Lauren Schwartz, MD

“I was wrong.”

It’s one of the hardest things a person can say. 

It’s why pushing back against gender ideology takes evidence and empathy – and perhaps nobody balances them better than Dr. Lauren Schwartz, a psychiatrist, a mother of 3, and a senior fellow at Do No Harm. 

Several years ago, Dr. Schwartz’s young children started coming home from elementary school with age-inappropriate questions about sex and gender. Her instincts knew that something was off.

Dr. Schwartz dug deeper, and found the school was trying to keep up with guidance from top national associations, which all claimed to be evidence-based and focused on the best interests of children.

But the evidence didn’t hold up. Behind the scenes, ideology was overruling rigorous science and a long history of child and developmental psychology used successfully in schools – and vulnerable children were paying the price. Families, schools, and practitioners were being led down a dangerous path by the “experts” who should have been protecting them.

“What was most disturbing to me as a mother and as a psychiatrist, was that these supposedly ‘evidence-driven’ programs were being promoted by my own professional association (the American Psychiatric Association), as well as nearly every other national association in education, mental health, and medicine. My own field was pushing this – and because schools rely on and trust these organizations, they take them at their word.” – Dr. Lauren Schwartz

Dr. Schwartz soon realized parents, professionals, and policy makers across the nation were doing the same thing, taking national associations at their word without thoroughly examining the evidence themselves. While working with Dr. Miriam Grossman on her book, Lost in Trans Nation, Dr. Schwartz decided to start engaging her peers and the public with the facts, doing so with courage and compassion.

“To truly change course, a tremendous amount of healing and support will be needed, for patients, families, and practitioners. We have adolescents with bodies forever changed, who aged out of their pediatric gender clinics at 18 and were pretty much abandoned to find their own care. We have detransitioners who don’t have anywhere to go because their clinics turned their backs on them. I’ve talked with parents through Do No Harm and other advocacy organizations who say, ‘what have I done to my child, the experts told me to do this, but now my child is worse,’ and I’ve talked with young adults who say, ‘I blame myself, I did this to myself’. And that part is heartbreaking, because they didn’t. The medical community did this to them.” – Dr. Lauren Schwartz

Together with Do No Harm fellows Dr. Miriam Grossman and Dr. Aida Cerundolo, and Dr. Carrie Mendoza, Dr. Schwartz co-authored an open letter to the APA in 2024, calling the minimizing of risks and lack of evidence within its new Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care textbook, “unacceptable, unethical, and unsafe.” It has since been signed by more than 7,200 medical professionals and concerned citizens from around the world. 

Her plea to families, schools, and practitioners? Slow down, stop the rush to medicalize, and find the root causes of the child’s pain. “There cannot be a rush to medicalize, especially with our most vulnerable patients, children,” she says. “The distress these kids and young adults are feeling is real, and our job as physicians and mental health providers is to consider all contributing factors.”

“Is the distress a very normal reaction to a hard situation? Did he or she go through a significant loss or trauma? Did a relationship fall apart? Are they being bullied at school? As adults we can certainly validate feelings – but validating and ‘affirming’ are not the same thing. It is a critical part of our job as parents and caregivers to hold reality for our children when it feels impossible or overwhelming to them to do so themselves.”

“Some children are going to show distress around these temporary phases of life. Get them support if they struggle. But if it gets to, ‘I need to make a change in my body right now so that I can be happy in this moment,’ you’ve veered in a dangerous direction. There has been no other time in medicine that we have altered healthy, developing bodies, sacrificing future health and wellness for a current, underdeveloped perception of self.”

Similar to her approach with patients, Dr. Schwartz engages her colleagues and peers with respect, dignity, and compassion. She knows that to fix a broken system, you need to stay firm on the facts while giving people a path forward – and that’s not always an easy thing to do.

“There are so many layers to how we got here and how it all went wrong. We need to come together as a medical community and give space and grace to those who are just waking up and realizing they’ve been on extremely harmful, misinformed paths. Remember, this was pushed as a ‘model of care’ by the very associations that print our textbooks. You could see how there was an easy path for practitioners to feel like they were doing the right thing. When we show them the evidence, and they realize they’ve been horribly misled, we need to give them space to pivot.” – Dr. Lauren Schwartz

Most recently, Dr. Schwartz penned a chapter on gender-affirming ideology in the newly published book, The War on Science: Thirty-Nine Renowned Scientists and Scholars Speak Out About Current Threats to Free Speech, Open Inquiry, and the Scientific Process. It’s officially on the shelves, so check it out!

Thank you, Dr. Schwartz, not only for speaking out against the harms of pediatric gender medicine, but for the way you do it. Your one-two punch of empathy and evidence is a gold standard.