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.
“The Detransition Diaries: Saving Our Sisters” is a cautionary tale that exposes not only how influential the spread of trans ideology is on social media and in doctors’ offices, schools, and therapy sessions, but also how that same ideology weaponizes vulnerable young women’s identity struggle against them.
The film from the Center for Bioethics and Culture documents the testimonies of three women — Helena, Cat, and Grace — who went through various forms of so-called “gender-affirming” prescriptions and procedures only to discover that the wrongly named “treatments” marketed to make them feel better about their bodies did more harm than good.
The featured women do not shy away from mentioning the irreversible procedures and damage this mutilative movement had on their bodies and souls, but they also don’t leave viewers feeling hopelessly doomed in a world that works overtime to normalize the destruction of healthy bodies.
Social Contagion
The documentary starts with the women explaining not just how they learned about transgender ideology but why it appealed to them.
“I don’t think anybody would have described me as gender nonconforming, or a tomboy or anything like that,” Helena admitted.
Though Helena said she never would have been considered “gender nonconforming” or even a tomboy, after hours of scrolling Tumblr, the social contagion of transgender ideology took root in her mind and began fueling her mental health problems.
“By the time I was about 13, I started to feel really depressed. I started self-harming. I started developing an eating disorder. That kind of isolation led me to go on Tumblr because I was spending a lot of time online generally,” Helena said. “I was introduced to a belief system that it had a lot to do with gender, but it was more like, ‘If you don’t fit in, that’s a sign that you’re trans. If you don’t like your body, that’s a sign that you’re trans. And if you transition, all these problems will be fixed.’”
Similar to Helena, Cat’s interest in “transitioning” was piqued when she was 13 after she visited a website boasting all things trans, prompting her to determine she had gender dysphoria.
Grace testified that she had “a lifelong like preoccupation and discomfort with my body” that turned out to be a “very normal sort of young adult female issues.” It’s not uncommon for children and young adults like Grace to feel uncomfortable in their growing bodies, but the vast majority outgrow their sex-related woes if left alone. For instance, in one Canadian study of boys with gender-identity disorder released last year, over time, nearly 88 percent of the subjects “desisted,” or abandoned their desire to identify as the opposite sex.
Grace, however, wasn’t left alone. After years of feeling “lost,” suicidal, and depressed, she jumped at the opportunity to alter her body. Grace also attributed her eventual decision to take testosterone and go through with a double mastectomy at 23, something she said she regrets, to “trans influencers” online.
“I was looking at trans influencers who had the body that I wanted and reading all of that stuff like the happy testimonials, also feeling the hysteria of the online trans community which was really freaking out because Donald Trump was president and they’re like, ‘Oh, it’s going to be illegal to transition.’ It felt like it was a little bit of time pressure,” Grace said.
How could vulnerable young women not entertain the idea of “transitioning” when it is marketed as the end-all to their mental distress? Especially since it is plastered all over social media, and “doctors” advertising castration and mutilation get endless positive press coverage.
There’s plenty of scientific evidence to suggest that kids, especially girls, are heavily influenced by this shameless online trans peddling and the ideology’s popularity among their friends. That’s why “transition” procedures on U.S female adolescents alone quadrupled between 2016 and 2017.
The online world of trans ideology is so pervasive that when Grace began to question whether amputating her breasts was a wise decision, she admitted that she believed she was experiencing “internalized transphobia.”
As Helena explained, it was easy to get swept up into the world of “social justice ideology” with just a few taps on a screen:
In this social justice ideology, there’s kind of a hierarchy of who is the most oppressed versus who is the most privileged. The further along you are on the oppressed scale, that means you know that your opinion is listened to more. I found myself in this place where I had found the only community of other girls who are more like me in terms of personality. I could relate to them, but it was so enmeshed in this kind of belief system that made me feel really guilty about being a cis, straight, white girl. You begin to feel a kind of pressure to constantly apologize for yourself. “OK, well, how do I not be this privileged person anymore?” And one thing that’s really easy to do is just change your pronouns.
Changing pronouns, of course, was just the beginning. Eventually, Helena, Cat, and Grace all began taking testosterone.
Beyond the Screen
When Helena didn’t get the affirmation she wanted from her parents over her gender confusion, she sought help from her school’s guidance counselor and psychologist, both of whom were more than willing to push the teen to “transition” behind her parents’ backs.
