FRIEND OR FOE : Which best describes Dr. Laura Edwards-Leeper and Dr. Erica Anderson?

Part I - Laura Edwards-Leeper

 It was November 24, 2021, when my phone lit up with another revelation that those of us with kids caught in the gender cult thought signaled the end of gender interventions on children.  Dr. Laura Edwards-Leeper and Dr. Erica Anderson had published an op-ed in the Washington Post, entitled Mental Health Establishment is Failing Trans Kids, Gender exploratory therapy is a key step. Why aren’t therapist providing it?  The article highlighted a real mother’s story of her depressed and traumatized daughter being immediately affirmed as a transgender boy by mental health providers without any exploration. The article revealed the failures of the mental health profession, and the coercive technique of using the risk of suicide to cajole the mother to “support” the depressed teen’s demand for transition.

While I celebrated the admissions that these two prominent gender mental health providers exposing that the medical community is affirming children without much or any therapy, I would not go so far as to canonize Dr. Edwards-Leeper and Dr. Anderson. They both believe in true trans, and even worse, they believe that they possess assessment techniques to determine which child is truly transgender and which child is not. Spoiler alert: no child nor adult is transgender. It’s not possible to be born in the wrong body.  You get what you get.

Edwards-Leeper and Anderson proudly admitted in their Washington Post op-ed that:

Together, across decades of doing this work, we’ve helped hundreds of people transition their genders.

The hundreds of “people” that they are referencing are CHILDREN.

They also insulted those of us – rational humans – who want bathrooms to be sex-segregated with this little gem of a sentence:

This is an era of ugly moral panic about bathrooms, woke indoctrination and identity politics in general.

Apparently, to them, it’s moral panic to keep persons with fetishes and/or penises out of bathrooms where little girls frequent, and those of us who might recognize the danger are to be dismissed as ridiculous. 

But the coup de grâce was their admitted enthusiasm, thrill, excitement, passion, gusto, fervor, zeal, eagerness to perform secondary sex characteristic treatments on children: 

In response, we enthusiastically support the appropriate gender-affirming medical care for trans youth, and we are disgusted by the legislation trying to ban it. 

It’s been almost three years to the day that their op-ed was published.   My conflicted feelings for them lean squarely on disgust and revulsion for these two psychologists.

But as I describe the good, the bad and the ugly about them, I will let you be the judge.  Let’s start with Dr. Laura Edwards-Leeper.  Part II will discuss Dr. Anderson.

LAURA EDWARDS-LEEPER OPENED PANDORA’S BOX TO GENDER MUTILATION OF U.S. CHILDREN

Edwards-Leeper is proud that she is the birth mother of transitioning children in the United States.  Edwards-Leeper, as a young psychologist armed with her major gender accomplishment – a minor in gender studies from Lewis & Clark College - traveled to the Netherlands to learn about the emerging “Dutch Protocol” from Dr. Peggy Cohen-Kettenis and Dr. Annelou de Vries, who are truly the world’s creators of rearranging children’s bodies to appear as the opposite sex.  De Vries hypothesized that the failed outcomes for adult gender-confused patients following their secondary sex characteristic modification interventions was the result of starting the body modifications too late. De Vries’ focus was clearly on the outward appearance of the body – “passing” as the opposite sex as opposed to improvements in life, hypothesizing that the better the body mimicked the opposite sex, the better the mental health of the patient. De Vries’ transfer to a pediatric practice may have also been a factor in her shift to experiment on children.

The Dutch Protocol was birthed like most of the gender studies, with the data being teased and manipulated to reach the desired conclusion. A few examples of the selective data mining are as follows:

(1) the Protocol involved an initial deep vetting of the children by excluding any child with severe mental health issues, and any child who did not make it through the puberty blocker stage (only 70 of the first 111 children made it to that stage which ended when the child was ready for cross-sex hormones) were studied.  The study then used 70 as its data set. How the missing 41 participants (37% of the study’s original participants) fared is anyone’s guess. One might assume not well since they discontinued, or perhaps the concomitant mental health sessions resolved their gender dysphoria.  By the end of the study, there were only 55 participants left. This is a 50% attrition rate, for a study related to children who are having their non-diseased body treated with potent drugs.

