open-ended play psychotherapy, parent counselling, and parent-guided interventions to prevent "transsexualism". The study was criticized by the reviewers for relying on flawed estimates of desistance as well as actively trying to reduce cross-gender identification. In 2015, the American Psychological Association and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration collaborated on a report stating "conversion therapy—efforts to change an individual's sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression—is a practice that is not supported by credible evidence and has been disavowed by behavioral health experts and associations. Conversion therapy perpetuates outdated views of gender roles and identities as well as the negative stereotype that being a sexual or gender minority or identifying as LGBTQ is an abnormal aspect of human development. Most importantly, it may put young people at risk of serious harm." Already by 2017, the majority of major medical associations had defined attempts to change an individual's gender identity or gender expression as conversion therapy. In 2021, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health concluded that treatment aimed at trying to change a person's gender identity and expression to become more congruent with sex assigned at birth "is no longer considered ethical." Edgardo Menvielle, a child-adolescent psychiatrist at the Children's National Medical Center in Washington advised that "Therapists who advocate changing gender variant behaviours should be avoided." Developmental and clinical psychologist Diane Ehrensaft told the Psychiatric Times, "The mental health profession has been consistently doing harm to children who are not 'gender normal,' and they need to retrain." Society and culture Diagnostic dispute Pickstone-Taylor has called Zucker and Bradley's therapeutic intervention "something disturbingly close to reparative therapy for homosexuals." Other academics, such as Maddux et al., have also compared it to such therapy. They argue that the goal is preventing a transgender identity because reparative therapy is believed to reduce the chances of adult GD, "which Zucker and Bradley characterize as undesirable." Author Phyllis Burke wrote, "The diagnosis of GID in children, as supported by Zucker and Bradley, is simply child abuse." Zucker dismisses Burke's book as "simplistic" and "not particularly illuminating;" and journalist Stephanie Wilkinson said Zucker characterized Burke's book as "the work of a journalist whose views shouldn't be put into the same camp as those of scientists like Richard Green or himself." Critics argue that the GIDC diagnosis was a backdoor maneuver to replace homosexuality in the DSM; Zucker and Robert Spitzer counter that the GIDC