Gender ideology is unraveling. It’s fraud all the way down. There is no good evidence that “transitioning” helps anyone, especially children. And people are realizing that the entire premise — that a boy can somehow be born into a female body, or vice versa — is superstitious nonsense. Indeed, transgender ideology is so insane that the coalition against it ranges from conservative Christians to lesbian feminists.
Transgender ideology has many enemies, but the most effective are those who have been victimized by wrongly named “gender-affirming care,” especially the detransitioners who have realized that so-called transition is a pursuit of the impossible, driven by lies. The power of their testimony was displayed during the recent Detrans Awareness Day, which was organized by Genspect and hosted at the U.S. Capitol on March 12. There were interviews and meetings with administration officials and members of Congress. The public centerpiece was an outstanding series of panel discussions involving activists, doctors, policy experts, and especially detransitioners.
The first panel included Dr. Eithan Haim, the whistleblower whom the Biden administration persecuted after he exposed the continued medical “transition” of children in Texas. He warned that transgender programs resist being shut down and explained how doctors may be committing fraud to keep performing trans experiments on children. Put simply, they may deliberately use the wrong billing codes to hide what they are doing.
For example, if a girl claims to be transgender, a doctor might change her chart to show her as male, which is easily done in the Epic medical records system, and then “diagnose” her with testosterone deficiency. The doctor could then prescribe testosterone for her and get either private insurance or the government to pay for it without them knowing it was to “transition” a child. Leftist groups are promoting this scheme, publishing literal guides to committing insurance fraud.
Transgender ideologues are resorting to insurance fraud because of laws and policies restricting the medical fraud that is “gender-affirming care.” Pro-trans doctors were confident that if they just kept transing people, eventually evidence would come in and vindicate them, but the opposite happened. Among other examples, the U.K.’s Cass Report foundthere is no good evidence that performing transgender medical interventions on children helps them. It has also been revealed that the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) suppressed a review of the evidence it had commissioned, and that Johanna Olson-Kennedy, one of the nation’s leading pro-transgender pediatric doctors, is suppressing the results of her own taxpayer-funded study.
Detransitioners are flesh-and-blood proof of what the numbers show. Their testimonies indict a medical profession that is either in the grip of radical gender ideology or cowed by those who are, and which has therefore betrayed its duties to patients and the public. The detransitioners speaking in the Capitol described a conveyor-belt approach to transgender medical interventions that quickly affirmed trans identities and encouraged each new step of so-called transition.
Thus they were harmed by those who were charged above all with doing them no harm. In the words of Laura Becker, “I have to wear a mastectomy bra for the rest of my life because I was lied to.” She “was a traumatized girl” who needed help, not a “gay trans man” who needed her breasts cut off.
The malfeasance of the medical system is fed by the internet (increasingly joined by the school systems and social services), which is filled with encouragement to embrace a transgender identity. Instead of addressing trauma or the difficulties of being different, there is the false hope of fleeing into another identity.
The online world and transgender ideology intersect in other malevolent ways. As Chloe Cole put it, exposure to online pornography makes many young women want to escape their femininity; if that is what being a woman is, many girls will want nothing to do with it. Meanwhile, Forrest Smith noted that for males there is often a sexual aspect to the desire to transition, which may also be the result of pornography exposure and use.
Though there are common themes to their stories, and insights to be gained from them, detransitioners are not interchangeable, so it was important to have more of them sharing their distinct experiences. Yes, some detransitioners are more publicly prominent and polished, but they are hardly alone. As Detrans Awareness Day demonstrated, the number of people speaking out about the harms transgender ideology inflicted on them is increasing.
These detransitioners are leading the way to defeat radical gender ideology. Their stories expose the lies and fraud of “gender-affirming care.” Their boldness in speaking out informs both politicians and the public. And their lawsuits against the medical systems that have injured them will likely be the final nail in the coffin of the medical industry’s embrace of transgenderism.
Suing “gender” doctors may make “gender-affirming care” impossible by making it uninsurable. As Soren Aldaco explained, it is not about money but about holding the medical system accountable. The first lawsuits will be the hardest. But it will get easier after the first few wins, and then the floodgates will open as trans-experimenting doctors are rightly sued into oblivion for their fraud and malpractice.
Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a fellow in the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
The truth about transgenderism is coming out. On Monday, Michael Shellenberger released a multitude of internal files from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) that “prove that the practice of transgender medicine is neither scientific nor medical.” WPATH has been accepted by the political, cultural, and medical establishments as the authority on transgenderism, but what its members say in private is not the narrative they sell to the public.
Instead of the rigorous, careful, evidence-based medicine that champions of “gender-affirming care” claim to practice, the WPATH files show doctors who are making it up as they go along, smashing through guardrails even though they know that the children they are chemically and surgically altering cannot really give informed consent. And people are noticing.
No wonder the transgender ideologues are worried. The public has proven more resistant than they expected, especially regarding radical policies such as putting men in women’s prisons and girls’ locker rooms, let alone sexually mutilating and sterilizing children. And transgender activists and their allies have no response except to repeat their same failed arguments, just louder.
Consider a recent opinion piece in the New England Journal of Medicine by Michael R. Ulrich, a Boston University professor of law and public health who is also affiliated with Ibram X. Kendi’s scandal-plagued Center for Antiracist Research. Ulrich argues that restrictions on transitioning children are part of a broader right-wing culture war restricting and regulating medicine. There is a lot wrong with this assertion, but the fundamental problem is that so-called gender-affirming care is not medicine.