(2) The study used an invalid measuring test to reach the conclusion that performing interventions on children’s secondary sex characteristics alleviated gender dysphoria. Cohen-Kettenis, de Vries and Delemarre-van de Waal’s used their self-created Utrecht Gender Dysphoria Scale, but flipped the gender dysphoria test from sex-based questions from the natal sex to the desired sex post-medicalization for the patient, making the test absurd. For example, a female was given the female gender dysphoria test that asked the patient to rate her feeling about whether she “hates menstruating because it makes [her] feel like a girl.”  Post medicalization, she was given the male version of the test, and asked to rate if she “dislikes having erections.” The results of these inscrutable tests were then used as evidence that the children’s gender dysphoria decreased.

(3) The Dutch claimed that the children’s mental health improved because of the medicalization.  But did it, really? These children were given significant mental health treatments while simultaneously undergoing medical treatments. It is not possible to determine if the mental health treatments or synthetic hormones, both or none resulted in the minor self-reported improvements. What we do know is that one of experimented on children died from complications from a vaginoplasty surgery.  A 1-in-70 chance of dying should have ended the experiment.

Changing sex is such an intriguing proposition for those with god-complexes

that their experiment on children had to be presented as a success.  Perhaps I am too harsh, but I don’t believe that the sexual-development experiments on children had anything to do with wanting to alleviate their distress and provide for a long fruitful future, because it is clear that the focus was, and continues to be, on successful mimicry of the desired gender.

Despite the egregious errors in the experimental process, psychologist Cohen-Kettenis appeared to be somewhat more cautious when it came to changing the sex-characteristics of children and adolescents, although her age restrictions were based on arbitrary factors.  They chose a minimum age of 12 for puberty blockers because at least “some cognitive and emotional maturation is desirable when starting these physical medical intervention.  Further, Dutch adolescents are legally partly competent to make a medical decision together with their parent’s consent at age 12.” (See, Annelou L. C. de Vries MD PhD & Peggy T. Cohen-Kettenis PhD,  Clinical Management of Gender Dysphoria in Children and Adolescents: The Dutch Approach, Journal of Homosexuality, 2012.) I guess “some” cognitive and emotional maturation is better than none.  For irreversible cross-sex hormones, the Dutch chose age 16 because: “withholding physical medical interventions in these cases seems more harmful to wellbeing in both adolescence and adulthood when compared to cases where physical medical interventions were provided,” and at age 16, Dutch children are considered to be able to make independent medical decisions.  

In contrast, Edwards-Leeper’s cast those age restrictions and any of the Dutch’s caution to the wind when she brought gender interventions on children to the United States.

Edwards-Leeper took all of her knowledge from the Dutch experimenters and along with her partner-in-crimes against humanity, Dr. Norman Spack, founded  the first pediatric clinic in the United States in 2007 – the Gender Management Service (GeMS) at Boston Children's Hospital (BCH). Prior to its opening, BCH saw a total of 40 patients under the age of 21 over a span of 8 years (1998-2006) or 4.5 patients a year.  Upon opening the cash-cow clinic, the numbers jumped four-fold to 57 patients annually.  If you built it, they will come.

GeMS was opened and operational 5 years before de Vries and Cohen-Kettenis published the their “diagnostic and treatment protocols” that resulted from their rigged experiment of 70 children undergoing gender interventions, but that did not stop Edwards-Leeper, because after all, she had been trained by them.

Edwards-Leeper Altered the Dutch Protocol Without Supporting Data

Under Edwards-Leeper’s leadership, GeMS decided to alter the Dutch Protocol, which to date was the only tested, albeit manipulated protocol in existence, why? Likely, because the Dutch Protocol was slow, had guardrails, and was costly.  Edwards-Leeper’s adaption would fast track younger children to become perpetual medical patients and lift the relatively stringent screening procedures of the Dutch.  She did this because if a child went through some puberty, it would be harder for the child to trick others that they are actually the opposite sex.  A side by side comparison shows just how far Edwards-Leeper deviated from the Dutch Protocol. This means that Edwards-Leeper was experimenting on children, without the patients’ knowledge that she was just speculating on the effect of the gender interventions, and proceeding without the required parameters for tracking the successes or failures.

