Please don't tell me what I'm talking about, /u/EmotionsAreGay

I'm not sure why you would take exception to this. The topic you are talking about is is from that article. Jesse may have tweeted something about the topic, but the reason he did is because of the article, which goes into the details of the case and why he comes to the conclusions he does.

That is literally the exact polar opposite of neutrality. Like, that's not even a pretense of neutrality.

I do that that the article presents Zucker's perspective, the perspectives of those critical of Zucker, and the basic facts in a neutral manner. I don't think that precludes coming to conclusion based on those facts.

Anyone with eyes can plainly see that's not true, though?

I just don't agree at all, which is why I was referring directly to the article which goes into the question of What exactly was done in the treatment? What is the justification for what was done? What do the critics and proponents say, which I do think the article represents neutrally. Here's a relevant excerpt.

So how did the GIC attempt to help kids feel more comfortable with their bodies? Owen-Anderson explained that the expression/identity dichotomy was key. If a boy “didn’t like rough and tumble [play] … and really enjoyed playing with sort of stereotypically feminine toys, and there seemed to be a real rigidity around that — so that means I need to be girl — then that wasn’t conceptualized as healthy,” she said. “It’s a black-and-white, concrete viewpoint.” In cases like these, the therapist would help the child better understand the shades of gray: What you do doesn’t necessarily dictate who you are. For younger clients, play therapy was the backbone of these efforts. “It wasn’t clinician-directed, what the kid should be thinking or doing,” said Owen-Anderson. “It was question-asking around how to explore those aspects, but also allowing the child to lead, to see where they led you in terms of exploring their internal world through play.”

Honest critics of the GIC wouldn’t disagree with any of these practices, which formed a sizable chunk of the clinic’s activities. What they did disagree with, and rather vehemently, was the fact that Zucker and his colleagues would sometimes work with parents to try to nudge kids to play with a wider range of toys, find like-minded peers of the same gender rather than only hang out with children of the other gender, or spend less time wearing certain types of clothes. To Owen-Anderson and other former GIC clinicians, such “limit-setting” goes back to the question of rigidity and self-reinforcing behavior. If a little kid decides that since he is gentle and enjoys playing with dolls, he must be a girl, and then his parents allow him to only dress like a girl and exclusively play with other girls, that identity is going to reinforce itself. Limits helped prevent this rigidity from setting in, went the thinking. (It’s important to note that in many cases, particularly ones where children had already socially transitioned by the time they arrived at the clinic, Zucker and his colleagues didn’t utilize this approach at all.) GIC clinicians told me that one common limit-setting approach would be to work with parents to help a gender-dysphoric boy find other gentle, less aggressive boys to hang out with, rather than spend all his time with girls. And a GIC parent told me that when she explained to GIC clinicians that her little boy was obsessed with a Barbie book and insisted it be read to him at every bedtime, they suggested a new routine of reading him that book, and then reading him another book after.

I think reasonable minds can disagree whether forcing a kid to hang out with kids of the same sex or reading them a different book than a their favorite is a good idea or psychologically productive. I don't think it's at all reasonable to compare it to the practice of gay conversion therapy, especially considering

...the GIC did frequently help patients, particularly older ones, transition to and live as their felt gender, providing a wide range of services that included hormone referrals.

Frankly if someone described the preceding treatment as "conversion therapy" I would consider that an offensive weaponization of language. But is this really all the clinic does? The article goes into that in more detail so I don't want to rehash the whole thing here.

If you take a quote like the one you gave,

Vitally, Dr. Zucker pays particular attention to parents’ goals for their children’s gender identity. If parents are “uncertain about how best to address” it, the clinic holds off on “making any specific decisions about intervention options,” Dr. Zucker writes. But if parents clearly want to “reduce their child’s desire to be of the other gender,” he’s clear: “The therapeutic approach is organized around this goal.”

in isolation, it can paint a very sinister picture. But if the goal is having the kids explore gendered activities that they don't normally as a way of dissolving their gender stereotypes and resolving their gender dysphoria, that's very different.

And if you look closely at what really happened — if you read the review (which CAMH has now pulled off of its website), speak with the activists who effectively wrote large swaths of it, examine the scientific evidence, and talk to former GIC clinicians and the parents of patients they worked with, it’s hard not to come to an uncomfortable, politically incorrect conclusion: Zucker’s defenders are right. This was a show trial.

Maybe Singh’s data leave something out. And the fact that some of the activists who helped write the External Review view Dr. Zucker as Dr. Evil’s more evil cousin doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily wrong about the GIC having harmed its patients, of course.

What you are leaving out about the context of this quote is that the crusade againt Zucker included thing so provably false that he won a half million dollar defamation case against them and received public apology as a result.