From puberty blockers to hormones to surgeries, transition is never medically necessary. Transitioning does not cure any disease or correct any physical ailment or injury. Rather, the point of medicalized transition is to disrupt and destroy the normal functioning of healthy bodies.
Ulrich tries to assuage concerns over these procedures by comparing them to “Pediatric chemotherapy and radiation,” which also “have lasting effects on growth development and reproductive capabilities.” Well, yes, but cancer kills people, which is why we are willing to accept serious side effects to treat it — and even then, doctors and patients have to balance the risks of the disease against the risks of treatment. In contrast, there is no physical risk from not receiving “gender-affirming care,” whereas, as the WPATH files show, there is significant, potentially lethal, risks from puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and transition surgeries.
This is why the argument for transition always comes down to encouraging people, especially children, to take themselves hostage by threatening suicide. The only harm that can come from not transitioning is self-harm. And so, Ulrich deploys the suicide threats early and often, writing that “it is not hyperbole to say that lives are at risk in states pursuing these bans on needed care.” Ulrich offers no real evidence to back this claim up. He simply presumes that the “high rates of suicide, suicide attempts, and suicidal ideation among transgender young people” would be reduced with affirmation and medical transition.
Ulrich cites just one study as “evidence showing the effectiveness of gender-affirming care in reducing depression, anxiety, and suicide attempts.” But, despite hype to the contrary, that study showed no such thing. Rather, as Jesse Singal explained after it was published in 2022, “the kids who took puberty blockers or hormones experienced no statistically significant mental health improvement during the study. The claim that they did improve, which was presented to the public in the study itself, in publicity materials, and on social media (repeatedly) by one of the authors, is false” (emphasis in original).
No Evidence Regarding Suicide
There is no good evidence that transition prevents suicide, especially for children. Those who identify as trans do have an elevated risk of suicide (though this tends to be exaggerated by activists), but this is best explained by trans-identified individuals also having a much higher rate of mental health problems and trauma — and it doesn’t help to add to these underlying issues the lie that they were somehow born in the wrong body.
This extraordinary claim — that some children are born into the wrong bodies, and therefore must be chemically and surgically reshaped into a facsimile of the opposite sex — is medically unsupported. It is ideological and sexual fantasy masquerading as medicine. There is no good evidence to support transitioning children because gender ideology is just that, an ideology masquerading as medicine. The reality of human nature does not change, even though much of the medical establishment, such as the NEJM, was shamefully eager to capitulate to a small number of aggressive activists.
Rein in the Industry
Therefore, it is not only reasonable, but imperative, for legislators to rein in the transgender industry, and especially to stop the “transitioning” of children. Ulrich and other activists can fulminate about right-wing conspiracies, but it is right and just to ban the surgical and chemical mutilation of children. Many states have done so, thereby proving that gender ideology will not inevitably triumph and claim our children for its own.
This does not mean the fight is over. Indeed, we should expect gender ideologues to become more aggressive as their losses pile up. They thought time would be on their side, and that new research would vindicate them. But their time is running out, and the continued lack of evidence for “gender-affirming care” is pushing them to increasingly brazen lies and distortions as they attempt to justify their collapsing position. And they are also becoming more authoritarian in the places and institutions they do control, as they attempt to impose transgender dogma on the rest of us.
Thus, those opposed to gender ideology must not get cocky. Trans activists and their allies will keep fighting to the bitter end, especially those who have staked their reputations, livelihoods, and self-respect on radical gender ideology. Nonetheless, the end can now be envisioned, even if much work remains to achieve it.
Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Chloe Cole speaks as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., looks on during a news conference on Capitol Hill on Sept. 20, 2022, in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Detransitioners have been trying to warn the public that so-called gender-affirming care—transgender surgeries, hormones, and puberty blockers—is both experimental and dangerous, especially for minors. Now, thanks to the efforts of journalist Michael Shellenberger, we know that World Professional Association for Transgender Health doctors and medical experts pushing these practices were well aware of the experimental and lasting nature of the procedures they were recommending. Yet these so-called health professionals pushed forward, despite alarming awareness of tumors developing from hormones, reduced sexual function, lack of proper informed consent for minors, and more, according to Shellenberger’s reporting.
“Let the reckoning begin,” says Luka Hein, a young woman who underwent a double mastectomy when she was only 16 years old, believing that she would be happier if she could become a boy. “Because of organizations like WPATH I’m missing body parts and struggle with pain.”
The WPATH medical professionals acknowledge in the messages that some of the minors who are being given puberty blockers have no idea that they will be sterilized. Other messages reveal WPATH doctors saying they went ahead with performing surgery on patients with severe mental health problems, even though they were worried the patients couldn’t give full informed consent.
“I’m relieved the files are out in the world for everyone to read,” Shellenberger told my colleague Tyler O’Neil, sharing that the files reveal WPATH’s “whole paradigm falling apart over the last three years.”
The news prompted a number of detransitioners to speak up, sharing the mental and physical anguish that they have gone through as a result of this ideology.
“I was a scared kid who thought doctors were going to help me…and look at how these butchers talk about what happened to those like me behind closed doors,” Hein added in another X post.
