The war to protect children from politically motivated treatment for gender dysphoria is not going well. While state laws have served to prevent most surgeries, far too many blue states allow doctors to prescribe so-called “puberty blockers,” whose side effects are still being discovered.
Those side effects can follow a patient for the rest of their lives. It could include sterility, diminished bone density, an impact on adolescent brain structure and cognitive function, and a loss of sexual pleasure.
The justification for giving young teens and pre-teens the puberty blockers is that it helps relieve the “distress” of gender dysphoria, anxiety, and depression associated with unwanted physical changes of puberty. The reality is that there is no evidence that the drugs do any such thing. What’s more, the medical community knows it.
An eye-opening investigation by The Free Press about what gender care doctors and others treating transgender youth actually believe about the care they are giving their patients should be read by parents whose child expresses “gender confusion” of any kind. It should be read by members of Congress and every state legislator in the country.
The Free Press obtained a video of the 2021 US Professional Association for Transgender Health, where Amy Penkin spoke about an 18-year-old high school graduate named “Sky” and his unusual request.
Penkin explained that Sky expressed a desire to look like “a Barbie down there.” Sky, Penkin said, reported “being asexual, never having had sex, and having no desire to have sex in the future.” Indeed, Sky did “not want to feel any pleasurable sensation and hope[d] removal of all erogenous tissue [would] be possible,” according to Penkin.
Penkin was concerned not because of Sky’s request but because the care for non-binary youth was so “inaccessible.” Penkin’s colleague, psychologist Mair Marsiglio, gave Sky exactly what he wanted.
More shocking is that both women believe that any co-morbidities like “multiple personalities” and “psychosis” are “not excluded from gender surgery just because the team is ‘uncomfortable’ operating on them.”
So even though the young patient may have a serious mental illness that could interfere with his or her ability to rationally choose a course of treatment, the gender care medical team should do it for them.
The repercussions are growing, and it’s getting harder to contain the backlash.
Indeed, a growing number of young people who have undergone various hormonal and surgical interventions are going public about being harmed physically and psychologically. Some, known as “detransitioners,” seek to reverse or mitigate the effects of medical transition. Some, having undergone a mastectomy at the outset of puberty or having damaged their bodies with hormones, are suing their medical providers, saying that they were misled about the need for and consequences of transition.
(WPATH’s Standards of Care don’t have much to say about detransitioners. There is no chapter for them, and WPATH asserts, falsely, that detransition “appears to be rare.”)
Actually, there has been an effort on the part of WPATH to suppress information that would be of vital importance to parents who are asked to place their confused child’s health in the hands of charlatans.
The Free Press and other publications have documented “how families are pressured into approving the transition of minors with the unsubstantiated threat that a child will commit suicide otherwise,” according to The Free Press. There’s also the fact that “false assurances are made about the safety and necessity of life-changing gender interventions, treatments that can cause many serious side effects, including infertility.”
One of the biggest revelations from the recordings is how these clinicians acknowledge performing unproven, seemingly experimental treatments—only it appears there is often no protocol being followed, no formal research being conducted, and no ethics-board approval being sought. These practitioners say their goal is to fulfill the “embodiment” desires of their patients, whatever these may be, and doing this may require “deviat[ing] from guidelines.”
To explain what it means to fulfill patients’ “embodiment goals,” pediatric endocrinologist Hayley Baines of OHSU’s Doernbecher Children’s Hospital gender clinic presented a “composite case” at the 2022 WPATH conference. Baines described a 13-year-old boy who identified as nonbinary (“she/they” pronouns) and whose “stated goals are: ‘I want tits,’ and ‘I want my parts to still work.’ ” The boy and his accompanying parent, who also identified as nonbinary, were both “surprised” to hear that hormones could compromise his future fertility. The clinical team’s role, Baines explained, was to understand how “impacts on fertility and the ability to have erections” fit in within the boy’s “goals.” When the boy responded with “c’est la vie,” the parent, who wanted biological grandchildren, started crying.
There are not enough detransitioners, and they aren’t well organized. Arrayed against them are several highly organized, well-funded physicians’ groups, transgender advocacy organizations, and fanatical activists who see the task of transitioning young people to a different gender (or no gender) as a sacred calling.
The lies, the half-truths, and the hiding of vital information from parents about gender dysphoria and puberty blockers told by the gender care industry are creating a generation of confused children. This is exactly what the gender care industry wants, as they believe the more children who are “unsure” of their gender, the more patients they will have to fill the beds of the new clinics springing up all over the country.
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