In Berlin last week, at the conference of the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine (SEGM), I interviewed Dr Zucker.
Trans rights activists, who had reportedly posted scouts outside various city hotels in the hope of finding and disrupting the meeting, issued “KNOW YOUR ENEMY” social media posts with photos of key speakers. It would have been odd to omit Dr Zucker—not because he is “transphobic”, whatever that means, but because he is a leading international authority on youth gender dysphoria.
Until 2015, when an activist smear campaign cost him his job, he ran the Toronto gender identity service which, together with the pioneering Amsterdam clinic and the London-based Tavistock gender identity development service, was a key centre for treatment before the international explosion in cases that do not fit the classic profile of gender distress.
Dr Zucker chaired the 2007-13 work group that adopted gender dysphoria as a “depathologised” successor to gender identity disorder within the diagnostic manual (DSM-5) of the American Psychiatric Association. He is a prolific researcher in the field and edits the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, which has been targeted by activists for its willingness to publish papers on the new clinical presentation described as rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) by Dr Lisa Littman. As a Toronto-based clinician, Dr Zucker sees some of these patients.
Trans euphoria: Activists reimagine rapid-onset gender dysphoria and display their work outside the Humboldt University of Berlin
Up for debate
In our September 14 interview, Dr Zucker discusses—
the attempt to cancel SEGM as a “hate group”
the shift in treatment justification from outcomes such as reduced gender dysphoria to serving patient autonomy and “embodiment goals”
the “absurdity” of ignoring treatment effectiveness in favour of autonomy
the political factor in the removal of the requirement for distress in the World Health Organisation’s ICD-11 diagnosis of gender incongruence
the dubious “destigmatisation” argument for taking gender incongruence out of the mental health chapter of the ICD
whether insurers and hospitals will be willing to finance and resource interventions that appear cosmetic
systematic reviews of the evidence base and the question of outcome measures in the underlying scientific literature
why ROGD amounts to something more than today’s variant of the Goth subculture
the predictable effect of early social transition of children, with desire for medicalisation more likely
the uncertain outlook for members of this group as they approach sexual development in jurisdictions where puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and trans surgery have been restricted
the various family dynamics of early social transition, with some parents naively going along, and others just “too into it”—keener on transition than the child itself