On a more positive note, since I reposted the scar picture, I want to put it side by side with a more recent picture. I am determined to thrive, in spite of what has happened. #detrans#detransitionpic.twitter.com/ua0Yfi3MaX
A detransitioner is someone who attempted to transition to another gender, then realized that such an attempt is impossible, and “de-transitioned.” Many of these individuals, like Hein, say they were betrayed into irreversible hormonal and surgical procedures by doctors and therapists who ignored biological realities in favor of ideology.
I document numerous stories of these transitioners in my upcoming book, “Detrans: True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult,” an intimate look at the lived experiences of detransitioners, including the manipulative therapy sessions, botched surgeries, and attempts to construct phantom body parts.
“WPATH gave my therapist the green light to destroy my body,” said Abel Garcia, a young man who attempted to transition to become a girl by taking hormone and undergoing breast augmentation surgery. “The people who hurt me sleep with no problem, while I live in emotional, physical & mental pain.”
“These files prove what detransitioners have always said but now it’s coming from their own mouth,” he added. “Let the truth prevail.”
WPATH gave my therapist the green light to destroy my body. The people who hurt me sleep with no problem, while I live in emotional, physical & mental pain.
These files prove what detransitioners have always said but now it’s coming from their own mouth. Let the truth prevail https://t.co/DTpy5bz9PO
Chloe Cole, a young woman who underwent a double mastectomy as part of her teenaged gender transition, specifically addressed WPATH conversations reported by Shellenberger about developmentally delayed 13 year olds attempting transition.
“There is no ethical approach to taking an already developmentally delayed child and preventing them from going on the only path they have towards growing into an adult,” she said. “We are leaving vulnerable children stunted for life.”
“This is unimaginable levels of cruelty,” added Cole.
Laura Becker, another female detransitioner who has become an outspoken advocate against gender ideology, commented on Shellenberger’s revelation that doctors asked permission of all the “alters,” or alternative identities, of one client who had dissociative identity disorder (DID).
“I can’t believe this,” she wrote. “WPATH doctors got ‘consent’ from all a patient’s ‘alter’ personalities before doing surgery… instead of you know, treating the DID symptoms. Absolutely unethical.”
Some detransitioners called for punishments for the medical professionals who led them down this path.
“Justice for all victims,” wrote Richie, a man who attempted to transition to become a woman. “Jail time for the surgeons that held the scalpel, and the therapists that signed off the surgery. If I took everything from them, we still wouldn’t be even.”
“I didn’t think anyone should be jailed when I first ‘came to’ post-transition,” chimed in Michelle, another detransitioned woman, on X. “Changed my mind now. Probably would’ve still had some mercy in me if we hadn’t been gaslit so badly.”
Prisha Mosley, a young woman who has detransitioned and travels the country testifying in defense of biological sex, emotionally shared on Monday evening that she could not yet bring herself to read “The WPATH Files”: “No one deserves this monstrous form of irreversible medical harm…”
WPATH standardized blackmail and abusive medical experimentation and exploitation.
Detransitioners have been saying it for a while now: Doctors have forgotten their oath to Do No Harm. #WPATHFileshttps://t.co/wRs8evulsH
Meg Brock (left), Dr. Eithan Haim (middle), Terry Schilling (right) speak during a panel session at CPAC 2024 on Feb. 22, 2024 in National Harbor, Maryland. | Samantha Kamman/The Christian Post
NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland. — A whistleblower who exposed a children’s hospital for lying about prescribing puberty blockers to children likened sex-change surgeries and hormone treatments to lobotomies, a procedure he noted society eventually came to view as “barbaric.”
General surgeon Dr. Eithan Haim spoke at the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference during a panel titled “Genesis 1:27,” named after the Bible verse that states God created men and women in “his own image.” Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, also appeared on the panel, while Daily Caller reporter Meg Brock served as the moderator.
During the panel, Haim discussed how he blew the whistle on the Houston-based Texas Children’s Hospital, where he completed his surgical residency. The doctor provided journalist Christopher Rufo with internal documents showing that the hospital was continuing to conduct so-called “gender-affirming services” on minors despite telling the public it had paused such procedures.
Haim said that after he exposed the hospital, federal agents showed up at his door to tell him that he was now under criminal investigation for his actions. Brock asked the surgeon why he decided to blow the whistle on the hospital, and Haim replied that he took an oath as a doctor to “do no harm.” He said he felt a responsibility to do something.
In response to a question about how trans activists argue sex-change surgeries and puberty blockers are medically necessary for people suffering from gender dysphoria, Haim declared, “In no way is this medicine.” The surgeon stated that it is not possible to treat a psychological issue with a “solution of the body,” likening so-called “gender-affirming care” to lobotomies.
Introduced in the 1930s, lobotomies became a popular brain procedure that some believed could be a cure for mental illness. According to a 2013 paper by Mercer University School of Medicine Clinical Professor of Neurosurgery (ret.) Miguel A. Faria, Jr., an estimated 60,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States and Europe between 1936 and 1956. As Haim noted, society finally recognized the procedure as “barbaric.”
The whistleblower called on “good people” to speak up, claiming that trans ideology is “evil” and doctors are attempting to “play God.”
“The actual goal of medicine is to preserve and strengthen what has already been created,” he said.
