One bastion of the mainstream media reported that there is "reason to worry" about gender-transition treatments such as puberty blockers.
In an opinion column on Sunday, The Washington Post's editorial board used the Biden administration's recent challenge to a Tennessee law, which bans the use of puberty blockers and hormones in minors, to address gender-transition treatments.
"The court's decision will be consequential in the 24 states with these restrictions, but it won't resolve the crux of the debate over pediatric gender medicine: whether, as the plaintiffs argued, the treatments can be lifesaving or, as some global health authorities have determined, the evidence is too thin to conclude that they are beneficial and the risks are not well-understood," the Post's editorial board wrote.
"This unresolved dispute is why Tennessee has a colorable claim before the court; it would be ludicrous to suggest that patients have a civil right to be harmed by ineffective medical interventions — and, likewise, unconscionable for Tennessee to deny a treatment that improves patient lives, even if the state did so with majestic impartiality. The issue is subject to legal dispute in part because the medical questions have not been properly resolved."
The board cited European health authorities who have reviewed available evidence regarding treatments and concluded results showed "very low certainty" and are "lacking" and "limited by methodological weaknesses."
The board also mentioned that Britain last week banned the use of puberty blockers indefinitely due to safety concerns.
"The uncertainty is the result of scientists' failure to study these treatments slowly and systematically as they developed them," the board wrote. "Early studies from a Dutch clinic seemed to show promising results, but the research started with only 70 patients (dropping to 55 in a follow-up study) and no control group. Treatment results that look impressive in small groups often vanish when larger groups are studied. That's why the Food and Drug Administration generally requires large, randomized controlled trials of drugs: to ensure that encouraging initial results aren't mere statistical noise."
Republican lawmakers are investigating a National Institutes of Health-funded study on transgender children. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, medical director of the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children's Hospital of Los Angeles, told The New York Times that results from that study hadn't been published because more time was needed to ensure the research wouldn't be politically "weaponized."
GOP Senators recently wrote NIH Director Monica Bertagnolli to request annual progress reports on the project in which scientists administered puberty blockers to children to study the physical and psychosocial impact of the drugs.
House Republicans began an investigation regarding the attempts of Olson-Kennedy to suppress the results from the study.
"Medical progress is impossible unless null or negative results are published as promptly as positive ones," the Post's editorial board wrote.
"No matter how the court rules, though, the federal government should supply the missing evidence at the heart of this dispute."