Open Letter to the AAP

Nothing good will come of this and you know it. Use some common sense.

The decision to medically transition should be made when you are a mature adult and a able to fully comprehend what you are doing to yourself.

I do not think children and young people are in a position to make medical and surgical decisions to alter their healthy bodies. Help.them live with their dysphoria as u would help an anorexic. Keep children and young people safe.

Please consider these well-articulated concerns.

For the love of our children. First do not harm! Impossibility of being born in the wrong body! Impossibility of changing sex! Protect our children body integrity!

I am so grateful that I came of age before the trans movement, because I would have ended up on hormones with no breasts. I'm one of the 80% of people who had gender dysphoria in childhood that desisted after adolescence. Kids, especially girls, need time to come to terms with the changes in their bodies. With the right support, we can adjust and learn to love our bodies. Please don't fail young girls who aren't comfortable in their own skin! With help, we can learn to accept ourselves as we are without disfiguring hormones, binding, and surgery. You've taken an oath to do no harm; you actually harm girls by transing them.

Children are diagnosed too soon. No child should be encouraged to transition medically. The treatments offered them are too experimental or have serious side effects. Please protect childhood from the transition trend. No child is born in the wrong body.

First, Do No Harm

As a parent with a daughter who tranidentified, this kind of affirmation-only treatment ignores the fact that many children and teens have other issues which need to be addressed and are ignored because of a trans identification. I want to remind the AAP that they've issued guidance in the past that they rescinded -- particularly approving of pediatricians participating in female genital mutilation. Please rethink the unintended consequences and the damage to children, teens, and families that this position will cause. Please.

Hello, I'm 25 years old, a transsexual male, and am unable to support any sort of medical intervention with regard to transgender identifying youth. These kids are not mentally, emotionally, and/or physically capable of the immense consequences that arise with changing one's secondary sexual characteristics. The current state of transgender ideology has become a trend. Misdiagnosis of body dysmorphic disorder, narcissistic tendency, or depression coupled with low self esteem among many other alternative health issues is widespread. We need to be aware of, discuss, and scientifically challenge any mentality with a basis upon unidentifiable innate feelings of self. These concepts are very abstract. Children should not be encouraged to mutilate their bodies in the name of feelings, artificial societal roles of oppression, and acquiesce to gender non-conforming tendency. Best regards, Thank you

Like most children i grew out of my gender confusion. Please look at the research of Paul McHugh as well.

Please re-consider. You are mixing a non-scientifically grounded ideology (Queer Theory) with medicine, and doing so in the name of "political correctness." This has historically never ended well. Let's re-assess and properly adhere to the scientific method - hypothesis testing with rigorous methodology, only drawing conclusions about practice after the data is collected and analyzed. We must have more ethical consideration and intellectual curiosity. Trans people deserve better than this.

Former director of Montefiore Medical Center Sex and Gender Clinic.

United States

Young people with underlying conditions or pre existing issues need referral or treatment for those issues first. I trust profit is not the motivating factor in AAP members' choosing only to deal with the apparent dysphoria in front of them.

Children and young people with complex mental health problems or anxiety or simply gender confusion are being medicalised with severe long term physical complications. There is evidence that transition has little beneficial effector mental health after the first year. This is a social experiment on children and young people that will damage lives, erases homosexuality and is essentially medicalised conversion therapy. This is a future child abuse scandal and wil expose clinicians and pharmaceutical companies to huge lawsuits

You know deep inside your policy has everything to do with money, political correctness, and extortion, and little to do with our children’s health. It has never been more important for you to live by the oath, “First, do no harm.”

Transition should be well vetted with therapy and ruling out other possible mental and medical health issues before landing on transition. These are adolescent kids who need to explore this in depth.

I was a gender non-conforming kid who went through what a lot of us do, questioning my gender, being uncomfortable with being a boy bc I was treated differently. If I were a kid today you would be putting me on hormone blockers and on my way to transitioning, with surgeries & lifelong complications. This is wrong. You must stop this cult-like social contagion Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria before it's too late. When these children grow up there will be hell to pay for what people are inflicting on them from very young ages. We should be affirming people's identities & helping them to feel comfortable in their bodies without binding, surgeries & the delusion that someone can change sex.

I am an Australian medical practitioner alarmed by the lack of a proper evidence base for this policy. This nonevidence based approach is also being widely practiced in my country. The sterilisation of minors (who cannot given informed consent) is a grave matter which requires a compelling reason and a solid evidence base behind it. I have no ideological barrow to push - I am not religious, and left leaning in my political views. Are you suspending your clinical judgement in favour of ideology? I struggle to see another explanation for this. This is a shameful chapter in the history of my profession. I am grateful that I do not work in an environment where I am likely to see these children as I would feel ethically (and medicolegally) unable to recommend medicalisation to my young patients. You are failing your members as well, by placing them in the invidious position of having to choose between supporting a non evidence based policy which exposes them to medicolegal risk , OR refusing to do so, which may expose them to risk of accusations of transphobia and complaints to regulatory authorities. I can see this inevitably falling apart at some point, probably when the lawsuits start rolling in. But how many people will be damaged in the meantime.? The personal stories appended to signatures of this petition are heartrending. As doctors, how can you pretend that ROGD is not real and ignore these families.? There is unquestionably something going on here. Rather than assuming it is due to "increased acceptance" please act like doctors and scientists and enquire as to what is causing this social epidemic. Support followup research to Lisa Littman's study. I also want people reading these comments to know that there are doctors and clinicians out there who do NOT agree with this. Thanks to "Jenn Smith", transgender adult who signed and commented on October 27th calling this "medical mass hysteria" I could not put it better myself.