203 - Gender Clinicians Should Take the Family's Input Into Account, with Marieke den Ouden

Gender: A Wider Lens

Sasha Ayad and Stella O'Malley

Health & Fitness, Society & Culture, Mental Health

4.6 • 961 Ratings

🗓️ 31 January 2025

⏱️ 69 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sasha and Stella welcome Dr. Marieke den Ouden, a medical biologist and psychologist, about pediatric gender medicine in the Netherlands. While the Dutch Protocol is believed to ensure thorough mental health evaluations, Marieke reveals inconsistencies in its application. She discusses a new survey gathering input from extended family on a child’s mental health and gender identity, raising questions about bias in reporting.

The conversation also explores the clinical foundations of gender medicine, examining how early researchers with backgrounds in disorders of sexual development (DSDs) shaped the field. Their search for a biological basis of gender identity—whether in hormones, chromosomes, or brain structures—led to a medicalized approach to gender distress. This framing has contributed to the widespread push for medical interventions, fast-tracking youth into irreversible treatments despite a lack of clear biological justification.

This episode presents fresh debates and critical insights into the ethical dilemmas surrounding pediatric gender transition and the protocols involved.

For links and resources relevant to this episode, access the full show notes at https://www.widerlenspod.com/p/episode-203

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Stella O'Malley, a psychotherapist in Ireland.
0:04.0	And I'm Sasha Ayyad, an adolescent therapist in the United States.
0:08.0	And this is Gender, a Wider Lens, a podcast dedicated to the shifting concepts around gender in our contemporary culture.
0:16.0	Through in-depth interviews, personal stories, and psychological exploration, we seek to open up the discourse
0:22.7	around this hot-button issue. Join us as we look at gender from a wider lens.
0:31.9	Hi, Stella. How is Sasha these days? Sasha as well. I'll speak about her in the third person.
0:40.6	This interview was very interesting because as you mentioned, we have interviewed people
0:47.5	from the Netherlands a few times. And of course, anyone following this whole pediatric
0:51.8	gender transition thing knows that the Dutch protocol was,
0:56.7	you know, the name of the first basically protocol where children were put on puberty
1:03.5	blockers and then given cross-sex hormones and surgery in the Netherlands.
1:08.1	And today we talk to Marika Danaudoudin, who explains that in her country,
1:15.2	even the Dutch protocol, which is often seen as this rigorous, very careful, excluding mental
1:22.0	health issues before medicalizing kids, even the Dutch are not following the Dutch protocol.
1:27.3	So this is what we get into
1:28.5	today with kind of an update about what's going on in the Netherlands. Yeah, because we already
1:34.4	interviewed Steenswendovries back in the Pioneers. And then we also interviewed, you know,
1:39.1	journalists and sociologists from the Netherlands and Teresius, who was a detransitioner. And each time the news was
1:46.5	fairly grim from the Netherlands. It was like not good. So this idea that they were, you know,
1:51.4	following this strict protocol and that it was the only problem in the USA was that they were
1:55.8	following the actual protocol. It's like, well, not according to the interviews we've done,
2:02.3	not according to the fact when you actually go to speak to the people who are actually impacted,
	...

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