Transgender Dysphoria, Medicine, and True Care: Correcting an Ideological Project Gone Bad

Dr. Karine Khatchadourian is a Canadian pediatric endocrinologist. Over the past twelve years, by her own estimate, she has cared for somewhere between 250 and 300 children who say they are “transgender.”

She is the lead author on the first Canadian study, published back in 2014, of how to medically “treat” gender dysphoria in youth, i.e. to give them heavy doses of drugs to either prevent them from undergoing the normal processes of puberty or to give them synthetic hormones to trick their bodies into resembling those of the opposite sex.

Until very recently, she helped run the gender clinic at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO). She still says, on the record, that she believes in the so-called transgender “treatments” she has spent her career championing.

In April, however, she surprised her colleagues and made national news after she stood up before a public audience and effectively said that her field has lost its way. Speaking at a Canadian conference and afterward to journalist Sharon Kirkey of the National Post, Khatchadourian described the field she helped pioneer as one in “a highly consequential grey zone with contradictory findings at best.”

In other words, the science is very far from “settled,” as many pro-transgender clinicians have been claiming. And, in fact, the evidence may point the opposite direction, i.e. against “treating” many youths the way clinicians have been doing.

“I can say that, with everything I now know, as of now, I would challenge medicalizing the majority of youth that are presenting to clinics,” Khatchadourian said, according to the National Post. “I strongly believe in this care,” she continued. “But it must be approached with rigour and caution, given the high stakes in this field.”

Indeed.

Gender Dysphoria Contagion

So, what has changed for Khatchadourian? What is she seeing now that she did not see fifteen years ago, when she was at the vanguard of pro-transgender “medicine”?

She is seeing, first of all, a clinical population that bears almost no resemblance to the one for which the original “Dutch Protocol” (the cornerstone study on which the entire pediatric “transition” model was built) was developed in the early 1990s.

The original Dutch patients were a small group of biological males with persistent, early-onset dysphoria. Today, by Khatchadourian’s account, seventy percent of the children walking into gender clinics are female. Many of them carry psychiatric or neurodevelopmental diagnoses (e.g., autism, anxiety, depression, complex trauma) that complicate any attempt to read their distress as a simple “gender” question.

The explosion in non-binary identification among teenage girls, she suggests, has a great deal to do with social media and peer contagion. “We know social media and peers have greater influence during adolescence,” she said. “It’s so hard to know when you see a patient how much of this story is really that person’s story and how much is based on the influence of peers and social media.”

She argues that doctors are misusing the principle of patient autonomy to affirm whatever a confused fourteen-year-old declares about her own body. And Khatchadourian’s single greatest concern is the drug-induced irreversible loss of fertility in patients who have not yet finished growing up.

“The most challenging conversations are always around fertility,” she said. “Most of the time you’re going to hear youth say they don’t want children, they don’t want biological children, or if they do at some point, they will consider adoption. You have to ask yourself, is that a mature response? Have they really given it considerable thought? Have they truly demonstrated capacity to consent?”

For her candor, Khatchadourian was quietly removed from the leadership of CHEO’s gender clinic. As she dryly puts it: “It was deemed that my expertise would be better suited to focus on other clinical and academic responsibilities.”

Of course it was.

She Is Not Alone

As I noted in my recent column on the Brazilian persecution of Isadora Borges, the cracks in the supposed medical “consensus” behind the radical pediatric gender protocols have been multiplying for some time. What is striking now is how rapidly those cracks are widening, and how many of them are appearing in 2026 alone.

In late January, 22-year-old Fox Varian became the first American “de-transitioner” to win a malpractice case against the doctors who medically transitioned her as a minor. The court awarded her $2 million in damages from the New York surgeon and psychologist who removed her healthy breasts at sixteen. Twenty-eight similar lawsuits are now pending across the United States.

Days later, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) released new guidance cautioning against gender-transition surgeries on minors. The American Medical Association (AMA), which for years had been one of the loudest American voices proclaiming “gender-affirming care” as an essential human right, quickly followed, stating for the first time that such procedures should generally be deferred until adulthood.

In February, Baystate Health, the largest hospital system in western Massachusetts, abruptly halted prescriptions of cross-sex hormones to minors. Hospitals in California and other parts of Massachusetts followed.

In part, this was because the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) had threatened to pull Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement from any institution that continued the practice. Hospitals that until weeks earlier had been insisting that these treatments were “medically necessary, even life-saving,” folded almost overnight when the funding posture shifted.

Khatchadourian’s testimony is merely the latest and one of the most credentialed voices in a chorus that includes the Cass Review in the United Kingdom, policy reversals in Sweden, Finland, and Norway, the AMA and ASPS pivots, the Massachusetts and California hospital closures, and the de-transitioner lawsuits like Varian’s.

The times, they are a-changin’.

What the Reversals Reveal

For the past twenty years, those of us who have raised serious concerns about the pediatric “transition” industry were told, with great solemnity, that we were on the wrong side of the science. The medical establishment had spoken. The professional organizations had reached consensus.