“Ironically, one of the things that really kind of supported my idea of being trans was that before I was trans, none of the adults in my life at school or anything really cared that much. They didn’t really see that I was struggling. But when I said I was trans, then they all wanted to like bend over backwards to help me be trans,” she said.
Helena eventually found an in with a medical office that, after she requested it, prescribed her the maximum dosage of testosterone on her first visit.
Unfortunately, it is not uncommon for public school officials to urge and aid kids who want to reject their sex. This is documented well on the Libs of TikTok Twitter account. But schools aren’t the only trans-crazed accomplices.
“After just a 30-minute conversation, the doctor prescribed testosterone over the phone,” Cat said. “It was pretty clear she did not look at my chart, because she would have seen some things that would at least be cause for concern, because like I had a history of suicide attempts, I had been institutionalized before, I had been to inpatient eating-disorder treatment. The outcome of that conversation was, ‘Here’s your drugs.’”
At first, the young women saw what they believed was an improvement in their sex-related confusion and other problems.
“It did kind of feel like, you know, one of the better antidepressants that I’d ever taken in my life,” Cat recalled.
Eventually, however, Helena, Cat, and Grace all learned that taking drugs designed to inhibit their bodies’ natural functions was not the cure they’d hoped it would be. It ultimately left them feeling physically ill, angry, and even more depressed than before.
But in the case of Helena, who was on testosterone for 17 months, her health professionals never considered her symptoms to be a result of the male hormone. Instead, she was prescribed more medications to combat what her hospital’s psych unit deemed borderline personality disorder and psychosis.
“My life just became like a total disaster,” Helena said. “I wasn’t functioning at all. I wasn’t holding down a job. I wasn’t going to school. I just felt like a monster. Once I stopped the testosterone, the symptoms all went away and I started feeling like myself again.”
It was then that Helena gave up on the idea of doing surgeries, saying, “I just became so dysfunctional that I wasn’t really able to have the mental wherewithal to go through the process of calling surgeons, dealing with insurance.”
Cat, a singer, had plans to dive deeper into the trans world with a double mastectomy and legal name change but paused those when she realized “how detrimental the changes to my voice had been and how devastated I was that I had made irreversible changes to myself.”
Grace, who went through with her double mastectomy, experienced regret and the unnerving feeling that no matter how much she altered her body, “this will never be over for me.”
“I just was realizing that there might not be a light at the end of the tunnel like I thought there was. I also don’t really feel like a man, I just feel like a woman who has had her breasts cut off,” Grace admitted.
It was then that she began thinking about all of the irreversible damage her body was subjected to because she was told it was necessary to combat her gender confusion.
“I’m concerned that the testosterone may have affected my fertility and potentially will cause me some like infertility issues, but I really don’t know,” Grace said. “…I feel, I think more than anything else, regret over that. I just hadn’t been thinking about having children at that time. I didn’t think I really wanted them, and that’s something that I began to really want in my mid-20s.”
All Hope Is Not Lost
There were plenty of people, organizations, and resources available to Helena, Cat, and Grace when they first considered “transitioning,” but support for their “detransition” was severely lacking — so they started doing their own research.
“I started looking into a lot of studies, and what I found is that there actually isn’t much quality evidence supporting medical transition as the best treatment,” Cat said. “I started to grow concerned with scientific and medical misinformation being tried by the trans community.”
These young women found a way around the smokescreen with help from truthtellers such as Posie Parker, who ignored the threat of censorship from Big Tech to state hard and fast truths about sex.
“I went on YouTube, and I just searched ‘trans women aren’t women’ because I had never ever listened to gender-critical people or TERFs because I was just told they were hateful people,” Cat explained.
Helena found solace in talking to others like her who had started taking hormones and considering surgeries before waking up to the deception.
“I realized that like, oh, OK, there’s a lot of people going through this. It’s not just a handful of people. It’s like hundreds and thousands of people going through this. And so once I started meeting these people, I just started having conversations,” she said.
Those conversations are why it’s so important for young women like Helena, Cat, and Grace to share their stories.
“I’m really worried about other people who are getting sucked into thinking that gender transition is the answer to problems that would be better solved elsewhere,” Grace said. “I am hopeful, but I think it’s going to be a really ugly time. … The fallout is going to be really severe from all of the detransitioners. … But our voices can no longer be denied.”
