The AAP no longer views itself as a professional organization of physicians and gatekeeper of medical knowledge, but as an agent of radical social reform.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has come under intense scrutiny of late after members and scholars exposed the organization’s politicized inner workings and the lack of standards at its flagship journal, Pediatrics. AAP leadership must also be feeling the heat as European countries begin to restrict the use of hormones to treat teenagers in distress over their bodies and as families in the U.K. look to sue the Tavistock clinic for fast-tracking their children to cross-sex hormones.
On Wednesday, AAP president Dr. Moira Szilagyi published a press release explaining why her organization has thus far been unwilling to conduct a thorough “systematic review” of the evidence for “gender-affirming care”—a gold standard review methodology which assesses the entire body of the evidence instead of cherry-picking individual studies that are often deeply flawed and unreliable. A systematic review hasn’t been necessary, Szilagyi told pediatrician members frustrated with the organization’s lack of transparency on this issue, because critics of the AAP’s current stance are operating from the false assumption that “gender-affirming care” involves “pushing medical or surgical treatments on youth.” What it really means, Szilagyi insists, is “the opposite: a holistic, collaborative, compassionate approach to care with no end goal or agenda.”
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Leor Sapir is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
This piece originally appeared in Reality's Last Stand