Ensuring Comprehensive Care and Support for Transgender and Gender-Diverse Children and Adolescents.

Published By: The American Academy of Pediatrics. September 17, 2018.

“Supportive involvement of parents and family is associated with better mental and physical health outcomes. Gender affirmation among adolescents with gender dysphoria often reduces the emphasis on gender in their lives, allowing them to attend to other developmental tasks, such as academic success, relationship building, and future-oriented planning. Most protocols for gender-affirming interventions incorporate World Professional Association of Transgender Health and Endocrine Society recommendations and include ≥1 of the following elements:

“Social Affirmation: This is a reversible intervention in which children and adolescents express partially or completely in their asserted gender identity by adapting hairstyle, clothing, pronouns, name, etc. Children who identify as transgender and socially affirm and are supported in their asserted gender show no increase in depression and only minimal (clinically insignificant) increases in anxiety compared with age-matched averages…

“Legal Affirmation: Elements of a social affirmation, such as a name and gender marker, become official on legal documents, such as birth certificates, passports, identification cards, school documents, etc…

“Medical Affirmation: This is the process of using cross-sex hormones to allow adolescents who have initiated puberty to develop secondary sex characteristics of the opposite biological sex…

“Surgical Affirmation: Surgical approaches may be used to feminize or masculinize features… These changes are irreversible. Although current protocols typically reserve surgical interventions for adults, they are occasionally pursued during adolescence on a case-by-case basis, considering the necessity and benefit to the adolescent’s overall health…”

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/…/09/13/peds.2018-2162