Haim believes doctors are hesitant to speak up because they fear for their livelihoods. He warned that the silence from doctors fearful of losing their jobs is a “miscalculation” on their part.
Haim contends that if more doctors don’t speak up, then the world they will deliver to their children will be “much more dangerous.” The surgeon stated that the “longer this goes on, the worse it gets.”
(L to R) Meg Brock, Dr. Eithan Haim, Terry Schilling speak on a panel at CPAC 2024 on Feb. 22, 2024. | Samantha Kamman/The Christian Post
At one point during the panel, Schilling made a similar statement when he called on Republicans to stand against trans ideology, adding that they must care about values and not just winning elections.
The conservative activist also highlighted a 2022 report the group released titled “The Transgender Leviathan.” The report cited an analysis by Global Market Insights, which estimated that the “global market valuation” for sex-change surgeries will exceed $1.5 billion by 2026.
“This is about control, and ultimately, this is about the destruction of biological sex,” Schilling said in response to a question from Brock about how trans activists have branded themselves as a civil rights movement.
The American Academy of Pediatrics launched a review of the evidence on transgender “care” but is endorsing the experimental medical interventions anyway. Pictured: Protester holds a sign supporting “gender-affirming care” in New York City on June 25. (Photo: Erik McGregor, LightRocket/Getty Images)
Imagine the Food and Drug Administration announces a new drug with some known side effects and no proven benefits and says, “We’re not quite sure this is safe for the public. We need to run more tests, but until we learn more, everyone should take it anyway.” COVID-19 vaccines notwithstanding, the American public would rightly mock such guidance, and the FDA commissioner might find a pink slip when he returns to his desk.
Yet something very similar to this just happened at the American Academy of Pediatrics. The academy bills itself as the top organization for pediatricians in the United States, and it has formally endorsed the idea that children can consent to experimental “transgender” medical treatments that will leave them stunted, scarred, and infertile.
On Thursday, the academy voted to confirm its 2018 policy statement supporting “gender-affirming care,” but it also authorized a “systematic review of the evidence,” in part, to develop an expanded set of guidance for pediatricians.
As The New York Times’ Azeen Ghorayshi reported, this “systematic review of medical research on the treatments” follows “similar efforts in Europe that found uncertain evidence for their effectiveness in adolescents.” Indeed, many European countries have withdrawn their support for childhood gender interventions, embracing a “watchful waiting” approach.
The American Academy of Pediatrics admits that more research is warranted but endorses the experimental “treatments” anyway. In what world does that make sense?
Like so many other pro-transgender organizations, the academy claims that the best evidence supports “gender-affirming care,” the euphemism these activists use to refer to a wide variety of interventions that aim at making girls look like boys and vice versa.
“Gender-affirming care” involves pumping kids with “puberty blockers”—drugs like Lupron, which the FDA has not approved for gender dysphoria (the persistent condition of painfully identifying with the gender that is the opposite one’s biological sex); or “cross-sex hormones” (testosterone for girls, estrogen for boys) that introduce a hormone imbalance, a condition that endocrinologists would otherwise recognize as a disease. (Endocrinologists treat the endocrine system, which uses hormones to control metabolism, reproduction, growth, and more.)
Psychiatrists, endocrinologists, neurologists, and other doctors testified in support of a Florida health agency’s rule preventing Medicaid from funding various forms of “gender-affirming care,” such as “puberty-blockers,” cross-sex hormones, and transgender surgeries.
“Patients suffering from gender dysphoria or related issues have a right to be protected from experimental, potentially harmful treatments lacking reliable, valid, peer-reviewed, published, long-term scientific evidence of safety and effectiveness,” Dr. Paul Hruz, an endocrinology researcher and clinician at Washington University School of Medicine, wrote in a sworn affidavit.
Hruz notes that “there are no long-term, peer-reviewed published, reliable, and valid research studies” documenting the percentage of patients helped or harmed by transgender medical interventions. He also notes that attempts to block puberty followed by cross-sex hormones not only impact fertility but also pose risks such as low bone density, “disfiguring acne, high blood pressure, weight gain, abnormal glucose tolerance, breast cancer, liver disease, thrombosis, and cardiovascular disease.”
Hruz and other doctors argue that the medical interventions often described as “gender-affirming care” are experimental and that the organizations that present standards of care supporting them—the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and the Endocrine Society—represent more a political and advocacy effort than an objective analysis supporting these alleged treatments.
The American Academy of Pediatrics is right to launch a systematic review of the evidence, and it should embrace caution in light of that review. If there is no concrete evidence that these experimental and life-altering drugs will actually help children in the long run, then the academy should stop recommending them until it uncovers the facts. Otherwise, it is needlessly putting children at risk and encouraging medical malpractice that will lead more “detransitioners” like Chloe Cole to file lawsuits after they realize the harm doctors have done to their bodies in the name of this destructive ideology.
Suppose a troubled teen girl “identifies” as a boy and wants to change her body to match it. Most people balk at the thought of pumping her with testosterone or cutting off her healthy breasts. But many of these same people think using puberty blockers isn’t so bad for even younger kids. In fact, activist groups such as the American Academy of Pediatrics suggest drugs like Lupron can “pause” puberty without harm.
