The American medical establishment spent years insisting that puberty blockers were safe and reversible, that gender transition saved young lives, and that anyone who questioned the science was a bigot. A new peer-reviewed paper suggests the “science” used to justify the barbaric procedures was the problem all along.

According to a report from Just the News, a critical review published May 30, 2026, in the European Journal of Developmental Psychology concluded that "three decades of 'Dutch Protocol' research has not produced reliable evidence." The Dutch Protocol is the foundational framework for medically transitioning kids suffering from gender confusion.

Clinicians in the Netherlands, where they developed it in the 1990s, required long-term documented gender confusion before any transition steps. American practitioners threw those guardrails out, affirming gender confusion early and often, regardless of what other mental health conditions a child was dealing with.

This has led to the use of hormones and surgeries to “treat” confusion that typically would resolve itself on its own.

The authors of the critical review are Baylor Medicine psychiatrist Kathleen McDeavitt and Jay Cohn of the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM), both of whom contributed to the HHS-commissioned systematic review of medically transitioning minors. They wrote in direct response to a February 23 paper in the same journal, published by the Amsterdam University Medical Center's Center of Expertise on Gender Dysphoria. This institution created the Dutch Protocol, which claimed its research proved the blocker-hormone-and-surgery regimen a success.

McDeavitt and Cohn destroyed that claim.

The foundational mental health studies tracked only the first 70 patients and excluded participants along the way: those needing extended psychological evaluation, those who stopped treatment, those who developed serious health conditions, and one who died. None of the studies used randomized controlled trials. Researchers switched measurement scales between time points in the post-surgery study, undermining claims about improved body image and resolved gender dysphoria.

In other words, they were cherry-picking data and moving goalposts to achieve the result they wanted.

Prior reviewers had missed the switch, meaning they likely "underestimated the methodological problems." Other documented flaws included the lack of long-term follow-up on outcomes such as cardiovascular disease, the absence of suitable comparison groups, and failure to adjust for confounding variables.

Related: Another Huge Victory Against the Transgender Cult

"Improvements were not seen in all mental health outcome measures, and in those that did improve, the improvements were small and of unclear clinical significance," McDeavitt and Cohn wrote. The center's authors had claimed the opposite.

Manhattan Institute senior fellow Leor Sapir, another contributor to the HHS systematic review, described the paper as one that "chronicles failure of Dutch clinicians to respond scientifically and appropriately to problems of evidence from their own clinic" and "documents how the Dutch (and others) responded by shifting the rationales for treatment."

Dutch Member of Parliament Diederik van Dijk submitted 17 written questions to Health, Welfare and Sport Minister Sophie Hermans in response to the journal paper, asking whether she agrees that the "methodological basis" for giving children puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones is "highly questionable," and why the Netherlands has not followed Finland, Sweden, and the UK in pulling back such treatments for minors.

Thirty years of studies built on excluded patients and switched measurement scales. Make no mistake about it, every pillar of the case for medically transitioning children has cracks, and the people who built that case knew it. The question is whether anyone in medicine will ever be held accountable for what they did to kids in the name of science that was never there.

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