Evolving national guidelines for the treatment of children and adolescents with gender dysphoria: International perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
From the early years of this century, many Western countries adopted the “Dutch Protocol” as a new medical pathway for treating children and adolescents with childhood-onset gender dysphoria. On this approach, gonadotrophin-releasing hormone agonists (GnRHa) were used to suppress puberty, followed by cross-sex hormones (testosterone or oestrogen). This perspective article traces—in each of the countries where we, the authors, live and work—how the Dutch Protocol came to be incorporated into clinical practice or formally adopted into national guidelines. Over time, guidelines across different countries were progressively shaped by a rights-based approach that removed previous safeguards and increased availability of gender-reassignment medical interventions for children and adolescents. From 2010 onward, two developments raised new concerns, generating alternate perspectives and wide-ranging differences in clinical approach. Numerous countries reported an unexpected increase in adolescent-onset presentations, especially among girls. During the same period, an increasing number of individuals who had undergone gender-reassignment medical interventions as minors reported harm and regret. Worldwide, questions were raised about the safety of clinical guidelines for children and adolescents presenting with gender dysphoria. Government bodies in Finland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. state of Florida commissioned systematic reviews pertaining to hormone treatments and issued formal reports. In a parallel process, “conversion therapy” laws, passed in many countries, closed access to exploratory psychotherapy that enables exploration of gender-identity issues from a neutral therapeutic stance. Taken together, these three developments introduced evidence-based and legal considerations into the debate, resulting in tensions that remain unresolved.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".