UN Event: “Gender Affirming Care” Must End

By | 2026

UNITED NATIONS, February 13 (C-Fam) A recent UN event hosted on the sidelines of the annual UN Commission for Social Development shows that pediatric gender affirming care, including the kind promoted by the UN, is harmful to children, scientifically unsound, and out of step with international standards. Panelists asked governments to reject it.

Hosted by Concepts of Truth International and Burundi’s Mission to the UN, the event featured presentations by board-certified psychiatrist Miriam Grossman, Joseph Figliolia, a Policy Analyst specializing in gender medicine at the Manhattan Institute, and de-transitioned author and speaker Laura Perry-Smaltz.​

Dr. Grossman explained that “[t]he evidence against gender-affirming care is formidable and growing by the day” and said, “it’s deeply troubling that the United Nations pressures […] the developing world to teach that sex is assigned at birth.”

Having a track record of working with gender-distressed youth, Grossman spoke against sex-ed curricula, especially the UN-backed programs teaching kids they can transcend their biology, reject their bodies, and that “disembodiment is healthy and normal.”

Dr. Grossman called it “preposterous” that the UN will soon host a Commission on the Status of Women while at the same time including men who identify as women in their definition of womanhood.

Referring to puberty blockers as “risky experiment[s],” Dr. Grossman said, “we cannot assume, as gender-affirming care does, that [puberty] can be turned on and off synthetically without paying a price.”

Dr. Grossman explained that testosterone and estrogen intake for gender affirming care purposes exposes young people’s brains to “abnormal levels during the most critical time of growth and restructuring of their brains since the womb” and that “a girl’s body is not designed to be exposed to super high levels of testosterone.”

Joseph Figliolia argued that pediatric gender-affirming care lacks strong scientific backing. He flagged that the “original clinical rationale” for these interventions was based on the Dutch Protocol, which “is very low in the evidence hierarchy” by today’s medical standards.

Figliolia explained that the protocol is based on a study with a “very small” sample size and was developed for a population experiencing “childhood onset dysphoria” with no overlapping health issues, among other limitations. Figliolia stressed that today, it is adolescent girls who frequent clinics for gender affirming care, often with overlapping psychiatric conditions.

Figliolia said the “key players” creating the “illusion of consensus” for pediatric gender-affirming care in the U.S. are the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the U.S. Endocrine Society, and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Figliolia criticized them for reducing gender affirming care to a “civil rights problem” without paying adequate attention to medical research. He mentioned cases where they suppressed studies, cited one another’s findings, and used overlapping authors, which “artificially inflated the degree to which [pediatric gender affirming care] was an accepted practice.”

Figliolia and Dr. Grossman pointed to psychotherapy as a preferred treatment for gender distressed youth and said it has “a much more favorable risk-benefit ratio.”

Laura Perry-Smaltz, formerly identified as transgender, said it is unfortunate that “we’re not getting these kids the counseling they need; we’re giving them this band-aid solution that is going to make them feel better for a moment, but it’s not fixing the reason they don’t like themselves in the first place.”

Burundi’s Permanent Representative to the UN spoke against “subjecting children to medical treatments that permanently alter their reproductive freedoms, their present and future family stability, and compromise their health and dignity” and said, “institutions that are supposed to care and protect them must conform with the highest standards for health as established by competent authorities.”

 

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