For years, anyone who dared question the rush to put children on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones was branded a bigot, a transphobe, or worse. Well, a devastating new critical review published May 30 in the European Journal of Developmental Psychology just confirmed what every concerned parent already knew — three decades of research behind these procedures is riddled with errors, and the "settled science" was anything but.
Trust the science, they said. Turns out the science couldn't survive a basic fact-check.
The paper, which examined the foundational "Dutch Protocol" research from the Amsterdam University Medical Center Center of Expertise on Gender Dysphoria, concluded that "three decades of 'Dutch Protocol' research has not produced reliable evidence" for these interventions. Let that sink in. Thirty years of studies that were used to justify medically transitioning children — and the whole thing was built on quicksand.
The methodological problems uncovered are staggering. No randomized controlled trials. Selection bias from patient exclusions. No suitable comparison groups. Low follow-up rates. Confounding variables that were never properly adjusted. Measurement scales that got switched between time points. And here's the real kicker — the original mental health outcome studies started with just 70 patients, and nearly 50% had incomplete data on some outcome measures.
Seventy kids. Half the data missing. And they built an entire global medical industry on it.
The fallout is already going international. Dutch Member of Parliament Diederik van Dijk has formally questioned Netherlands Health, Welfare and Sport Minister Sophie Hermans, calling the "methodological basis" for puberty blockers "highly questionable." When even the Dutch — the country that invented this protocol — are backing away from it, you know the jig is up.
Meanwhile, researchers like Leor Sapir of the Manhattan Institute and Kathleen McDeavitt of Baylor Medicine, who authored an HHS-commissioned systematic review, along with Jay Cohn of the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, have been sounding the alarm for years. They were ignored, smeared, and marginalized. Funny how that works.
But it gets worse. The Biden administration didn't just rely on bad science — they actively weaponized it. Former Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine pushed gender-affirming care as official policy. Julie Kruse, the Administration for Children and Families senior adviser for LGBTQI+ initiatives, requested "data on why LGBTQI+ children and youth are overrepresented in child welfare" to justify an affirmation mandate in foster care regulations.
The theory they leaned on? "Family rejection" — the idea that parents who don't immediately affirm a child's gender identity are the real problem. But even UCLA social welfare professor Bianca Wilson acknowledged that "family rejection" as a theory lacks supporting data. They couldn't even get their own experts to back up the premise.
A federally funded study claimed nearly one-third of 12-to-21-year-olds in foster care identify as LGBTQ+. That statistic was used to ram through policy. Nobody stopped to ask whether the study methodology was any better than the Dutch Protocol garbage that just got exposed.
Every state that passed laws protecting kids from experimental procedures was sued. Every parent who said "wait, let's slow down" was called a monster. Every politician who raised concerns was accused of wanting children to die.
And now we know: the parents were right. The science was junk. The experts were wrong.
Somebody owes a whole lot of families an apology. Don't hold your breath waiting for it.