The “right side of history” was, we were assured, perfectly clear. Anyone who questioned the safety, the wisdom, or the long-term effects of medically transitioning a child was simply ignoring expertise.

As it turns out, the “consensus” that was held over our heads as a club for so many years was never really a consensus at all. It was a manufactured one, produced by activists inside the relevant professional societies, working in coordination with media partners and political allies, while the dissenting clinicians (the ones who, like Khatchadourian, saw what was happening but were not yet ready to speak) were quietly sidelined.

What was sold to families and to the public as settled science was, on inspection, an ideological project that had captured key institutions of medicine. The science is now catching up to that fact. And the countless children who were sterilized, scarred, and abandoned by the system in the meantime will be paying the price for the rest of their lives.

The Body Is a Gift

As usual, the Catholic Church never for a moment had its head turned by this shiny new ideology that promised a new world of “freedom” for those suffering from gender dysphoria. Anchored deeply in the truth of the human person, Catholic institutions and teaching authority have continually recalled our culture to sanity – a sanity that is now beginning to reassert itself.

In November of 2025, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops promulgated the seventh edition of the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services (ERDs). Directive 28 of the new edition, building on Pope Francis’s Amoris Laetitia, states:

Creation is prior to us and must be received as a gift. … Catholic health care institutions, services, and personnel may not perform or facilitate interventions, whether surgical, hormonal, or genetic, that aim not to restore but rather to alter the fundamental order of the body in its form or function.

The Catholic response to transgenderism (gender dysphoria) is founded on the idea that the human person is a unity of body and soul. The body is not a costume or a piece of property. It is not a biological machine to be optimized through chemistry and surgery to better match a conviction in the mind. It is the gift given to us at the moment we are knit together in our mother’s womb.

It is, as Pope Francis taught in Amoris Laetitia, prior to us, and is to be received with gratitude and respected for what it is. The Catechism of the Catholic Church puts the same point in its own way: “Everyone, man and woman, should acknowledge and accept his sexual identity” (no. 2333).

What Genuine Care Looks Like

What was lost over the past two decades of increasingly intense ideological pressure, outright coercion, and publicly-fabricated “consensus” on questions related to gender, were the people suffering from the horrific pain of gender dysphoria.

They are children, teenagers, and adults whose distress is real, whose mental-health struggles are often acute, and whose families are often desperate. The Catholic claim is not that their suffering should be dismissed. It is that they deserve better than the false promises of medical “transition.”

Directive 29 of the new ERDs calls upon Catholic health care providers to “mitigate the suffering of those who experience gender incongruence or gender dysphoria.” Genuine care, care that respects the patient as a unity of body and soul, addresses the underlying conditions: depression, anxiety, autism, family fracture, the saturation of the adolescent mind by social media. It does not begin by promising what cannot be delivered. It does not end by leaving a young person sterile, scarred, and disillusioned, with no path backwards.

The Catholic Medical Association has been a leading voice for exactly this approach. Its physicians are now leading a national effort to identify clinics willing to care for de-transitioners (those young men and women who medically “transitioned,” found themselves no better off, and now need help navigating the consequences). And the CMA has urged the Department of Health and Human Services to retire the Orwellian phrase “gender-affirming care” in favor of the more accurate description: “sex-rejecting procedures.”

Hold Fast to the Truth

Unfortunately, despite the growing signs that things are changing towards sanity, the battle is far from over.

For one thing, the ideology will not retire simply because the medical evidence has crumbled beneath it. Ideologues will continue to demand, with the help of the State where it can, that the rest of us stop noticing what has now become impossible to deny.

As I noted in my recent column, this is precisely what has happened to Isadora Borges in Brazil, what happened to Jennifer Melle in England, and what is being attempted, at this very moment, against ordinary parents in our own country. This includes by recent reports, parents in Oregon who are under threat of losing custody for declining to “affirm” their teenage daughter’s claim to be a boy.

More fundamentally, even if every gender clinic in the world closed tomorrow, the deeper anthropological error that fueled this episode would remain. The notion that a human being’s body is a piece of malleable raw material, to be reshaped by the will to fit whatever inner conviction the moment produces, did not begin with gender ideology, and it will not end with it. We have seen versions of the same error before (in the contraceptive revolution, in the abortion regime, in the spread of euthanasia), and we will see it again, in new technological dress, in the years ahead.

The Catholic answer, as ever, is to proclaim the truth with courage and with love. We are bound to say plainly that the body is a gift, that men are men and women are women, that children should not be sterilized to satisfy adult ideologies, and that parents have the irreplaceable right to protect their children from those who would do them harm.

And we are bound to say it in such a way that even those who have been most wounded by these errors, even the activists most convinced of our hostility, can hear in our words not mere ideological conviction. Rather, may they hear a loving concern for the humans who are being harmed by this perverse ideology, including the most-ardent transgender activists, who are often among those who have been most deeply hurt by their mistaken beliefs.