health care that does not teach them to view their bodies as the enemy to vanquish. Every child has the right of parental inclusion in their education and health care delivery to ensure against exploitation and impulsive and social contagion-driven peer-oriented decision making that can characterize adolescence. A boy can wear a dress or play with dolls and he can reject competitive machismo masculinity and he does not need to be affirmed by GnRHa and synthetic estrogen. A girl can wear pants and climb trees and do sports and reject femininity and she does not need to be affirmed by GnRHa and toxic levels of testosterone that will atrophy her reproductive tract and necessitate an eventual full hysterectomy and increase her risk of metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance, and liver damage. Dr. Ross, we believe that pubertal suppression of gender confused kids (many of whom turn out to be gay or autistic) imposes prejudice and restrictive conditions that can lead to harm and stigma.
We recognize puberty as fundamental right of all children and youth and call on a suspension of all experimental off-label pubertal suppression for children suffering with mental health issues, diagnosed or awaiting assessment, in Canada. We remind the CMA of Canada’s obligation to the Nuremberg Code on human experimentation. We remind the CMA of Canada’s obligations to The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child which states children have the right to live free from exploitation and negligence. We remind the CMA of Canada’s obligation to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which states that the disabled have a right to fertility on an equal basis with others. A reliable connection between gender dysphoria and autism has emerged and we urge the CMA to consider the ramifications of Gender Affirming Care as a mass forced sterilisation campaign against autistic children.
Sterilization, when performed without informed consent, violates an individual’s rights to dignity, humane treatment, health, family, information, privacy, and to freely decide the number and spacing of children, among others. Forced sterilization removes a person’s ability to reproduce, usually permanently and irreversibly.
We remind the CMA that mature minors lack the developmental capacity to consent to their own puberty suppression and sterilisation. A mature minor cannot consent to Gender Affirming Care (GAC), the outcome of which is sterilisation. We remind the CMA that we are speaking of chemically castrating children. We remind the CMA that the BC Court of Appeals and the Ontario Court of Appeals have openly criticized the use of chemical castration for recidivist sex offenders because of the mediocrity of available scientific evidence for its utility and efficacy. We question the integrity of the medical profession imposing an invasive treatment on a child which the judiciary does not favour imposing on repeat sex offenders. We express grave concerns about the informed consent process in GAC when we see currently available literature on gender transitioning deceptively reassuring young people and their parents that puberty blockers are reversible — this violates the child’s freedom because it does not satisfy informed consent. We remind the CMA of the Canadian Medical Protective Association statement that, in order for informed consent to be satisfied, the patient must have been given an adequate explanation about the nature of the proposed investigation or treatment and its anticipated outcome as well as the significant risks involved and alternatives available.
We support and defend the right of every child to self determination, to have the freedom to be himself or herself to the fullest. We defend the right of every child to explore gender expression without fear or reservation and without disruption of their physiologic growth process. We support and defend the right of every child to grow up free from the arbitrary bodily imprisonment of gender-motivated pubertal suppression. We invite the CMA to join us in supporting and defending these rights for all Canadian children. We ask for your support in crafting an approach to paediatric gender expression and healthy emotional child development that embraces parental inclusion and family unity.
Yours Truly,
Roxanne Sukhan | Eva Kurilova | Nick Osmond-Jones | Stuart Parker | Diane Schellenberg
I fully agree with this letter to the Canadian Medical Association. Anne-Louise Flynn
As a grandmother of three school age children, I agree with every word and am appalled that any of this even needs to be said.