Even some conservative lawmakers, such as Georgia state Sen. Carden Summers, have bought this claim. As a result, the bill he sponsored, just signed into law by Gov. Brian Kemp, partially restricts “gender-affirming” hormones and surgeries for minors but says nothing about puberty blockers.
Is it really safe to give these drugs to kids? Mounting evidence says “no.” And even some on the left are starting to sound the alarm.
Last month, a stunning report in the British Medical Journal, written by a former editor of Ms. Magazine, argued that only a contrived medical consensus, not scientific evidence, props up wrongly named “gender-affirming care” for minors. That’s the protocol that starts with social transition, moves on to puberty blockers, then wrong-sex hormones, and finally surgery. The article pointed to disagreement within the medical community about how to best treat kids with gender dysphoria. Indeed, the publication of such an article, in a major medical journal, is itself evidence of such disagreement.
Two weeks earlier, Jamie Reed, a self-identified “queer socialist” married to a “transman,” blew the whistle on the work of the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. She confirmed what critics have long been saying: These treatments are uncontrolled experiments with children as subjects.
“These treatments are uncontrolled experiments with children as subjects. “
Lupron
Consider Lupron. First approved by the FDA to treat prostate cancer, doctors later used the drug to chemically castrate sex offenders and stop early-onset puberty.
Today, it’s the primary “off-label” drug used to “block” puberty. Lupron stops the body’s normal hormonal process, including the development of ovaries and testes, by “blocking” the brain’s ability to communicate with the pituitary gland. The pituitary controls the release of hormones. Without it, the sex hormones can’t direct puberty as they otherwise would.
Lupron’s side effects are so severe that doctors tend not to prescribe it for even mild (non-metastatic) cases of prostate cancer. Would you be shocked to learn it might not be great for young girls, either? In fact, after taking the drug, girls may develop osteoporosis and osteopenia, problems that mostly afflict older women. Many doctors found that Lupron decreased minors’ bone density so much that they could no longer recommend it.
Not Reversible
Some gender-activist doctors will admit their guidance is not based on long-term studies. Rather, they claim it’s based on expert consensus.
But that consensus is highly stage-managed. Because of the known dangers and lack of long-term data, the Finnish, French, and Swedish governments have either banned or limited Lupron’s use for minors. Similarly, the British National Health Service now urges caution, and argues most gender-confused minors are going through a “transient phase.”
The report in the British Medical Journal shows this regimen for minors is not based on sound science. The Endocrine Society found that little evidence supports its own guidance regarding Lupron. The Swedish government confirms Lupron does not help these minors. In fact, it “may lead to a deteriorating of health and quality of life,” and can cause irreversible harm.
When used for minors with gender distress, over 95 percent will move on to cross-sex hormones and never go through natural puberty. Even when puberty blockers are discontinued, their dangers to a child’s development don’t disappear. After all, no one can reverse time. It’s no surprise New Zealand’s ministry of health recently scrubbed the words “reversible” from its online discussion of puberty blockers.
Jamie Reed’s firsthand testimony is damning. Patients in Reed’s clinic could access hormone blockers after only one meeting with a therapist. Some of these minors had severe mental illnesses that went untreated. Instead, they were fast-tracked with transgender drugs toward transition surgeries.
States Start to Respond
Fortunately, the word is getting out. Some states are now restricting these weapons in the “gender-affirming” arsenal. Since 2022, Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Mississippi, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and Iowa have passed legislation to restrict Lupron as a puberty blocker. (Alabama and Arkansas’ bans are on hold in federal district court.) Several more states will likely do so in the coming weeks.
Florida followed another path to ban this use of Lupron. The state’s medical boards reviewed the literature and found these transition procedures lacked a solid scientific basis. The legislature is now working to secure their boards’ judgment in law.
Other states should follow Florida’s lead and pass health policies and laws that follow scientific evidence, not the activists’ spin. Until this happens, troubled children will continue to be sacrificed on the altar of toxic ideology.
Samuel Silvestro is a member of The Heritage Foundation’s Young Leadership Program. Jay W. Richards is the director of Heritage’s DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family.
Friday, in Sacramento, Calif., a group of detransitioners, parents, and allies gathered at the state capitol building in honor of Detrans Awareness Day. They came together to raise awareness about the growing group of individuals who say they’ve been irreparably harmed by the gender industry.
Among them is Prisha Mosley, a female detransitioner who was prescribed male hormones as a minor and underwent a double mastectomy shortly after turning 18. Today at 25, Mosley describes feeling like a “medical monster,” suffering from a long list of prolonged side effects, including such severe vaginal atrophy that she can no longer use tampons.
The effects of the “mutilation” that Mosley describes falling victim to as a child is not unlike the horrific procedure of female genital mutilation, which involves partial or total removal of the external female genitalia.
As a result of her medical transition, Mosley is unable to have a normal sex life, says she feels as though she’s “robbing” her boyfriend of her breasts, and doesn’t know if she’ll ever be able to bear her own children.
According to data from the World Health Organization, more than 200 million girls and women alive today have been subjected to FGM and, annually, more than 3 million girls are still at risk of being subjected to the procedure. FGM is nearly universally recognized as a violation of the human rights of girls and women, and a violation of the rights of children. And yet, in the U.S., under the guise of “gender-affirming care,” a modern-day version of the practice is being widely accepted and promoted to young girls.
