While in recent years the UK has come to recognise the harms that trans interventions have done to children and young adults, and some countries are finally enforcing age limits and abandoning the myth of “reversible puberty blockers” and “life-saving treatments” for troubled youth, the lure and profit of trans youth medicine across Europe, and particularly in the German-speaking world, is only just picking up.
Pride Month seems to be a particularly well-suited vehicle for their PR campaigns, as both media and politics appear to have traded their minds for progress flags and rainbow lanyards to pre-party with the drag queens.
Here’s a shocking example from Austria about the state of “trans medicine”.
Prepare for the worst.
Picture Britain, 2015.
In the past days, timed perfectly to coincide with the beginning of Pride Month on 1 June, we've seen a scandal in reporting that reveals the mindset behind the current state of "trans medicine" in Austria, with its influence extending well into neighbouring regions of Germany and Switzerland.:
The “Transgender Center Innsbruck” - led by EPATH Speaker Dr Katharina Feil - claims to be reaching its limits and is using the annual Pride bacchanalia for their activist marketing and PR, which the media, right up to Austria’s public broadcaster ORF, has largely reproduced without criticism. Notably, none of the outrageous, harmful and misleading claims presented with the authority of medical experts were challenged.
This is particularly striking given that one of Dr Feil’s colleagues at the clinic, Dr André Leonhardt, whose research focuses on adolescent gender dysphoria, is meanwhile a welcome speaker at both SEGM conferences and the upcoming IACAPAP World Congress. IACAPAP, the International Association for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Allied Professions, is one of the world’s leading professional organisations in the field of child and adolescent mental health.
The strategy appears successful: positioning oneself as the reasonable middle ground, embedded within the scientific community, willing to discuss evidence and research findings across competing perspectives.
Parents, meanwhile, are left struggling to survive the avalanche unleashed on their families by the combined force of media narratives, political advocacy, activist medicine and ideological research.
Coincidentally, the Austrian province of Tyrol, where the Transgender Center Innsbruck is based, is also home to major operations of Sandoz. one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies and a self-described global leader in generic and biosimilar medicines. Sandoz - Stonewall Top Global Silver Employer 2025 - has its own "lived experience" stories to showcase, including a brave and beautiful trans-identified manager who now speaks at conferences and corporate events about diversity, equity and inclusion and whose personal journey features prominently in the company's diversity and inclusion messaging.
Last October, Sandoz proudly hosted the first “Gender Affirming Care” networking meeting for “Transgender Healthcare Professionals” to strengthen structured collaboration in the provision of transgender healthcare, with representatives from gynaecology, urology, plastic surgery, psychiatry, psychology and psychotherapy (for both children and adolescents as well as adults), internal medicine, paediatrics, endocrinology, general practice, counselling and sociology. This resulted in the establishment of an interdisciplinary DACH-wide network to improve cooperation between hospitals and community-based providers. Their first conference took place in March this year, with presentations covering topics such as "Surgical sex reassignment for trans men from the perspective of plastic surgery: from chest surgery to phallus construction"and "Masculinising genital surgery." Nothing out of the ordinary at all. The organisers applied for eight official continuing medical education credits, positioning the event as accredited professional training for physicians.
The inaugural network meeting was led by Tirol Kliniken and the director of the Transgender Center Innsbruck, Dr Katharina Feil. Tirol Kliniken is not a private clinic operator. It is the public hospital network of the Austrian province of Tyrol, owned by the State of Tyrol and responsible for the operation of the region’s public hospitals. This is not merely activist networking on the margins of healthcare but within publicly funded institutions and with public resources.
Always present, of course, is Courage, Austria's largest and institutionally embedded LGBTIQ+ counselling organisation, which specialises in gender identity, runs programmes for trans-identified children and adolescents and promotes gender-affirming approaches.
A remarkably coherent picture of the ecosystem surrounding contemporary transgender medicine. Suddenly, much of it begins to make sense.
Here is the narrative that the Transgender Center is trying to spin. The media, meanwhile, appears entirely out of its depth when it comes to scrutinising their claims.
Notably, none of the outrageous, harmful and misleading claims presented with the authority of medical experts were challenged. Nor was there any attempt to scrutinise statements that place parents of trans-identified children under immense pressure and burden them with the fear that failing to affirm a child’s stated identity may have catastrophic consequences.
The Transgender Centre reports that its capacity is stretched with around 900 patients. According to its own figures, roughly one third of them are minors (!) receiving treatment there.
