Finnish Psychiatrist Who Pioneered “Gender-Affirming” Care for Kids Now Warns of its Dangers

"We were being told to intervene in healthy, functioning bodies simply on the basis of a young person's shifting feelings about gender.”

An esteemed Finnish psychiatrist who was involved with pioneering standards for “gender-affirming” care is now warning that the push to normalize such treatments has been dangerously politicized and ignored glaring warning signs.

In a lengthy piece for The Free Press, Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala recounts her involvement with the development of the then-novel protocol for treating children who experience what is known medically as gender dysphoria in her expert field of adolescent psychiatry, the “Dutch protocol.”

She explains that the protocol was developed after Dutch clinicians published a groundbreaking paper purporting that a select group of gender dysphoric children who went on to thrive when they were “socially transitioned” and underwent medical treatments to appear as members of the opposite sex.

As chief of the adolescent psychiatry at one of Finland’s most important teaching hospitals, Tampere University Hospital, Dr. Kaltiala was tasked with establishing her hospital’s services to provide the Dutch protocol.

She explains that this came after the Finnish Ministry of Social Affairs and Health caught wind of a robust activist movement to normalize the new approach.

“Even so, I had some serious questions about all this,” Dr. Kaltiala writes. “We were being told to intervene in healthy, functioning bodies simply on the basis of a young person’s shifting feelings about gender.”

“Adolescence is a complex period in which young people are consolidating their personalities, exploring sexual feelings, and becoming independent of their parents,” she continues. “Identity achievement is the outcome of successful adolescent development, not its starting point.”

Dr. Kaltiala explains that she has personally met and evaluated over 500 patients considering transition, a majority of those minors who sought treatment from both of Finland’s gender clinics. Many do not go on to medically transition, and that number has dwindled to just twenty percent in recent years.

When the Dutch protocol services were first rolled out, the patients came in droves, but Kaltiala noticed a major red flag: many did not resemble the patients described by the Dutch researchers.

Instead of boys who insisted they were girls at a young age and had no indication of psychological illness aside from gender dysphoria as was represented by the research behind the Dutch protocol,

Meanwhile, 90 percent of the patients in the Finnish clinics were girls who had experienced mental health concerns from a young age and expressed gender dysphoria suddenly as adolescents, often following the influence of peers or LGBT activists. Many of these girls suffered eating disorders, depression, self-harm, and psychotic episodes.

“Many—many—were on the autism spectrum,” Kaltiala notes.

The impressive results that were promised with the Dutch protocol were simply not being produced.

“Soon after our hospital began offering hormonal interventions for these patients, we began to see that the miracle we had been promised was not happening,” she wrote. “What we were seeing was just the opposite.”

However, many in the medical community were afraid to speak up, as we’ve often seen in the states when any degree of skepticism is applied to this crazed movement to “transition” young children whilst completely ignoring the potential harm it could cause.

“Medicine, unfortunately, is not immune to dangerous groupthink that results in patient harm,” Dr. Kaltiala warns.