Join me for Detrans Awareness at the California Capitol on March 10th! Dress warm it might be raining! pic.twitter.com/XOE9YbRvkK
Instead of calling it FGM, activists have bubble wrapped their modern-day mutilation in pleasant-sounding terms such “top surgery,” “bottom surgery,” and “reversible” hormonal treatments for children and adults who identify as transgender.
Yet, like FGM, procedures offered to those who suffer from body image issues and/or gender confusion incorporate medical interventions that can mutilate their sex organs. These effects aren’t limited to vulvoplasties and hysterectomies, which are two of the more extreme surgical procedures offered under “gender-affirming care.”
As Jamie Reed, a whistleblower who oversaw the treatment of thousands of minors at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, recently described:
“[G]irls were disturbed by the effects of testosterone on their clitoris, which enlarges and grows into what looks like a microphallus, or a tiny penis. I counseled one patient whose enlarged clitoris now extended below her vulva, and it chafed and rubbed painfully in her jeans. I advised her to get the kind of compression undergarments worn by biological men who dress to pass as female. At the end of the call I thought to myself, ‘Wow, we hurt this kid.’
“There are rare conditions in which babies are born with atypical genitalia—cases that call for sophisticated care and compassion. But clinics like the one where I worked are creating a whole cohort of kids with atypical genitals—and most of these teens haven’t even had sex yet. They had no idea who they were going to be as adults. Yet all it took for them to permanently transform themselves was one or two short conversations with a therapist.”
This is an atrocity. And disproportionately, it’s an atrocity that’s affecting the bodies of women, as girls account for a significant majority of minors receiving “gender-affirming care.”
While critics are quick to dismiss evidence of “social contagion” among teenage girls, even the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and its activist president, Dr. Marci Bowers, have recognized that social influences may be driving some transgender identification in youth.
This perhaps explains why detransitioners are a rapidly-growing group gaining more visibility and attention, despite claims by some transgender activists that detransitioning is rare or not a “real thing.” Yet the harrowing stories of former trans-identified individuals serve as a cautionary tale against medical transitioning, as professionals appear either unable or unwilling to treat the often-severe medical complications caused by puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries.
At its root, gender ideology teaches vulnerable and impressionable girls to medicalize the natural insecurities that they face. In pursuit of “acceptance,” professionals then send them down a devastating path that includes drugs used to castrate male sex offenders and, in some cases, irreversible surgeries.
European countries such as the U.K., Sweden, Finland, and most recently Norway have moved to sharply limit these practices for minors after a systematic review of evidence found that the risks to “gender-affirming care” outweigh any benefits.
Here in the U.S., aside from a few brave states such as Florida pushing back on “gender-affirming care,” we’re moving in the opposite direction. Activists, medical professionals, and politicians are doubling down on their support for the mutilation of healthy bodies by smearing attempts to ban these procedures as bigoted and dangerous—attacks not unlike those once used to legalize and normalize FGM.
For his part, President Joe Biden has made his position clear: “Affirming your child’s identity is one of the most powerful things you can do to keep them safe and healthy,” he said in a 2022 video message speaking directly to parents.
To transgender Americans of all ages, I want you to know that you are so brave. You belong. I have your back. pic.twitter.com/mD4F0m3rU1
But sadly for the Biden administration, it’s not enough to irreversibly destroy the future sex lives and reproductive abilities of youth by encouraging experimental drugs and treatments in the U.S. According to a leaked internal memo from Secretary Antony Blinken, the Biden administration may begin pressuring other countries to push vulnerable youth into hormones and surgeries.
As Manhattan Institute scholar Leor Sapir put it, “Under President Biden, it would appear that cultural arrogance and ‘colonialism’ (as defined in the contemporary academy) are once again staples of American foreign policy.”
With Detrans Awareness Day following on the heels of International Women’s Day this week, it’s time to stop mincing words. We must treat gender ideology as a human rights issue. And we must be clear, the Biden administration is on the wrong side.
NIH is funding many studies premised upon how little research has been conducted on the long-term health risks of cross-sex hormones. Yet HHS is pushing for more transgender ‘care.’
As the Biden administration pushes the Department of Health and Human Services to make “gender-affirming health care” more widely available, HHS’s own National Institutes of Health is funding multiple studies premised upon how little research has been conducted on the long-term risks of taking cross-sex hormones and whether they improve mental health. The NIH research on transgender issues also emphasizes intersectionality and about half has been on HIV prevention.
The NIH Reporter database, which lists active federally funded research projects, shows 74 with “transgender” in the title, totaling more than $26 million of taxpayers’ money annually. Several NIH-funded studies examine specific health risks of cross-sex hormone treatment — such as associated bone loss and possible increased risk of thrombosis, drug overdose, heart attack, and stroke.
Onlyafew studies evaluate the risk of infertility, even though “the impact of long-term cross-sex hormone therapy on reproductive health is largely unknown,” as one such project states and experts have warned. In contrast, seven studies examine stigma and disparities in health care for transgender people, in response to NIH’s Notice of Special Interest in understanding the role of alleged intersectional stigmas and how they harm health.
Manystudiesaddresshigherincidence of sexually transmitted infections in transgender people, and whether hormone therapy might increase that risk. About half of all NIH-funded research on transgender health, including that which has been completed, relates to HIV prevention among the transgender population, totaling approximately $80 million since 1985.
