Dr. J. Edward Les: The Canadian Medical Association's inexplicable stance on pediatric gender medicine
Late last month, the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) announced that it, along with three Alberta doctors, had filed a constitutional challenge to Alberta's Bill 26 'to protect the relationship between patients, their families and doctors when it comes to making treatment decisions.'
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Bill 26, which became law last December, prohibits doctors in the province from prescribing puberty blockers and hormone therapies for those under 16; it also bans doctors from performing gender-reassignment surgeries on minors (those under 18).
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The unprecedented CMA action follows its strongly worded response in February 2024 to Alberta's (at the time) proposed legislation:
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'The CMA is deeply concerned about any government proposal that restricts access to evidence-based medical care, including the Alberta government's proposed restrictions on gender-affirming treatments for pediatric transgender patients.'
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But here's the problem with that statement, and with the CMA's position: the evidence supporting the 'gender affirmation' model of care — which propels minors onto puberty blockers, cross-gender hormones, and in some cases, surgery — is essentially non-existent. That's why the United Kingdom's Conservative government, in the aftermath of the exhaustive four-year-long Cass Review, which laid bare the lack of evidence for that model, and which shone a light on the deeply troubling potential for the model's irreversible harm to youth, initiated a temporary ban on puberty blockers — a ban made permanent last December by the subsequent Labour government. And that's why other European jurisdictions like Finland and Sweden, after reviews of gender affirming care practices in their countries, have similarly slammed the brakes on the administration of puberty blockers and cross-gender hormones to minors.
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It's not only the Europeans who have raised concerns. The alarm bells are ringing loudly within our own borders: earlier this year, a group at McMaster University, headed by none other than Dr. Gordon Guyatt, one of the founding gurus of the 'evidence-based care' construct that rightfully underpins modern medical practice, issued a pair of exhaustive systematic reviews and meta analyses that cast grave doubts on the wisdom of prescribing these drugs to youth.
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And yet, the CMA purports to be 'deeply concerned about any government proposal that restricts access to evidence-based medical care,' which begs the obvious question: Where, exactly, is the evidence for the benefits of the 'gender affirming' model of care? The answer is that it's scant at best. Worse, the evidence that does exist, points, on balance, to infliction of harm, rather than provision of benefit.
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