Transgender Expert Says 4 Out Of 5 Kids Who Question Their Gender ‘Grow Out Of It’

A psychiatrist, who has been in charge of youth gender transition treatments for more than a decade, has claimed that “four out of five” gender-questioning children eventually accept their bodies without needing any medical intervention.

Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala, an expert on pediatric gender medicine and chief psychiatrist of one of Finland’s two government-approved pediatric centers made the claim in an interview with a Finnish newspaper earlier this week.

Slamming the spread of ‘disinformation’ on children with gender confusion the doctor said that data from 12 separate studies all supported her claim.

The Mail Online reports: Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala previously administered gender-affirming treatment only to patients who met restrictive requirements, but after seeing a significant increase in adolescent patients in the 2010s became skeptical that treatment was the solution to the problem.

In a recent interview with the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanoma, Kaltiala laid out a number of points – including that overwhelming evidence showed the desire for gender transitions spiked among female teenage friend groups exposed to social media.

That evidence supported her assertion that far too little is known about the current wave of gender dysphoria to be administering life-altering treatments to children.

She also said physicians often weaponize parents’ fears of suicide to push treatments, calling it ‘purposeful disinformation, and spreading it is irresponsible.’

Last year, she testified before the Florida Board of Medicine and Florida Board of Osteopathic Medicine and said there was no evidence to support prescribing gender-affirming treatments for patients who experience gender dysphoria for the first time as adolescents. 

Kaltiala’s findings, used as the basis for treatment in much of Europe, are in stark contrast to the United States’ approach to gender treatment.

Kaltiala began handling youth gender transition treatments in 2011 as the chief psychiatrist of one of Finland’s two government-approved pediatric centers.

There she initially stuck to a treatment protocol which required patients to have experienced gender dysphoria before puberty and continued into adolescence. Additionally, they could not have had any serious recurring mental health issues, needed to partake in six months of psychotherapy, and have their family’s support for hormonal treatment.

After a few years however, Kaltiala found those requirements were not regulating the numbers of patients who came to her and that an increasing number of patients was seeking treatment. 

She found the majority were adolescent girls who had never experienced gender dysphoria as a child, and that 75 percent had experienced serious mental health problems before, according to Tablet.

In 2019, Kaltiala and her colleagues published an article saying there was not enough data about the gender crisis teens were experiencing to justify serious body-altering treatments.

‘Research on adolescent onset gender dysphoria is scarce, and optimal treatment options have not been established,’ she wrote. ‘The reasons for the sudden increase in treatment-seeking due to adolescent onset gender dysphoria/transgender identification are not known.’

Her findings resulted in health officials in Finland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom opening reviews of their processes for administering gender-affirming treatment.

In her recent interview Kaltiala suggested that the kind of gender-affirming treatments administered in the US were likely to solidify problems patients were experiencing, rather than treat them.

She said doing things like using children’s preferred names or pronouns could be as severe an act as altering their bodies, because it solidifies in their psyches that there is something wrong with their body.  

‘It’s a message saying that this is the right path for you,’ she said, adding that changing names and pronouns is ‘not a neutral act.’

Kaltiala also spoke out against the warning that not giving children gender-affirming treatments might lead to their suicides, which has been employed by many doctors across the US to pressure parents into approving treatment for their children.

‘It is not justified to tell the parents of young people identifying as transgender that a young person is at risk of suicide without medical treatments and that the danger can be alleviated with gender reassignment,’ she said.

She said the suicide narrative might be pushed by ‘adults who have themselves benefited from gender reassignment, have a desire to go out and save children and young children. But they lack understanding that a child is not a small adult.’