Gender dysphoria should be treated with therapy instead of transition treatments, massive Trump-ordered HHS report urges

A sweeping review of transgender treatments on minors found “deep uncertainty about the purported benefits” of many of those interventions — and urged doctors to put more of an emphasis on behavioral therapy when addressing gender dysphoria.Researchers also concluded that many of the protocols for treating children with gender dysphoria became widely used before outcome studies determined whether or not they were safe practices, a massive 409-page Health and Human Services study revealed.“The umbrella review found that the overall quality of evidence concerning the effects of any intervention on psychological outcomes, quality of life, regret, or long-term health, is very low,” HHS’ Gender Dysphoria Report determined in its assessment of common studies on transgender treatments.“This indicates that the beneficial effects reported in the literature are likely to differ substantially from the true effects of the interventions.”President Trump signed an executive order in January ordering HHS to conduct a review of best practices for treating gender dysphoria within 90 days, which was released Thursday.Transgender interventions in children that were scrutinized in the blockbuster HHS report include the use of puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgeries.While the report stressed it is not a “clinical practice guideline,” the paper examined 17 systematic reviews of transgender treatments in minors and concluded that there was limited evidence to suggest those interventions had any “meaningful improvement in mental health.” In some instances, this was because studies did not properly measure track patient outcomes or studied individuals whose mental health was already at a “high-functioning at baseline.”“Multiple SRs [systematic reviews] have concluded that the evidence supporting the benefits of pediatric transition interventions—from PBs [puberty blockers] to CSH [cross-sex hormone therapy] and surgery—is of ‘very low certainty,�...