Transgender males “have some of the highest concentrated HIV epidemics in the world, with a pooled global prevalence of 19% and a 49-fold higher odds ratio of acquiring HIV than non-transgender adults,” according to one project summary. Behavioral factors contribute, another project says, but the role of sex hormones needs further study, since they “are known to modulate the immune response, resulting in changes in host susceptibility to pathogens, vaccine efficacy and drug metabolism.”
Many Ongoing Projects Highlight Lack of Research
While suicide prevention is often cited as a major reason to give dysphoric children puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, only one of the current studies is focused specifically on suicide risk, although several emphasize the lack of long-term studies of cross-sex hormones administered to children and their relation to mental health.
Medical professionals “say more specific research is needed to determine whether medically transitioning as a minor reduces suicidal thoughts and suicides compared with those who socially transition or wait before starting treatment,” according to Reuters.
One NIH-funded project summary acknowledges that the long-term effect of puberty suppression on mental health needs further study and will evaluate children already taking puberty blockers.
During puberty, hormones change the structure and organization of the brain. Puberty blockers “may also disrupt puberty-signaled neural maturation in ways that can undermine mental health gains over time and impact quality of life in other ways,” the Nationwide Children’s Hospital project summary says. “The overall impacts” of puberty blockers “have not been systematically studied,” the summary says.
One of the larger NIH-funded transgender studies, funded at $743,000 annually, is at Boston Children’s Hospital. It notes, “Little is known [emphasis added] about how pubertal blockade, the first step in the medical management of a young transgender adolescent, affects bone health and psychological well-being. … In an exploratory aim, we will also consider the effect of pubertal blockade on anxiety, depression, and health-related quality of life.”
Another research project, “Psychological consequences of medical transition in transgender youth,” begun last year at Princeton University and anticipated to end in 2025, notes the lack of quality research in this area:
Five studies to date have longitudinally examined the relationship between one or both of these interventions [puberty suppression and hormone therapy] and mental health in transgender youth. However, these studies have had relatively small samples, none have been able to isolate the effects of endocrine interventions, none have included a cisgender [non-transgender] comparison group, and none have examined the mechanisms by which endocrine interventions might improve mental health.
A longitudinal study that began in 2015 and will run through at least 2026 acknowledges, “Transgender children and adolescents are a poorly understood and a distinctly understudied population in the United States. … Continuing our current research is imperative to expand the scant evidence-base currently guiding the clinical care of TGD [transgender and gender diverse] youth and thus, is of considerable public health significance.”
As the summary of one ongoing NIH-funded research project on sex hormones’ effects on the developing brain says, “There is little to no empirical data guiding clinical practices” of cross-sex hormone therapy in early pubertal adolescents, “highlighting the need for further research to address the critical knowledge gap.” The research, funded at $3 million so far to Stanford University, “will provide a much-needed foundation for understanding the longitudinal impact of treatments that are already being used [emphasis added] in clinical settings.”
The project will elucidate “how sex hormone therapy alters sex-specific risk for disease … and [its] impact on neural networks implicated in psychiatric disorders.” The research proposed “has never been conducted in early pubertal adolescents,” the summary reads.
NIH Acknowledges Limited Evidence, FDA Hasn’t Approved
The NIH, the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, told Reuters that “the evidence is limited on whether these treatments pose short- or long-term health risks for transgender and other gender-diverse adolescents.” Additionally, the Food and Drug Administration has not approved puberty blockers and sex hormones for children’s transgender medical interventions. As Reuters reported:
No clinical trials have established their safety for such off-label use. The drugs’ long-term effects on fertility and sexual function remain unclear. And in 2016, the FDA ordered makers of puberty blockers to add a warning about psychiatric problems to the drugs’ label after the agency received several reports of suicidal thoughts in children who were taking them. More broadly, no large-scale studies have tracked people who received gender-related medical care as children to determine how many remained satisfied with their treatment as they aged and how many eventually regretted transitioning.
Countries such as Finland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom have begun to limit children’s access to transgender health interventions. Early, foundational research from 2011 on transgender medical interventions has been criticized as failing to meet basic research standards.
Before 2012, “there was no scientific literature on girls ages eleven to twenty-one ever having developed gender dysphoria at all,” according to Abigail Shrier’s book “Irreversible Damage.” Studies show most children grow out of gender dysphoria, Shrier says.“There are no good long-term studies indicating that either gender dysphoria or suicidality diminishes after medical transition,” according to Shrier.
Meanwhile, despite all the possible health risks, President Joe Biden has issued executiveorders charging “HHS to work with states to promote expanded access to gender-affirming care.” The administration has issued directives that federal health insurance benefits must “provide comprehensive gender-affirming care.” The administration also opposes “conversion therapy — efforts to suppress or change an individual’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.”
Taxpayers are already paying for transgender procedures, as they are covered by some insurers and Medicaid in some states.
I’ll ask again. WHY ARE THESE MENTAL PATIENT LEFTEST SO HYPER ABOUT MUTILATING AMERICA’S CONFUSED CHILDREN? WHAT IS THEIR END GAME?
HHS’s Office of Population Affairs, which is overseen by transgender Dr. Rachel Levine, states there’s no debate: “Research demonstrates that gender-affirming care improves the mental health and overall well-being of gender diverse children and adolescents.” Other proponents acknowledge a lack of research on these hormones’ effect on brain development, but say the pros outweigh the cons.
