Last week, the New York Times released a six-part podcast on youth gender medicine called The Protocol. The name hails from the regimen developed by Dutch clinicians in the early Nineties: rigorous evaluation of young people suffering from gender dysphoria, followed by puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and procedures we once referred to as “sex-change surgeries”. The show promises to tell us how the Dutch protocol came to America and turned into a political battlefield. Alas, they didn’t quite succeed.

We hear about and from patient zero, a hard-core tomboy known as FG, and another early patient, both of whom are doing relatively well in adulthood. They seem happy enough, if forced to grapple with the decisions they made at a young age to forgo their fertility and live the rest of their lives medicalised.

We hear about how hard it was to implement the Dutch protocol in America, when the first US paediatric gender clinic, the Gender Management Service (GeMS), opened in Boston in 2007. After all, its part-time psychologist, Dr. Laura Edwards-Leeper, spent but a week in the Netherlands learning how to assess kids, to weed out those who might be suffering from other problems like internalised homophobia or trauma after sexual assault — both associated with distress over one’s sexed body.

The Protocol does a good job showing how the US ended up with the “gender-affirming” model. It reflects an unregulated medical system and a generation of clinicians who treated transition as a human right. This explains how doctors like Johanna Olson-Kennedy insisted children knew their gender, and clinicians should simply help modify their bodies to match. Any attempt to limit these interventions was dismissed as a form of “gatekeeping”. This, people like Olson-Kennedy disingenuously claim, increases children’s risk of suicide.

But this series fails to give a truly honest account of gender medicine in some basic and crucial ways. Episode four focuses on Jamie Reed, who blew the whistle on the Washington University paediatric gender clinic where she worked. Reed (who was married to a trans man at the time) saw patients seeking mastectomies, oestrogen, or blockers change drastically — without proper evaluation.

The series finds Reed — full disclosure, my podcast mate — eventually working with Republicans, testifying in favour of banning gender-affirming care for youth. And that, according to the series, is how we came to be fighting over it. They ignored Republicans who drafted the bills, and liberals, feminists, and gay people who supported them behind the scenes or Democrats who blocked detransitioner provisions. Though Olson-Kennedy, who is married to a trans man herself, is clearly portrayed as a version of a bad guy — someone doing the wrong version of the right thing — it’s Reed who becomes her foil.

But it’s not Jamie Reed versus Olson-Kennedy. It’s the affirming model versus those who’ve been hurt by it, namely detransitioners, who went through these medical procedures and realised that they had been both emotionally and physically harmed. There is nary a peep from one of them, even though there are a dozen lawsuits percolating from this very cohort, and a subreddit with thousands of them. They aren’t hard to find. They don’t mention that Reed’s trans spouse has since detransitioned.

We’re left to believe that Republicans have taken on this topic because they hate trans kids, and will hurt the ones who truly need the treatment, like the Dutch kids. We let a few rogue clinicians ruin the good work of the careful ones.

But that framing fails to interrogate so much about the “true trans” narrative, including that the majority of those early Dutch patients were same-sex attracted, and that the initial impetus for transitioning them before puberty started was so they could “pass” as the opposite sex. In other words, it made gay, gender nonconforming young people into straight, gender conforming adults.

Most importantly that framing fails to acknowledge the primary reason we’re battling the issue in the courts: because Democrats and liberals (the political side I see myself on) have covered their ears and eyes, leaving those who’ve seen the harms done no choice but to turn to Republicans and ask for their help. Republicans have welcomed disillusioned trans-critical gays, Leftists, and feminists into the fold. The Protocol never quite reaches the conclusion that we are fighting over it because Democrats left a vacuum, which Republicans filled.

Over the past decade, the New York Times has failed to fill that vacuum with accurate reporting, giving readers and listeners the false impression that this is a Left versus Right story, when it is about belief versus science — and that Republicans are more aligned with the science. Alas, The Protocol shows that not enough has changed.

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Lisa Selin Davis is the author of Tomboy. She writes at Broadview on Substack.

LisaSelinDavis

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