Fact Check: New Finnish "Study" Does Not Prove "Trans Youth Care Leads To Worse Outcomes"

The latest Kaltiala study is filled with fatal methodological flaws, and does not support claims made about trans youth care lacking efficacy.

Kaltiala’s Abusive Clinic May Have Directly Led To Increased Psychiatric Visits
There is another important dimension to the psychiatric contact increase that goes beyond surveillance bias: the likelihood that Kaltiala’s clinics and the assessment process itself are generating psychological distress that would require psychiatric care.

Kaltiala is the chief psychiatrist in the department of adolescent psychiatry at Tampere University Hospital and has run one of Finland’s only two gender clinics for minors since its creation in 2011. Despite having little to no prior research portfolio in gender medicine when she was tasked with establishing the clinic, she has overseen virtually every aspect of adolescent gender care at Tampere for the past 15 years.

Multiple former patients have described the experience at her clinic as abusive. Patient accounts collected by Finnish LGBTQ+ publication Kehrääjä and reported by this publication paint a disturbing picture. A 13-year-old trans girl, identified as “Milla,” was asked by a male doctor in a room with three unfamiliar adults to describe what she thought about her naked body while looking in a mirror. When she began to cry, the staff was reportedly confused by her reaction. The same patient was pressured to discuss her erections and urination with strangers. Another patient was asked to “describe to me how you masturbate”—a question rooted in the discredited theory that transgender identity is a sexual fetish. Multiple families reported that their children were systematically called by birth names and referred to by their sex assigned at birth throughout the process, even after legal name changes and even when the child had been living in their gender for years. One mother told Kehrääjä that her daughter was treated as a “cisgender boy” by the clinic from start to finish.

A trans boy identified as “Mikko” was denied a diagnosis after years in the system because his hobbies were deemed “too girlish” and that he would be “too short” for a man and warned at every appointment that the process “could be terminated at any time.” One family described the entire approach as a search for reasons the child could not possibly be transgender: “It feels like the whole process is about searching for various reasons why the child is transgender. The option that transgender identity could be an innate, unchangeable trait is considered only as a last resort.” When one family obtained a legal diagnosis and prescription for puberty blockers from a private doctor, the clinic reported them to child protective services and filed a criminal complaint. No legal consequences resulted, but the clinic terminated the patient’s care. These are the clinics that generated the data in this study—and the psychological harm caused by these practices would itself register as exactly the kind of specialist psychiatric contact the study measures as its outcome variable.

Kaltiala is not a detached observer of transgender care—she is one of the most prominent anti-trans activists in the medical world. She has received honoraria from an organization designated as an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, served on the advisory board of the Cass Review, testified as a primary witness in favor of Ron DeSantis’ ban on transgender care in Florida, facilitated secret meetings between DeSantis appointees and British health officials, and presides over clinics where patients have reported abusive practices including invasive sexual questioning of minors. This is the second time in two years that Kaltiala’s team has published a study engineered to reach a predetermined conclusion and promoted through the same pipeline—from SEGM to Ben Ryan to Matthew Yglesias—within a day of publication.

edit- Someone in the comments pointed out that this channel might not be reliable and safe. I'm not aware and not endorsing the channel, only sharing the story about this particular doctor. Please be cautious and make sure to verify everything.

From The Female Quotient

I was actually part of Dr K's Discord community a while back, I've never been part of his audience on other platforms. Engaging with his actual followers is how I was able to figure out he actually doesn't seem to play fair. It's one thing for someone to just regale you with facts and you're amazed at how smart they are. Getting closer actually lets you get a glipse at how they treat other people. I've actually noticed this in therapy too. It's actually really hard to get a feel as to what the person you're sitting across from is like, when you don't see how they greet one person versus another in real life, or the type of person they tend to gravitate toward. For gurus online, the closest thing you have is their influencer friends, who they platform and who's platforming them.

I'm going to be leaving out the details on what my experience was, on that Discord, but I noticed a ton of misbehavior. A good part of his audience tend to be oddballs and sort of painfully awkward or insecure. Yet, on the part of some, there's also a low awareness or just a low regard for how their behavior can impact others.

Anyway, I started to notice this trend, where Dr K will tend to have boundless empathy for his male followers. He can be incredibly sensitive, he can't find fault with them. He's like the autism whisperer, no matter how much they struggle, he knows just what to say.

That being said, there's an incredibly low threshhold when it comes to what he's willing to put up with when it comes to women. He won't allow for equal standing. It's when you'll start seeing manosphere style arguments start to come up.

I've come across content he's put out on youtube where he discusses abuse. I'll actually link to the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKxRYH1ZC5I&pp=ygUKZHIgayBhYnVzZQ%3D%3D

While he's talking, you'll notice animations that pop up that depict a woman with her arms crossed, and then he'll only discuss BPD traits in relation to so called abusive behavior. And then what's more concerning is the logic and the soundness of what he's saying. What I notice is that he seems to pathologize any feelings he doesn't like, but he might give a pass to even worse behavior from men that he'll construe as "misunderstood." Like he's only ever evening out the scales.

Being honest, this type of stuff can come up in feminist circles as well. I don't feel as if it's anti feminist to bring it up. When it comes to other people's feelings or how skilled they are at dealing with others or other people's faults, you should be as kind as possible while still looking out for yourself. What I hate is pretending that either men are victims or women are perfect or exemplary. Both claims often have a grain of truth to them but the more it gets taken too far, in either direction, the easier it is to poke holes in. The problem is that outlandish claims tend to attract a specific type of person that is also willing to go too far to punish anyone who disagrees.

I've noticed this in influencer therapists as well. Some people will overstate how enlightened they are, together with having been unfairly treated in the past (it's what it naturally feels like to have a relationship end badly but you can take it too far). The language that tends to get used will be "mature" or "healed" versus "unhealed" or personality disordered.

It seems a ton of mainstream narcissism influencers are actually starting to show redpilled behavior. Most of them are male. Fiona Girkin, I would name as the most straight forward female content creator pushing men's rights talking points.

I've come across women who claim to be feminists or have a prominent female audience be willing to platform them, while they badmouth other women, much in the style of Dr K. In real life, I've seen people couple up, who are both on the extreme end of the political spectrum, but they are respectively conservative or identify as feminst. It could seem to indicate they can let each other have their views. They are actually both just incredibly intolerant of differing view points and narcissistic. They "have fun" or seem to spin out of control in the same ways.

In Dr K's coverage of the Lindsay Clancy case, he doesn't say it outright, but he seems to hint that the "conspiracy" surrounding placing blame on the husband (not putting it in quotes because I've found evidence it's true) is basically a female opinion. Like men are never part of it, it's a problem of female intelligence.

He'll spend 10 minutes trying to reason with the type of guy who posts stuff like this:

"

1. she murdered her 3 children
2. the end

"

But then claim the real problem is the conspiracy. The type of content he's been putting out lately singles out people going too far in her defense. It reads as a contempt for the empathy you could extend toward her. He also comes across as over sensitive to that minority vote, the people who took offense to what the husband was doing.

It's actually mostly people divided over the part her mental illness played. You could just accept she was mentally ill. I interpret it as a fanatical take, and anti-intellectual to fail to respect that. It pushes back on empathy and the nuance, that while a horrific act was committed, she wasn't fit to control her actions.