Growing Transgender Identification
The number of transgender adults in the U.S. is estimated at 1.4 million to 2 million, with an estimated 150,000 to 300,000 transgender children. The number of American children who started on puberty blockers or hormones totaled 17,683 from 2017 to 2021 and has been increasing, according to Reuters.
From 2019 to 2021, at least 56 patients ages 13 to 17 had genital surgeries, and from 2019 to 2021, at least 776 children that age had mastectomies, not including procedures that weren’t covered by insurance, according to Reuters.
The transgender surgery industry grosses more than $2 billion annually and expects to double that by 2030.
Debate Among Medication Providers
“Puberty delay medications are safe and effective,”according to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), a pro-transgender organization that sets standards for trans medical interventions. “Every person, including every TGD person, deserves an opportunity to be their true selves and has the right to access medically-necessary affirming care to enable this opportunity,” WPATH says.
When WPATH recently updated its guidance, authors “were acutely aware that any unknowns that the working group acknowledged — any uncertainties in the research — could be read as undermining the field’s credibility and feed the right-wing effort to outlaw gender-related care,” The New York Times reported. The newspaper is in the midst of an internal fight about its coverage of transgender issues, with some saying it has been too critical of transgender medical interventions.
A draft of the WPATH chapter for adolescents included minimum recommended ages for hormone treatments and breast removal or augmentation, but after criticism from providers and transgender activists, “it was determined that the specific ages would be removed to ensure greater access to care for more people,” WPATH said.
The final guidelines also walked back a recommendation that preteens and teenagers should provide evidence of several years of persistently identifying as transgender, to differentiate from kids whose change in identification is recent, and changed it to a vaguer “sustained” gender incongruence. “In the end, the chapter sided with the trans advocates who didn’t want kids to have to wait through potentially painful years of physical development,” according to the Times.
The final guidelines acknowledged that because of the limited long-term research, treatment without a comprehensive diagnostic assessment “has no empirical support and therefore carries the risk that the decision to start gender-affirming medical interventions may not be in the long-term best interest of the young person at that time.”
Reuters found that gender facilities across the country are not conducting recommended months-long assessments before administering hormones to children. Parents of 28 of 39 minors who had sought transgender interventions told Reuters they “felt pressured or rushed to proceed with treatment.” Gender-care professionals also said some of their peers are “pushing too many families to pursue treatment for their children before they undergo the comprehensive assessments recommended in professional guidelines.”
Studying Causes of Gender Dysphoria
Some of the taxpayer-funded studies may bring clarity to the issue of gender dysphoria by examining its causes. One study will examine social media’s influence on children becoming transgender. A second will study “the life history calendar to examine young transgender women’s trajectories of violence, mental health, and protective processes.”
Another government-funded study will help determine how chromosomes, sexual organs, and hormones combine to create sex differences. Another will “uncover genetic underpinnings of female sexual orientation.”
This byline marks several different individuals, granted anonymity in cases where publishing an article on The Federalist would credibly threaten close personal relationships, their safety, or their jobs. We verify the identities of those who publish anonymously with The Federalist.
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President Joe Biden welcomed six progressive activists to the White House for the Now This News presidential forum. The woke news website forum featured Democrat-friendly topics such as gun legislation, abortion access, the “climate crisis,” criminal legal reform, economic instability, and trans rights. One of the interviewers was trans activist Dylan Mulvaney. Mulvaney – a biological male – begins the interview by saying, “Mr. president, this is my 221st day of publicly transitioning.” Biden – a self-proclaimed Catholic – responded, “God love you.”
Mulvaney – who lives in Los Angeles, California – responded, “I am extremely privileged to live in a state that allows me access to the resources I need, and that decision is just between me and my doctors, but many states have lawmakers that feel like they can involve themselves in this very personal process. Do you think states should have a right to ban gender-affirming health care?”
Biden replied, “I don’t think any state or anybody should have the right to do that as a moral question. As legal question, I just think it’s wrong.”
“You know, I think I was saying before we started that, my son, my deceased son used to be the attorney general state of Delaware,” Biden continued. “He passed the most the broadest piece of legislation.”
Biden claimed that his late son Beau Biden was able to convince others to enact legislation that dealt with “gender-affirming capability.”
Biden declared, “So I feel very, very strongly that that you should have every single solitary right including, including use of your gender identity bathrooms, but public.”
Mulvaney responded, “And it feels like Republicans have turned trans and non-binary people into this thing to blame society’s downfall on in some ways. And this narrative is not only dangerous to our mental health, but also our physical safety, and particularly trans women of color are being murdered at an alarming rate.”
Mulvaney asked, “How can Democratic leaders be more effective in advocating for us trans people in our families in our lives and our opportunities?”
Biden responded, “I’m not being facetious when I say this but being seen with people like you. I mean, I genuinely mean it.”
“People fear what they don’t know,” he continued. “They fear what they don’t know.”
Biden claimed that some states are participating in politics that are “outrageous” and “immoral.”
In June, Biden recommended that American children as young as 6-months-old should get the COVID-19 vaccine.
You can watch the entire Now This News presidential forum interview below.
Joe Biden Answers Burning Questions of Our Young People in NowThis Exclusivewww.youtube.com
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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