I felt an increasing obligation to patients, to medicine, and to the truth, to speak outside of Finland against the widespread transitioning of gender-distressed minors. I have been particularly concerned about American medical societies, who as a group continue to assert that children know their “authentic” selves, and a child who declares a transgender identity should be affirmed and started on treatment. (In recent years, the “trans” identity has evolved to include more young people who say they are “nonbinary”—that is, they feel they don’t belong to either sex—and other gender variations.)

Medical organizations are supposed to transcend politics in favor of upholding standards that protect patients. However, in the U.S. these groups—including the American Academy of Pediatrics—have been actively hostile to the message my colleagues and I are urging.

I attempted to address the rising international concerns about pediatric gender transition at this year’s annual conference of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. But the two proposed panels were rejected by the academy. This is highly disturbing. Science does not progress through silencing. Doctors who refuse to consider evidence presented by critics are putting patient safety at risk.

[Dr. Kaltiala connects the dots to the same phenomenon that this has always recalled for me: the “recovered memory” craze of the 1980s. That fed social panics that resulted in infamous witch-hunts like the McMartin Pre-School investigation and trials, which exposed that as a dangerous myth and a manipulative device by mental-health activists. Many lives were ruined by widespread and false allegations of satanic child molestation rings and also in individual cases of false allegations of abuse. Like gender transitions, the psychiatric/psychological industry had no clinical evidence in support of “recovered memory,” but like the current moment, they quickly embraced it anyway to profit off of it, either financially or in pursuit of their ideological activism. That’s the way this will end up, too. — Ed]