How do the Europeans manage to stay so far ahead of the United States medical community when it comes to the entire transgender craze? We can’t explain it all that easily, but it definitely seems to be happening. The latest example comes to us from Finland, where that country’s leading expert on “pediatric gender care,” Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala, does not support surgical or chemical/hormone therapy for prepubescent children who express gender confusion. She will no doubt soon be the subject of calls for her cancellation by the trans crowd, but she insists that almost every child goes through some form of gender confusion at some point, but four out of five of them will “grow out of it” after they reach puberty. (Daily Wire)

Finland’s leading expert on pediatric gender medicine says “four out of five” children will grow out of their gender confusion.

Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala, the chief psychiatrist at Tampere University, Finland’s largest pediatric gender clinic, recently had an interview with the country’s top newspaper about her reluctance to recommend surgical and chemical sex change services for minors who identify as transgender.

Dr. Kaltiala explained that while it is “important to accept the child as they are,” it is also necessary to recognize that it is common for children to strongly identify with the opposite sex at some point in their lives, but four out of five children who identify as transgender will grow out of it during puberty.

Inserting the periodic reminder that I’m not a doctor here, this is something that seems as if it should have been blatantly obvious even to the layman. Children go through all sorts of phases while growing up and they frequently adopt behaviors based on their role models or (sadly) things they pick up at school or through social media. Just because your son wants to try on mom’s high heels when he’s seven years old, that doesn’t make him a diagnosed gender dysphoria patient.

Unfortunately, “growing out of it” won’t be of any benefit to children who have already been surgically altered or had their systems permanently damaged through the prolonged use of unnatural hormones or puberty blockers. It will be too late for them and may lead to a realization that they have made a tragic mistake that can never be undone for the rest of their lives.

It was good to see a medical expert in this field rejecting the idea of such hormonal or chemical treatments for children, but also a bit disappointing to hear that she would consider them at all. As we’ve discussed here more times than I can count, none of these procedures are “reversible,” despite constant claims that they are.

Too many detransitioners who have finally begun speaking out have described the permanent effects that opposite-sex hormones had on them. Young girls have learned that they will be permanently unable to bear children after years of testosterone injections. The drugs being prescribed as “puberty blockers” are actually cancer treatment drugs with known, significant side effects. Most obvious of all should be the fact that neither genital mutilation surgery nor mastectomies are “reversible.” That’s a lie that is repeated all of the time in American media and it needs to stop.

So when will the American Medical Association and the CDC catch up to Finland? These are not majority positions in the medical community at large. There are many doctors who are refusing to perform these “treatments” on children, some of whom are being sued over it. But major American medical associations are so infected with wokeness (or in some cases, a desire to make money from lifetime “repeat customers”) that they are going along with the program. We should be able to demand accountability from the unelected leaders in these fields and restore some sanity to the system.