‘Something has gone very wrong:’ Finnish psychiatrist speaks out against trans mutilation of kids
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‘Medicine, unfortunately, is not immune to dangerous groupthink that results in patient harm.’
(LifeSiteNews) — A leading adolescent psychiatrist in Finland spoke out about the popular craze of transgenderism, warning from her own professional experience that young people are being influenced by social contagion to identify as another gender, that surgical and chemical interventions are leaving kids more distressed than ever, and that pro-transgender organizations are refusing to acknowledge the facts.
In an October 30 letter published by the Free Press, Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala chronicled her own experiences and serious concerns regarding pediatric gender interventions, writing that “gender transition has gotten out of hand.”
“Medical organizations are supposed to transcend politics in favor of upholding standards that protect patients,” Kaltiala said. “When medical professionals start saying they have one answer that applies everywhere, or that they have a cure for all of life’s pains, that should be a warning to us all that something has gone very wrong.”
Kaltiala, who serves as the chief psychiatrist in the department of adolescent psychiatry at Finland’s Tampere University Hospital and has published over 230 scientific articles, according to the Free Press, detailed a “dramatic development” in adolescent psychiatry in recent decades.
She spoke of a widespread acceptance of transgender ideology, spurred in part by an influential 2011 paper by Dutch clinicians suggesting that gender-confused children (mostly boys) who were given puberty blockers “thrived as members of the opposite sex,” a report that subsequently became an international “gold standard.”
She also pointed to a simultaneous “activist movement” that declared transgender mutilation to be a “human right.”
“In response to all this, in Finland the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health wanted to create a national pediatric gender program,” she wrote in the Free Press. “The task was given to the two hospitals that already housed gender identity services for adults.”
Kaltiala became the head of her hospital’s pediatric gender program after her department opened its own program in 2011.
The Finnish psychiatrist said she “had some serious questions” about the venture. But after “a big round of discussions with bioethicists” in which she shared her concerns about the pediatric treatments, the national board on health ethics gave her hospital a statement “cautiously suggesting we undertake this new intervention.”