SEGM Digest 2025
The SEGM Digest is a series published by the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM), a nonprofit organization founded in 2019 that focuses on the evidence base for gender care for children, adolescents, and young adults. The first issue was published on May 30, 2025, and covers publications from April and May of that year.
The main article on this subject is Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM).
SEGM launched the series because the number of new studies and guidance documents has increased sharply. The Digest therefore focuses on breadth: each issue provides a brief summary of several publications, followed by a more detailed discussion. Several issues were published in 2025.
What it covers
The first issue discusses, among other things, the evidence report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), a report from the state of Utah, a systematic review of mastectomy, an analysis of fertility preservation, and a legal assessment of the Dutch Protocol.
More from the first issue
The first issue covers seven publications. The HHS report runs to 409 pages and identifies psychotherapy as the treatment currently supported by the strongest evidence. The report from Utah, by LaFleur and colleagues, is more than a thousand pages long; SEGM is critical of it because it lacks an overall assessment of the evidence. The review of mastectomy by Miroshnychenko and colleagues in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery rates the evidence for psychological outcomes in patients under 26 as being of very low certainty. The review article by McDeavitt, Cohn, and Kulatunga-Moruzi is also discussed, as is an article by Van Breukelen on study designs that offer an alternative to randomized research. The legal assessment of the Dutch Protocol was written by Smeehuijzen, Smids, and Hoekstra and published in Family and Law.
The third issue
The third issue was published on October 31, 2025, and covers July and August. Among other things, it discusses a study by Rackliff and colleagues of 957 people examining support and care during detransition. A small pilot study involving sixteen participants found no improvement in psychological functioning after twelve months of puberty suppression. A study by Lahaije and colleagues of one hundred young people describes the side effects of puberty blockers. The issue also covers an article by Finnish psychiatrist Riittakerttu Kaltiala on Finland's cautious approach, a British government report on barriers to research into sex and gender, and a report by the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women. Finland's approach is listed in this archive under Finland (2020).
Why it is included in this archive
The series is useful for anyone who wants to keep up with the academic literature without reading every article themselves. SEGM selects and interprets publications from its own critical position in the debate; it is therefore not a comprehensive or neutral overview. Other sources can be found under science and debate.