To put this experiment on children in perspective, the United States’ gender providers have been placing children on puberty blockers for 17 years without any actual studies showing the efficacy of such treatments.  Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, who is leading the first U.S. National Institutes of Health study related to transitioning children, has refused to release the findings of the $9.7 million taxpayer-funded study because she fears the results will be weaponized by those who are against transitioning kids and will be used in court cases.  Obviously, the results are not good.  WPATH did the same thing when the results did not support their desire to subject children to gender interventions.  Clearly, transitioning children was never about alleviating distress, and always about playing with nature, and of course, justifying that its perfectly natural and normal for men to be turned on by pretending to be a female. 

Edwards-Leeper significant and untested alterations of the Dutch Model.

Dutch Protocol

1.    No medications for children under age 12 and until Tanner Stage 2; only therapy is offered over a long period of time.

2.    Cross-sex hormones available at age 16.

3.    Interview parents individually.

4.    Noted that most pre-pubescent children will stop being gender dysphoric as they age. Only about 10% persist.

5.    Explore if parents may struggle more with the child’s behavior than the child with his nonconformance. (E.g., parents worried that they have a gay child.)

6.    Evaluate the child’s cognitive level, psychosocial functioning scholastics.

7.    Explore the relationship of other mental health issues with the gender dysphoria. Gave an example where the mental health issue was primary to the gender dysphoria.

8.    Mental health issues must be stable.

9.    Explore family functioning.

10. Focus on concomitant emotional and behavior and family problems that may or may have an impact of child’s gender dysphoria.

11. Recommends that the child does not completely socially transition.

Edwards-Leeper’s Protocol

1.    Puberty blockers can be started if the child is Tanner Stage 2 or higher. Tanner Stage 2 is age 8 to 14. No age restrictions.

2.    Hormones available Tanner Stage 4 (age 11-16)

3.    Parents must be supportive. No mental health investigation.

4.    Recognition that most children’s dysphoria will resolve, but that fact is given one sentence and does not seem to have any effect on the protocol of swift medicalization.

5.    One week is sufficient for an assessment and medicalization. (57% of GeMS’ patients were medicalized within a week of their initial visit)

6.    Existing mental health issues are secondary to the gender dysphoria (e.g., they are caused by the gender dysphoria, not the other way around).

7.    Significant psychiatric diagnoses do not interfere with obtaining gender interventions; all that is needed is to meet the readiness criteria.

8.    No recommendation regarding avoiding social transition, but 89% of GeMS’ patients between 1998 and 2009 were socially transitioned.

Edwards-Leeper and her colleagues including Dr. Spack collaborated in her 2012 paper entitled,Children and Adolescents with Gender Identity Disorder Referred to a Pediatric Medical Center, which promoted gender interventions on children by again twisting data. Based on a retrospective investigation (looking at 97 patients under the age of 21 who were treated at BCH/GeMS from 1998-2009), her “observations reflect the Dutch finding that psychological functioning improves with medical intervention and suggests that the patient’s psychiatric symptoms might be secondary to a medical incongruence between mind and body, not primarily psychiatric.” Edwards-Leeper came to the conclusion predominantly by examining the medical charts of the patients that included adults, without any post-medicalization follow-up psychiatric testing, without meeting the patients (except those from the time period of 2007-2009), and no communications with the former patients.  Edwards-Leeper then leaps to another conclusory statement that the pre-existing psychiatric issues with the patients -  might, could, maybe – are not the cause of the gender confusion but due to the patient’s brain mismatch and his body.

Edwards-Leeper’s published American Academy of Pediatrics’ paper goes on to state:

“Future research is needed to understand how adolescent patients change psychologically when they attain a physical appearance similar to or indistinguishable from their affirmed gender peers after being treated with early pubertal suppression followed by cross-sex hormone therapy.”  This statement clearly demonstrates that “passing” is the paramount concern, and that the long-term consequences are anyone’s guess.

