Boston doctors have criticized a controversial move by the city’s main hospital to cut in half the evaluation time for transgender children who want life-changing medical interventions.
Boston Children’s Hospital reduced the time for in-person evaluations from four to two hours, after which doctors can recommend treatments including puberty blockers and hormonal medications to children.
“In my opinion, that’s crazy,” Laura Edwards-Leeper, former senior psychologist at Boston Children’s gender clinic, told Congress. Boston Globe.
But others say the shorter evaluations were necessary because of the gender clinic’s growing caseload in recent years.
“We were able to get all the information in much less time,” clinic co-director and psychologist Kerry McGregor testified at trial, according to the Globe.
The screening policy, which was implemented in 2018, is facing new scrutiny in a discrimination lawsuit that lays bare the inner workings of the gender clinic.
Dr. Laura Edwards-Leeper (pictured), former lead psychologist at Boston Children’s gender clinic, said the two-hour assessment period is “crazy” and “worrying.”
In 2018, Boston Children’s Hospital reduced the time for in-person evaluations from four to two hours, after which doctors can recommend treatments including puberty blockers and hormonal medications to children, a new lawsuit reveals. .
The clinic’s former research director, Amy Tishelman, 68, filed the lawsuit this year, alleging that staff discriminated against her because of her sex and age before firing her in retaliation for suing them.
Boston Children’s Hospital responded by saying that Tishelman’s claims are false and that she was fired for a privacy violation. “The hospital cannot comment on ongoing litigation,” a representative told the Globe.
Tishelman’s lawsuit also highlights the in-person testing policy because she had been working on research into what the long-term impacts of shortening sessions would be when she was fired.
He claims the hospital did not have enough data on long-term outcomes to safely implement the policy, which he called “reckless.”
“Recommendations needed to go beyond a simple increase or decrease, yes or no for medication,” he said, adding that the treatments can have significant impacts on children later in life, including rendering them infertile.
The doctor said she and at least one other psychologist, Peter Hunt, did not agree to shortening the length of the tests.
McGregor confirmed at trial that the time for in-person evaluations was four hours when he entered the clinic in 2016, but was half that in 2017 or 2018.
“Some were not happy about it,” he said. ‘I thought it was appropriate.’
“To see our kind of growing patient population, it made sense to make that time more efficient,” McGregor added, according to the Globe.
‘We could also always ask for more time. …It’s pretty weird. But I could do it if I need to.’
The Supreme Court agreed to decide the legality of a Republican-backed ban in Tennessee on gender-affirming health care for transgender minors
A giant trans flag is displayed outside the Supreme Court during the Court’s previous hearing on a case dealing with LGBTQ rights. The Biden administration asked the court to take up the new case, after a lower court upheld a ban on surgeries and treatments in Tennessee.
Edwards-Leeper told the Globe that the two-hour testing time was “very concerning” because it is “simply not possible” to adequately test a child in that time.
The psychologist said she designed a protocol that would take 20 hours, including about five hours of in-person time with the patient and his parents.
Major issues over transgender care will play out on a national stage at the Supreme Court after the justices agreed to decide the legality of a Republican-backed ban on gender-affirming child care in Tennessee.
The justices accepted an appeal by Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration against a lower court’s decision upholding a ban on medical treatments including hormones and surgeries for minors suffering from gender dysphoria in Tennessee.
The court will hear the case in its next term, which began this month.
The challengers maintain that prohibiting care for transgender youth violates the guarantees of equal protection and due process of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution by discriminating against these adolescents based on their sex and their transgender status.
They add that banning care also undermines parents’ fundamental right to access and make decisions regarding their children’s health care.
Republican-led states have passed numerous similar measures in recent years targeting medications or surgical interventions for teens with gender dysphoria — the clinical diagnosis of significant distress that can result from an incongruence between a person’s gender identity and sex. that was assigned to him at birth.