Canada’s “mainstream media” plays a direct role in promoting positive perceptions of medical gender transitions, despite evidence that the practice adversely affects the lives and health of young people, a new report suggests.
Most of the largest media outlets in Canada portray these interventions as “gender-affirming care” that is evidence-based, medically essential, and life-saving when they can actually take a heavy physical and emotional toll on youth, according to a report from Ottawa think tank the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI).
The report is authored by Mia Hughes, an MLI senior fellow who specializes in pediatric gender medicine, psychiatric epidemics, and the intersection of trans rights and women’s rights.
Hughes said the mass media depict paediatric gender medicine as a straightforward issue, despite its potential to negatively affect fertility, sexual function, and bone density, harm bodily systems, and lead to the removal of healthy organs.
“There are medical professionals ignoring basic ethical principles, activists influencing policy under the guise of science, and victims being vilified and silenced. All this should prove irresistible to the inquisitive journalistic mind,” Hughes wrote.
“Canada’s mainstream media has opted to ignore the story and instead act as a mouthpiece for extremist trans activists, uncritically echoing their talking points.”
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Few media outlets have questioned the claims of the trans activist lobby and have instead spread inaccuracies to the public, she said.
One of those inaccuracies is that puberty blockers are fully reversible, Hughes wrote, pointing to studies that show that blocking puberty also blocks the potential natural cure of outgrowing gender-related distress.
Between 63 percent and 98 percent of young people outgrow gender confusion during puberty, studies have found. Among youth who take puberty blockers, however, nearly all move on to irreversible cross-sex hormone treatment.
“The explanation for this striking reversal of persistence rates is that the cognitive and sexual development that occurs during puberty naturally resolves gender dysphoria in most cases,” Hughes said.
Studies that challenge activist assertions are largely ignored by the media, including those that debunk the “transition-or-suicide” narrative that describes medical intervention as “life-saving care,” Hughes said.
“The truth is the transition-or-suicide claim rests on exceptionally flimsy scientific evidence,” she said. “All systematic reviews to date have found no good quality evidence to support the transition-or-suicide narrative.”
Studies that suggest a link between transition and suicide are skewed because of the high incidence of concurrent mental health issues in youth with gender dysphoria, she added, noting that completed suicide among this population is a rarity.
Both the Cass Report, an independent review commissioned by the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) in 2020, and a study released in Finland last year, reached the same conclusion as Hughes.
The Canadian Medical Association has opposed measures by governments in Canada to restrict gender transition for children.
“Exploring and determining one’s sexual orientation and gender identity is part of normal childhood and adolescent development,” the organization’s president Dr. Kathleen Ross says.
“There is no one-size-fits-all approach to treating patients experiencing gender dysphoria. An approach that restricts the most appropriate care options for some patients has the potential to cause permanent harm.”
‘Significant Regret’
Hughes said a prevalent misconception propagated by many news organizations is the claim that only a small fraction of people express regret after undergoing these hormonal and surgical interventions when there is actually “significant regret among this cohort.”
Hughes pointed to an article produced for children that said only 1 percent of patients who received gender-transition surgery regretted doing so. She said the media outlet used a study that is widely criticized for having “exceptionally low standards” as its source.
The problem is not just that media outlets repeat what activists say without further scrutiny, but that they have “misplaced trust” in activist groups that masquerade as credible organizations.
Media Impact
One-sided coverage of medical transitioning among youth can pose significant risks to families because it perpetuates the unfounded belief that certain children are predisposed to being transgender, Hughes said.
Such articles and news reports reinforce this concept within the public’s awareness, promoting the trend of adolescents identifying as transgender and persuading parents that the transition process is safe, she said.
Hughes is calling on the media to both scrutinize the “harms” being committed by the medical field and to give skeptics and victims of the process a voice.
“To the average person, it seems impossible that an entire medical field could be hijacked by an unscientific and irrational ideology,” she said.
“It sounds like a wild conspiracy theory. Yet every word is true.”
