A Finnish psychiatrist found 90 percent of patients were girls with other conditions
Jo Coburn said:
“The chief psychiatrist in Finland who was pioneering, um, hormone treatment for patients, but then over time discovered, as she has written in a lengthy piece, that actually the majority, I think 90 percent she said, of the patients that were coming to her were young girls between the ages of 15 and 17, who were asking to change their gender... but they also were suffering from a range of other conditions that spread from autism to anorexia and depression. And she became very concerned and concluded that they were the main issues and actually changing gender wasn't going to solve it.”
A clinician who pioneered a treatment and then changed her mind based on her own patient data is a compelling narrative. The specific detail of 90 percent and the list of co-occurring conditions makes it sound precise and evidence-based.
Riittakerttu Kaltiala is a real clinician who has published real concerns, and the demographic shift in referrals she documents is genuinely worth understanding. What the claim skips over is the step between observation and conclusion: that a young person has autism, or depression, or anorexia alongside gender dysphoria does not mean the gender dysphoria is not also real, and it certainly does not mean that treating it will leave everything else unchanged for the worse. The clinical literature across multiple countries and thousands of patients shows that addressing gender dysphoria tends to improve overall mental health, not compete with it. Building a policy that denies care to any trans adolescent with a co-occurring condition, on the basis of one clinician's interpretation of her own cohort, means the most vulnerable young people, the ones whose lives are already hardest, are the first to lose access to the one thing that is most likely to help.
What I said at the time:
“I think we need to be very careful that we're not going on 1 person's view.”
Trans adolescents with co-occurring mental health conditions who may be denied gender-affirming care on the basis that their other diagnoses disqualify them.