"We're giving these girls mastectomies. You have to be curious about what's going on."

Podcast Transcript

This is a transcript of the latest edition of the Year Zero podcast, in which I talk with Lisa Selin Davis, Eliza Mondegreen, and Corinna Cohn about our impressions of the European Professional Association of Transgender Health conference, which we attended in April.

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Wesley Yang

We’re here to debrief about the EPATH conference. Each of us found our way inside of its walls and witnessed some pretty interesting stuff. I guess we should begin by sharing our general impressions and our recollections and what we took away from it.  Who wants to go first?

Corinna Cohn

My name is Corinna Cohn. I am a gender healthcare activist from Indianapolis, Indiana. I started the Gender Care Consumer Advocacy Network in 2019. It is a very small nonprofit. In fact, it's possible that 2023 might be the last year for it because it's so hard to keep a nonprofit going. One of the things that we've been doing is speaking with clinicians and saying that there's a gap between what the WPATH Standards of Care and how that care is actually being delivered in the field. One of the reasons that I wanted to go to EPATH is to have conversations with practitioners — to talk about what my concerns are, and especially to talk about the low quality of studies that are used to justify the provision of gender medicine to children. I also wanted to tell my story about having transitioned as a teenager in the 1990s, and what I've learned being trans over the last 30 years to see if that information is useful to anybody.