Children’s bodies are irreversibly changed and Edwards-Leeper is merely speculating that their pre-existing mental health issues are not causing the rejection of their bodies?  Future research is needed? Yet, she is transitioning children within a week of visiting the clinic? Forty-three of the 97 patients (almost 50%) had severe psychiatric diagnoses, including bipolar, pervasive developmental disorder (similar to autism), autism, posttraumatic stress disorder, eating disorder and other psychiatric issues.  Might, could, maybe, these mental health issues, many that required psychiatric hospitalizations (35/97) be the root cause of the self-rejection, instead of the other way around?

Edwards-Leeper’s and her colleagues state three times in the paper that puberty blockers are reversible but also state that if a male is not placed on them early enough he will have a lower voice, an Adam’s apple and virilization of hair follicles, all developments that will be irreversible. But she didn’t think that if a male is placed on puberty blockers, these characteristics will never materialize even if he stopped? For females, she pointed out that the puberty blockers were needed to ensure that the female grew taller.  If she stopped puberty blockers, would her bone plates re-fuse and shrink her to her natural preordained height she would have been but for the puberty blockers?

I would be remiss if I did not point out another sleight-of-hand. Edward-Leeper’s cites to the 2009 Endocrine Society’s published guidelines for treatment as gender-confused adolescents, the Dutch Protocol that she altered with no explanation, and the World Professional Association of Transgender Health’s (WPATH) standards of care version 7 as support for her work at GeMS. The Endocrine Society’s guidelines’ authors include Spack, Cohen-Kettenis, Vin Tangpricha and Walter J. Meyer who also happened to have written portions of the WPATH’s SOC-7.  This type of circular citation wizardry is legendary in the gender space.  They cite to themselves as the basis for the same unfounded conclusions in their other papers.

WPATH’s SOC-7 Committee

One final word on Edward-Leeper’s hijinks in her 2012 paper. She reports that in 2009, she further simplified and shortened the “psychological assessment” by “triaging” patients via telephone by a social worker, and relied on the patient’s referring therapist. This process streamlined the assessment procedure to speed up final approval for medicalization. She also noted that patients with more complex mental health issues were presented in 2009, but no data shows how many were turned away.

The new triage process was used to exclude 90 of the potential 229 victims that reached out to GeMS in 2009.  The reasons for the exclusion of the 90 children were because they were:

1. Too young (34)

2. Too old (11)

3. Had no insurance coverage (9)

4. Were still questioning (12)

5. Had other treatment local options (6)

6. Had travel difficulties to get to Boston (11).

A mere 12 of the 229, or 5% of the adolescents were turned down because they weren’t quite sure. None were turned down because of severe comorbid mental health issues.  None were turned down because they might just be gay. I wonder how many were ultimately not medicalized because of Edwards-Leeper’s super powers determined that they were not really trans. We now know that the some 1,000 children patients at GeMS were never tracked.  Per Dr. Amy Tishelman, who started at GeMS in 2013, she was just starting a project to track how those children are doing years later.

In case you were wondering how kids came by thinking that they must be transgender in the early years before the schools got into the game, Edwards-Leeper’s 2012 paper revealed that:

“Many of [GeMS] adolescent patients report that it was their pediatrician who first asked if they were experiencing gender-related issues, which became the springboard to counseling and further medical evaluation.”  This is why a parent should never permit their child to fill out the well-visit forms or leave their child in the exam room alone with a pediatrician. 

It was recently reported by Ben Ryan, a journalist, that when GeMS’ first opened it had a 20-hour assessment of the child, that dropped to four and then to two  before they were green-lit for the irreversible gender interventions.  (I am skeptical about the 20-hours given that 57% of the patients began medical treatment within a week per Edwards-Leeper’s 2012 paper.)  Edwards-Leeper recently expressed “shock” about the abbreviated assessment.