Helena, Cat, and Grace will be labeled transphobic and hateful for speaking up, but their transparency offers a message of warning and of hope for real care that parents, policymakers, and people all around the world need to hear: Mangling healthy bodies is a sickness, not a cure.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
Long the nation’s chief abortion provider, Planned Parenthood has branched out. Its latest endeavor? Sterilizing America’s youth. Planned Parenthood has quietly been in the gender transition business since at least 2017. Today, more than a third of its offices — 239 clinics in more than 40 states — provide transgender services. And it’s not stopping there.
While those seeking puberty blockers or surgical procedures are referred elsewhere, Planned Parenthood is offering access to cross-sex hormones, promoting gender ideology in sex ed programs, and establishing “well-being centers” in local high schools. The organization is looking to cash in on gender transition for years to come.
Easy Access
Just how readily does Planned Parenthood provide the gender-confused with cross-sex hormones? Consider the case of detransitioner Helena Kirschner. She received testosterone during her first visit — without blood work or a mental health referral.
Sadly, Kirschner is not the exception. Offices guarantee that patients can receive hormones without an evaluation of their mental health. They also promise that, in most cases, patients can expect same-day prescriptions.
Already thousands of kids are getting hormones like candy. Three California regional offices of Planned Parenthood recorded almost 4,000 gender-related visits from July 2019 to June 2021. In one California region, more than 750 cycles of hormones were prescribed in a year. These numbers are not representative for California; other Planned Parenthood offices in the state don’t even bother reporting these services.
Planned Parenthood offices state they only offer hormones to minors aged 16 or older with parental consent, but that is not the whole truth. In California, minors may receive “sensitive care,” like transition services, without parental permission. Given Planned Parenthood’s past deception, there’s no reason to think the organization won’t bend its own rules for profit.
And that’s just California. Thirty-three states plus D.C. have laws that, to some degree, allow minors to obtain routine health care without parental consent. In states where “gender affirming care” is deemed “medically necessary,” minors may be able to transition without parents knowing. And hormones may just be one Planned Parenthood appointment away.
All of this is deeply troubling. Despite Planned Parenthood’s deceptive marketing, transition is not proven to be the best medical practice. We know that 88 to 98 percent of gender dysphoric kids will reconcile with their biological sex if allowed to go through puberty “untreated.” Moreover, those who do transition are estimated to be 19 times more likely to commit suicide than their peers.
Comprehensive Sex-Ed
Even before Planned Parenthood helps minors transition, it teaches them to desire it. Across the country, schools hire Planned Parenthood or its affiliates to lead sex ed. And its reach is not insignificant. Nationally, 1.2 million students receive Planned Parenthood’s affiliate sex ed programming each year, according to the organization’s last annual report.
While curriculum requirements vary by state, these programs promote everything from abortion and the morning-after pill to gender fluidity and transition. By indoctrinating youth, the abortion giant creates the demand it needs to profit from gender services.
Well-Being Centers
But creating demand does not stop with sex ed. Planned Parenthood wants to cement a permanent school-to-clinic pipeline. In 2019, the abortion giant announced it would open 50 “wellbeing centers” in Los Angeles high schools. These centers will offer “health and wellness education services, sexual health services,” and more. Innocuous as these services appear, they exist to market Planned Parenthood’s services. Handpicked staff will provide transition support and chemical abortion.
Ultimately, Planned Parenthood’s rapid expansion of services should raise alarm. Planned Parenthood is no longer a danger just to the pregnant and the unborn, but to every teen as well.
Legislation Needed
Thankfully, state and federal policymakers can help protect minors from falling prey to these “services.” By enacting bills like Arkansas’ SAFE Act, states could stop Planned Parenthood and others’ efforts to mislead minors. Instead of passing bills that undermine parental rights (as California has done), states should work to ensure parental rights are upheld and respected.
In Congress, members must remain vigilant against the Equality Act, which would make the school-to-surgery pipeline a permanent fixture of American society. Lawmakers should also consider Hyde-like riders to ensure the Biden administration can’t redirect federal dollars to help Planned Parenthood sterilize our kids.
Elected officials who haven’t been bought out by woke corporations can learn from the far-left’s tone deafness. Policies that protect kids and empower parents are popular with voters, especially parents. By championing parents and children, legislators can stop bad actors like Planned Parenthood from preying on the vulnerable.
Jared Eckert is a research assistant in The Heritage Foundation’s DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family. Emma Sofia Mull is a graduate of the think tank’s Young Leaders Program.
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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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