Speaking to a Friendly Journalist, Finland’s Kaltiala Largely Confirms Assigned Media’s Reporting
Kaltiala answers young people’s critiques: An update to our previous reporting on gender affirming care in Finland.
by Evan Urquhart
In late July, Assigned Media published a longform investigation into Finland’s treatment for young people with gender dysphoria. Toward the end of the piece, we included a few sentences, highlighting the fact that our story was still incomplete. Though we had tried through multiple channels to speak with the health professionals associated with Finland’s gender clinics, we were not ultimately able to include their side of the story.
Our piece expressed the hope that other journalists would follow up on our work and shed light on the perspective from Finland’s medical authorities, particularly that of Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala, who until recently was the head of youth gender treatment in Finland’s health system. Now, an American journalist with close ties to the gender critical movement, Benjamin Ryan, has followed up with Kaltiala. In a Substack post that spends its first half denigrating our reporting, Ryan eventually asks, and Kaltiala answers, many of the most pressing questions Assigned would have posed to health authorities in Finland.
Our reporting found that trans youth in Finland were asked about their masturbatory habits almost immediately after meeting providers who had made no attempt to build trust with their young patients before launching into highly personal, uncomfortable, often embarrassing questions. In one case, a young trans boy was given the instruction to go home and masturbate as “homework.”
Ryan (in bold) asked Kaltiala to explain this practice.
Far from damaging sexual functioning, testosterone for trans men is associated with increased sexual interest and higher ability to orgasm.
In his Twitter presence, Ryan has made much of his disagreement with how Assigned has characterized Kaltiala’s longtime skepticism towards providing gender-affirming care to minors. He asked Kaltiala about this, and her answer seems to largely confirm Assigned’s reading of the 2011 opinion essay where she opposed Finland providing gender-affirming care under the headline “At Least Save the Children.”
One of the more intriguing answers by Kaltiala was in response to patients saying they felt Finland’s approach was “designed to break them and encourage them to give up, rather than help them in managing their gender dysphoria…”
Although some medical steps in a gender transition, such as surgery, are difficult to reverse, others such as hormone therapy are gradual and can be largely or entirely reversed by ceasing to take hormones.
Lastly, Ryan asked Kaltiala about the number of youth under 18 who had accessed medical transition in Finland. Our reporting suggested that it was extremely rare, and often minors continued at the youth clinic into adulthood. Kaltiala’s answers did not contradict that picture.
We have included only selected portions of the interview posted by Ryan. Taken as a whole, Kaltiala’s answers do not seem to challenge the picture offered by our reporting of a heavily gatekept process, one more invested in slowing and preventing transition than offering support or treatment to trans youth in Finland. We appreciate Ryan’s work, providing us with the perspective of Finland’s top youth gender expert, a woman who has recently become an international force in the movement to restrict and limit medical options for trans minors.
Evan Urquhart is the founder of Assigned Media.