→ Minors are treated at the Centre with puberty blockers, which, contrary to the evidence, are described as reversible. This is misinformation directed at parents and affected children, with serious consequences. Puberty cannot simply be put on pause. Puberty blockers are usually followed by cross-sex hormones. The consequences are far-reaching, significant and well documented.
→ The clinic alleges that the rate of detransitioners lies between 1 and 3 per cent. There is no evidence for this figure. They do not conduct comprehensive long-term follow-up (10 to 15 years). In addition, they ignore the lack of medical and psychosocial support for detransitioners, as well as the considerable challenges associated with advanced physical changes, such as the masculinisation of women.
→ The clinic cites social media as the reason why it is seeing more cases today. Yet instead of analysing this through the obvious lens of peer groups, social influence and idealisation through social media, it promotes a narrative according to which people are simply coming to realise earlier that they might “fit better into a non-binary setting”. What is completely ignored is that this phenomenon is not evenly distributed across all age groups. Those most affected are adolescents, particularly girls. That this reality is entirely overlooked from a medical perspective and in clinical practice is astonishing.
Our first concern should be for young people who are in a vulnerable stage of life and who, in the vast majority of cases, live with significant comorbidities, ranging from eating disorders and depression to autism, and who come to believe through social media that transition is the solution to their problems. The clinic also appears to have no interest whatsoever in analysing the developments of recent decades, during which trans identification was not a phenomenon at all among adolescents or women.
→ Waiting times do not appear to deter pubescent young people from seeking treatment either. Especially not when they are supported during this period through “gender-affirming therapy”. The very form of therapy that Austria’s Social Democrats and Greens want to make the only permissible approach. In reality, it is already difficult enough to find a therapist who is not ideologically driven on this issue and who does not automatically affirm “trans children” or “trans adolescents”.
→ We are talking here about serious and irreversible interventions. Not about whether someone is “more male- or female-oriented”. These are regressive stereotypes and role expectations that are socially produced and can be changed. The clinic’s medical offer, by contrast, includes mastectomies, neovaginas, phalloplasty and other life-altering interventions.
→ The distress experienced by patients is indeed significant. The majority of those affected suffer from substantial psychiatric comorbidities. This is completely ignored. Instead, diagnostic overshadowing is produced.
→ The suicide narrative has by now been disproven by Finnish studies (2024, 2026), the Cass Review, and even statements made by trans activists themselves before US courts. Nevertheless, the state of the evidence is once again ignored and parents, families, society and the state are subjected to fearmongering.
→ The advice given to parents on how to deal with their children: what puberty actually is is completely ignored. A phase in which boundaries are tested, personal will is asserted and much behaviour is driven by impulse. A phase in which parents are required, on the one hand, to allow greater freedom, and on the other, to protect their child from serious harm and maintain appropriate boundaries. The responsible approach would be to set clear boundaries and maintain a firm grasp on reality. Instead, parents are encouraged to make space for and affirm the beliefs of a psychologically distressed young person.
→ Finally: referring parents, of all places, to the NGO Courage, an organisation that regularly runs camps for "trans children" and "trans adolescents", hardly requires further comment and reveals the clinic's ideological orientation.
There is, in fact, a thoughtful parents' group in Austria, ROGDÖ, which I can wholeheartedly recommend to parents looking for a space to talk openly, exchange experiences, find support without fear of judgement, and gain a clearer understanding of the institutional dynamics and capture surrounding youth transition.
For parents in Germany, I would like to recommend TransTeens Sorge-berechtigt, an association of parents of gender-questioning and gender-dysphoric adolescents and young adults. They maintain a highly informative website with practical resources and guidance for families and are in close contact with parent groups across Europe, providing support and exchanging experiences.
And in Switzerland, the association AUFG supports parents by providing information and practical advice on how to navigate questions surrounding their child's insecurities or dysphoria, while also offering a space to listen, exchange experiences and strengthen parents in their role towards their children.
There is also this podcast I recorded last year with parents of trans-identified children in Austria.
To the media, I would urgently recommend proper research rather than reproducing activist PR. These issues are far too serious to become part of mindless (Pride) celebrations.
Transgender ideology is alive and well in US Democratic-led states. I'm currently in a battle with my local college because I tried to start a lesbian club and my definition of lesbian does not coincide with theirs. I think we are a biological category; they think lesbian is an opt-in category. That means heterosexual men who want to screw women but also think that they're women are therefore lesbians. Ugh
An excellent effort in educating and a generous gift to concerned parents, Faika.