Reuters Investigates
Reuters is an international news agency. Under the name Reuters Investigates, its investigative team publishes long-form reports. In 2022, it published the series Youth in Transition about gender care for minors in the United States.
What you can find
The series opened in October 2022 with a report on the growing number of children and teenagers seeking medical gender care and the uncertainties facing families. In December 2022, it was followed by, among other pieces, an article on what detransitioners mean for research into gender care.
Why it is on this list
The series is a frequently cited journalistic source on young people and gender care, produced by a major international news agency. Critics of gender care refer to it particularly often; supporters of gender-affirming care called its tone too skeptical. See also the page on detransition.
Creators and approach
The reports were written by Chad Terhune, Robin Respaut, and Michelle Conlin. The opening article was published on October 6, 2022, under the title As more transgender children seek medical care, families confront many unknowns. On December 22, 2022, it was followed by Why detransitioners are crucial to the science of gender care. The series connects families' experiences with its own analysis of data on diagnoses and treatments. The individual reports can be accessed through the series overview page on the Reuters website.
The figures Reuters commissioned
Because reliable nationwide figures were lacking, Reuters asked the data company Komodo Health to analyze healthcare claims. Komodo looked at the years 2017 through 2021. According to that analysis, in 2021, 42,167 children aged six to seventeen in the United States were diagnosed with gender dysphoria, compared with 15,172 in 2017. That represented an increase of about 70 percent compared with 2020. Across the entire period, at least 121,882 children received a diagnosis. Komodo also examined the use of puberty blockers as a treatment. These figures have since been widely cited, including by other media outlets.
How to assess this source
The series is journalistic, not scientific research. The figures come from claims data from a single commercial company and cover only the United States. A diagnosis in such a dataset does not mean that a child received medical treatment. The figures are therefore a lower bound for diagnoses, not a measure of the number of treatments. The reports date from 2022 and describe the situation before the legislation that many U.S. states subsequently introduced. For the state of research on the treatments themselves, see systematic reviews in gender care, and for the situation in individual countries, see policies by country.