Mia Hughes: Nova Scotia ignores growing evidence against youth gender affirming care

National Post

19-05-2025

In recent years, a clear pattern has emerged in paediatric gender medicine: every country that has reviewed the evidence for interventions such as puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for adolescents has found it to be exceptionally weak, and responded by shifting towards cautious, psychotherapeutic care. In sharp contrast, Nova Scotia has just announced an expansion of its paediatric gender services to ensure that youth across the province can access these controversial medical treatments.
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So, who is getting it right? The growing list of nations that have conducted years-long investigations into their gender clinics, commissioned gold-standard systematic reviews, and ultimately acted to protect children from unproven interventions?
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Or, is it Canadian provinces like Nova Scotia — which have done none of the above, allow ideology to guide public health policy, and continue to follow the increasingly discredited World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), an activist association posing as a medical authority, known for suppressing inconvenient evidence and letting politics shape its guidelines?
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The evidence for the puberty suppression experiment has been shaky from the beginning, and the rationale highly questionable. Yet, it went largely unchallenged until 2020, when Finland became the first country to apply the brakes after a thorough review of the science. Sweden soon followed, then Norway, Denmark, and England. More recently, Brazil, Chile, Queensland, and Alberta have joined the retreat, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services just released the most scathing review to date.
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In short, every jurisdiction that has scrutinized this medical protocol has come to the same conclusion — there is no reliable proof of benefit, and the risks are too serious to allow the experiment to continue.
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For every Canadian province except Alberta to remain steadfastly committed to this treatment model as the dominos fall globally requires an extraordinary level of willful blindness. This is evident in our federal government's ongoing failure to commission an independent review of our paediatric gender clinics, and in our provincial health authorities, which continue to trust WPATH despite a deluge of revelations in recent years that the group has abandoned scientific rigour, evidence-based practice, and the Hippocratic Oath.
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Equally troubling is that most of Canada's top media outlets choose to ignore this scandal, instead acting as mouthpieces regurgitating activist misinformation. The CBC's coverage of Nova Scotia's announcement is a case in point. Written by a trans-identified reporter, Andrew Lam, the article parrots outdated ideological talking points — such as the long-debunked claim that puberty blockers are fully reversible — as if it was settled science. The piece contains no mention of the international pivot away from this medical approach. This kind of reporting helps to create the conditions for policy decisions like the coming expansion of services in Nova Scotia.