Journal article
The Dutch protocol for juvenile transsexuals: origins and evidence
- Abstract:
- It has been a quarter of a century since Dutch clinicians proposed puberty suppression as an intervention for “juvenile transsexuals,” which became the international standard for treating gender dysphoria. This paper reviews the history of this intervention and scrutinizes the evidence adduced to support it. The intervention was justified by claims that it was reversible and that it was a tool for diagnosis, but these claims are increasingly implausible. The main evidence for the Dutch protocol came from a longitudinal study of 70 adolescents who had been subjected to puberty suppression followed by cross-sex hormones and surgery. Their outcomes shortly after surgery appeared positive, except for the one patient who died, but these findings rested on a small number of observations and incommensurable measures of gender dysphoria. A replication study conducted in Britain found no improvement. While some effects of puberty suppression have been carefully studied, such as on bone density, others have been ignored, like on sexual functioning.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 2.0MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1080/0092623X.2022.2121238
Authors
- Publisher:
- Routledge
- Journal:
- Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy More from this journal
- Volume:
- 49
- Issue:
- 4
- Pages:
- 348-368
- Publication date:
- 2022-09-19
- Acceptance date:
- 2022-08-29
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1521-0715
- ISSN:
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0092-623X
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1276349
- Local pid:
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pubs:1276349
- Deposit date:
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2022-08-29
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Michael Biggs
- Copyright date:
- 2022
- Rights statement:
- © 2022 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
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