The world-renowned Boston Children’s Hospital is being denounced by leading psychologists for drastically reducing the time it allocates for mental-health professionals to determine whether children identifying as transgender should receive gender-transition treatment. Shocked and dismayed by the hospital’s policy, these experts in pediatric-gender medicine have called the shortened assessment period woefully inadequate — considering the complexity of gender-related distress in minors and the fact that these medications are life-altering and, in the case of testosterone and estrogen, cause irreversible effects.

During the second half of the 2010s, leaders at the pediatric gender clinic at Boston Children’s first cut in half, and ultimately slashed by eightfold, the time they typically scheduled for in-house psychologists to assess gender-distressed children before determining whether they should be referred to endocrinologists to begin a treatment path that includes puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.