edit: I dunno what I was on last night but I accidentally called the Economist a US publication, it is based in the UK. I can't edit the title unfortunately, but I've edited below. Still would like to hear from some more major news places...

I wanted to share this because I have seen nothing from other U.S. major outlets (e.g. NYT, CNN have been silent) about the Keira Bell case. This article was published in the Economist but the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, a recently-formed group of concerned medical researchers and professionals, reposted it on their website, so I linked to their version because it's free to read. Original Economist article: https://www.economist.com/international/2020/12/12/an-english-ruling-on-transgender-teens-could-have-global-repercussions

Some quotes:

Claire (not her real name), now a 19-year-old student in Florida, started on testosterone aged 14 because of a loathing for her body. (She was also deeply depressed.) “I felt it was the only option, especially with the insistence that having dysphoria meant you are irrevocably trans and thus you will probably kill yourself if you don’t transition.” Obtaining hormones was easy, she says. “They pretty much gold-stamped me through.” Then, aged 17, her dysphoria disappeared. “I felt extremely lost. I had never heard of this happening.” She came off testosterone, embraced her identity as a lesbian, and is furious. “It is the medical industry and the general social attitude towards dysphoric people that failed me.”

Arguments for providing hormones and surgery to dysphoric teenagers lean heavily on an intervention approach pioneered in the Netherlands, which has come to be known as “the Dutch protocol”. This was tested on 55 young people with early-onset dysphoria. The teenagers were treated with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and, after they turned 18, surgery. There was no control group. Instead the results of a study of the approach, published in 2014, concluded that these medical interventions were successful on the basis of psychological functioning at least one year after surgery.... Carl Heneghan, a professor at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University, wrote last year that use of the Dutch protocol amounts to an “unregulated live experiment on children”.

This right here, is honestly part of why I am nervous about going to therapy as someone who's same-sex-attracted:

Plenty of doctors fail to observe even WPATH’s guidelines. Laura Edwards-Leeper, a professor of psychology at Pacific University in Oregon who helped found America’s first transgender clinic for children and teens in Boston, says she gets many emails from parents “desperate to find a therapist who will not just blindly affirm that their child is trans”. Ideally, she said, an adolescent with gender dysphoria would have been regularly seeing a therapist, who encouraged them to explore other possible causes for their feelings and had a comprehensive psychological assessment before being put on blockers or hormones. “It is very rare that even one of these things happens,” she says.

In Australia the capital, Canberra, and the state of Queensland have outlawed “conversion therapy” in relation to sexual orientation or gender identity. So too have some American states. Canada is considering a similar law. This conflates two separate issues. Many people would say it is wrong to try to convert gay people into being straight. But the implicit definition of trans conversion therapy risks outlawing any counselling that helps children decide whether their dysphoria is permanent or a phase, and what to do about it.

Some parents in Quebec, which has its own curriculum, are also objecting. When Catherine, a consultant, asked to see the content of her six-year-old’s sex-education class, the school refused, so she made a freedom-of-information request. It turned out teachers are told that “Children can begin to explore their gender identity between the ages of 3 and 7” and that sex is “assigned” at birth rather than observed.

Johanna Olson-Kennedy of the Centre for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles says she mourns the loss of “this incredible tool” for English children. “I think there is going to be an avalanche of lawsuits,” says Dianna Kenny, recently retired professor of psychology at the University of Sydney. “But they won’t be in time to save a generation of adolescents who have been wrongly diagnosed as being trans.”

Okay, so I ended up pasting like a quarter of the article lol, but seriously!! I am so glad to see this getting press.