The UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls has accused the World Health Organization of taking a “one-sided” pro-medicalising approach to trans healthcare in its development of new guidelines.
Reem Alsalem has stepped into a developing row over the composition of a recently announced WHO committee, which will work to develop the organisation’s first global guidelines on adult transgender care.
Alsalem, who has previously intervened in the debate over Scotland’s gender recognition reform bill, wrote to the WHO’s director general to say she believed the committee’s composition contained “significant unmanaged conflicts of interest”.
Most committee members had “strong, one-sided views in favour of promoting hormonal gender transition and legal recognition of self-asserted gender”, she wrote, adding that of the 21 committee members “not one appears to represent a voice of caution for medicalising youth with gender dysphoria or the protection of female-only spaces”.
Alsalem said it was a “significant omission” that the committee contained no representatives who are experts in adolescent development, as “the vast majority of individuals contacting gender-related services worldwide are now adolescents and young adults who had no prior history of gender-related distress”.
She also raised concern that the WHO’s three-week consultation period for offering feedback on the committee’s makeup had fallen over a holiday period, and ended on Monday.
The committee is due to meet in February at the WHO headquarters in Geneva to examine the proposed guidelines. Alsalem said she hoped the meeting would be postponed until all concerns over the committee had been addressed. She said she had yet to receive any response from the WHO to her letter sent on 4 January.
Source: UN envoy criticises ‘one-sided’ WHO approach to trans health guidelines | Transgender | The Guardian
Perhaps the question needs to be asked ‘who is running WHO’? Being prepared (as it appears) to weather another major protest at its conduct of ‘health’ ‘business’ after the criticisms of its approach to COVID 19, the credentials of those at the head may need enquiry – or an inquiry.