This article originally appeared in the National Post.
By Mia Hughes, May 20, 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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
To cap things off, Justin Trudeau-appointed Senator Kristopher Wells publicly amplified Lam’s piece on the social media platform X, praising Nova Scotia’s action as “an excellent example of inclusive and affirming healthcare that should be implemented across Canada,” illustrating just how deeply trans activism has permeated the higher levels of Canadian society.
It bears repeating that at the centre of this medical misadventure, there are healthy young people being subjected to irreversible interventions based solely on self-declared identities without consideration for the latest reviews raising the alarm about these clinical practices. These interventions impede natural adolescent development and come with risks such as lifelong infertility, impaired sexual function, and bone density issues.
At this point, strong leadership is urgently needed to shake Canada out of its stupor. Supporters of youth gender medicine often claim that the government has no place interfering in the doctor–patient relationship, and in an ideal world, that would be true.
However, the field of gender medicine has not only failed to regulate itself; it has refused to self-correct, even as the harm becomes undeniable. A group of Canadian doctors recently issued a public statement condemning their profession’s handling of this crisis. The responsibility now falls to our governments to act to protect young people from a medical world that remains impervious to evidence and reason.
A well-known joke provides the perfect analogy for Canada’s current approach to this unfolding scandal. A woman hears on the news that a lunatic is driving the wrong way down the highway and calls her husband to warn him. “One?” he shouts. “There are hundreds!” That is Canada — barreling headlong in the wrong direction, drunk on a dangerous cocktail of wilful ignorance, progressive ideals, and ideological fervour — somehow convinced every other nation is mistaken.
It is unclear how long we can keep this up, but one thing is certain: when we’re sifting through the inevitable wreckage of this calamity, no one will be able to say we weren’t warned.
Mia Hughes specializes in researching pediatric gender medicine, psychiatric epidemics, social contagion and the intersection of trans rights and women’s rights. She is the author of “The WPATH Files” and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
