The tyranny of the transgender lobby is ending. The days when attacks on doctors, psychologists, clinicians, researchers, and others would automatically lead to the ending of a career are gone.
Dissension has entered the transgender debate. And not a moment too soon.
First came the Cass Review in Great Britain. The Cass Review, published in April 2024 by Dr. Hilary Cass, is an independent review of NHS England gender identity services for children and young people. It found "remarkably weak" evidence for medical interventions like puberty blockers and hormone treatments.
Then, in 2025, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services followed with its own stunning critique of treating gender dysphoria in children. Various medical societies followed with their recommendations that went against the ever-shrinking "consensus" on kids getting puberty blockers and other drugs to "treat" their condition.
Most recently, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons dramatically changed its policies on surgery on children to treat gender dysphoria.
But the American Medical Association and other major medical societies have yet to recommend against giving gender confused kids drugs and remain in favor of a "transition" regimen for gender dysphoria. That "transition" includes giving puberty blockers to kids, changing pronouns, and keeping parents in the dark about their child's "transition."
But "adolescence is always a period of profound biological upheaval — when hormones reshape the body and recalibrate mood and desire," writes Racket News' Rav Arora.
"For many kids, the solution is simply helping them grow up."
No drugs. No surgery. Intensive, individual psychotherapy, done in a clinical setting. Not exactly revolutionary unless you consider that it's a "science-based approach."
Kenneth Zucker, a clinical psychologist, "has resisted orthodoxy and taken a science-based approach to treating gender dysphoria for more than four decades at the largest mental health center in Canada," writes Arora.
That approach involves alleviating the distress these kids feel rather than assuming they're automatically "trapped in the wrong body."
“If the goal is to reduce gender dysphoria, there are many possible ways. For some kids it may involve social transition… but for other kids, that’s not the case,” said Zucker.
He calls his model “exploratory” or “developmentally informed” psychotherapy. It takes into account a kid’s biology, family, personality, life experiences, and social world.
The point is not to force an outcome. It is to explore hypotheses — before intervening irreversibly.
And unlike gender clinics that dispense hormones with few follow-up questions, Zucker’s practice does not use a one-size-fits-all style.
“One could say we were eclectic,” he said. “We would develop a treatment plan that took into account what a particular child or adolescent might most benefit from.”
“Kids who are more introspective and able to reflect on things, maybe they would benefit from a more open-ended psychotherapeutic approach,” he continued.
Others were “more concrete” and dealing with “many day-to-day crises,” in which case treatment would focus more directly on helping them manage these challenges, he said.
Unlike most gender clinics, Zucker's individualized assessments take into account the numerous co-morbidities that almost all gender dysphoric kids suffer from. Depression, anxiety disorders, and obsessive-compulsive symptoms are "overrepresented" in gender dysphoric children. The goal is to treat the whole child, not just the gender dysphoria.
“A gender-affirming clinician might say, well, all of these other problems are simply secondary to the gender dysphoria,” Zucker said. “They’re depressed because they have gender dysphoria. They’re depressed because kids are teasing them because of their gender dysphoria.”
That's not true in most cases.
Under an archaic worldview, a boy who likes dolls, fashion, or reading often gets interpreted as “really” being a girl. A tomboy who prefers rough-and-tumble play gets nudged toward identifying as a boy. The model collapses personality into sex — and in doing so, relies on exactly the crude gender stereotypes that liberal culture has spent 50 years trying to retire.
“Kids can be pretty black and white when it comes to gender when they’re quite young,” Zucker said.
One 12-year-old boy wanted to be a girl because he didn’t like to sweat. He believed that “only boys perspired, girls didn’t.” The same child thought “girls like to read but boys don’t.” Zucker called these “clear distortions.”
He persuaded the child that there are some girls who do sweat and there are some boys who do like to read.
Some data suggest that kids who are treated with this intensive psychotherapy approach have between a 63% and a 73% likelihood of gender dysphoria “desistance." That's a term that "refers to kids recovering from the condition after puberty." Zucker's own stats on recovery are even better.
“In our own follow-up in Toronto, the desistance rate was 88 percent for both girls and boys,” he said. Zucker's peer-reviewed study was published in 2021.
"In other words, gender dysphoria appeared to be a mostly temporary phenomenon confined to adolescence, rather than one which persists for decades post-pubescence," writes Arora. (My emphasis).
This isn't revolutionary. The evidence has been suppressed for perhaps two decades. Bringing it out in the open will help parents of gender distressed children make informed decisions about treatment and end the tyranny of politically-motivated activists.
Related: Women Are Playing Football, and The World Hasn't Ended. Yet.