EDWARDS-LEEPER IS PART OF WPATH

Edwards-Leeper is one of the authors of the adolescent and children sections of WPATH’s Standard of Care 8, which at first lowered the ages for children/adolescent to get gender interventions and surgeries from the 2011 version, and then shortly after publishing completely removed all age restrictions.  Edwards-Leeper is not to be blamed for the removal as it was at Admiral Richard (Rachel) Levin’s bequest that they were removed. But Edwards-Leeper stayed silent on the fact that a layperson and extreme advocate from the UK, Susie Green who transitioned her homosexual son because her husband could not deal with a gay child, was also a contributor.  Edwards-Leeper stayed silent about the fact that the WPATH SOC-8 determined that “eunuch” is an acceptable gender identity for a child.  Just the fact that Edwards-Leeper is a member of WPATH should cause everyone to question her morality. (See, the WPATH Files.)

“EVERYONE NEEDS A LAURA”

Whenever I think about Edwards-Leeper, I hear her voice saying “Everyone needs a Laura” in my head like nails on a chalkboard.  I was in the audience at a conference in New York with many of the world’s renowned gender specialists where she spoke. Edwards-Leeper’s presentation was filled with statements that the affirmation model is too simplistic; that a complete multi-disciplinary assessment is supposed to occur and that with the right psychiatric investigation, transgender kids can be parsed out from “cis” kids. She proudly said that Dr. Spack told her that “everyone needs a Laura.”  Edwards-Leeper was implying that she is the one with the special powers to assess which child will benefit and which will be harmed by gender interventions.  Yes, special Laura knows which kids who would not have grown to be comfortable with their natural bodies if left alone.  She knows which child won’t regret having no sexual function, be infertile and have missing body parts. I asked her if she followed up with her patients that she approved for transition, and she responded, “No, there is no money for that.”  Experiments on children with no data on outcomes because of lack of money. I don’t have words.   

EDWARDS-LEEPER AND ERICA ANDERSON SUBMITTED AN AMICUS BRIEF IN SUPPORT OF THE CHALLENGE TO THE BAN ON GENDER INTERVENTIONS ON CHILDREN IN THE CASE BEFORE THE SUPREME COURT

In their brief to the Supreme Court, they state that Tennessee’s ban on gender interventions for children will have “dire consequences.”  They claim that there is “broad consensus” that access to gender interventions is appropriate while ignoring the growing number of countries outright banning or severely restricting such treatments because of the paucity of evidence of efficacy of these treatments.  Naively, they state that if only mental providers would strictly adhere to the WPATH’s standards of care – the same standards that have no age restrictions –  things would be peachy. Without any scientific basis, Edwards-Leeper and Erica Anderson claim that without the ability to alter their bodies, some children will suffer from worsening mental health symptoms, or kill themselves, because treatments are life-saving.

EDWARDS-LEEPER PROTECTS HER OWN CHILD, AND SOMETIMES OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN FROM GENDER IDEOLOGY

Edwards-Leeper is well aware of the social contagion aspect of gender identities, observing it in her hometown and practice as clusters of kids announce that they are transgender. Edwards-Leeper even told my colleague that she was called by her child’s elementary school principal for help when parents were upset about a teacher instructing children about gender identities. Edwards-Leeper stated that there was no way her child was going to have that teacher the next year.  Yet, she continues to transition children.

 I have interviewed a parent whose child was helped out of the gender cult by Edwards-Leeper in Oregon, so I suspect that she has helped other children to accept their biological sex.

To recap and summarize, Edwards-Leeper:

1.    Brought the Dutch Protocol to the United States, altered it thereby experimenting on children, has no idea of the long-term results, and opened the first pediatric gender clinic in the United States

2.    Assisted in opening the pediatric gender clinic at Randall Children’s hospital in Portland, Oregon

3.    Teaches psychology students about the wonders of transitioning children

4.    Helped transitions hundreds of children

5.    Continues to approve gender interventions on children

6.    Perpetuates the false narrative that transitioning children is “life-saving”

7.    Believes that she has the magic assessment techniques that can determine which child will remain distressed about their natural body but has no idea how many times she was wrong. 

8.    Wants children to continue to be able to have irreversible gender interventions.

On the other hand, she has boldly publicly chastised mental health providers for just rubber stamping every child for gender interventions, is willing to criticize her colleagues and has helped some adolescents resolve their gender dysphoria. 

What do you think, is Edwards-Leeper friend or foe?