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Posts tagged ‘JAMIE REED’


Pumping Gender-Bending Drugs Into Kids Is Even More Dangerous Than We Thought

BY: SAMUEL SILVESTRO AND JAY W. RICHARDS | MARCH 30, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/03/30/pumping-gender-bending-drugs-into-kids-is-even-more-dangerous-than-we-thought/

A doctor holds a needle filled with "gender-affirming" drugs.
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.

Author Samuel Silvestro and Jay W. Richards profile

SAMUEL SILVESTRO AND JAY W. RICHARDS

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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 FinnishFrench, 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, AlabamaArkansasArizonaMississippiSouth DakotaTennesseeUtah, 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.

‘Queer’ Whistleblower Exposes Evils of the School-To-Scalpel Pipeline


BY: IAN PRIOR | FEBRUARY 15, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/15/queer-whistleblower-exposes-evils-of-the-school-to-scalpel-pipeline/

doctors performing surgery
Schools have become a pipeline for a dangerous transgender ideology that is gruesomely taking advantage of children and their parents.

Author Ian Prior profile

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Last week, a whistleblower came forward in The Free Press to expose how the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital engages in experimental interventions (aka “gender-affirming care”) on children that are “permanently harming the vulnerable patients in [their] care.”

The stories Jamie Reed outlines are horrific. Young girls were given testosterone, with gruesome side effects. Mentally ill individuals were chemically castrated with virtually no attempt to find another alternative. Parents were kept out of the loop, and people permanently altered their bodies as children, only to regret the decision shortly after. For the majority of these individuals, it is already too late.

Let’s get this straight. They are taking children who are sexually “confused” and feed them more information that ADDS to their confusion, then support that confusion by talking them into having life altering surgeries, WITHOUT PARENTAL KNOWLEDGE (in some cases), and then leave them alone to fend for themselves as a mutilated creature. We need to apologize to Dr. Frankenstein.

Many of us have heard these stories before and have been desperately trying to get people to pay attention. Calling out the transgender agenda for what it truly is, an experiment on our nation’s children, of course, comes with backlash from trigger-happy leftists who deem this language “hateful,” “transphobic,” or “anti-LGBT.” For conservatives, that reality is something we have learned to live with.

The risk for the whistleblower was far greater. Reed describes herself as “a queer woman, and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders” and is “married to a transman.” Her social and political circles are undoubtedly populated by people of similar viewpoints who are likely very supportive of so-called “gender-affirming care.”

This background is important — to come out as she did and to expose the horrors she witnessed at the St. Louis Children’s Hospital will almost certainly earn her a scarlet letter from her social and professional circle. She will likely face the realities of unemployment and social humiliation for standing up for the truth. She already knows the risks yet also knew that standing up on this issue was far more important.

Not only is this incredibly courageous, but it should be a message to others on the left who listen to the antics of glory seekers like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and her ilk, who have blamed the pushback for these practices on the “radical right.”

The whistleblower’s story is gut-wrenching in and of itself, but it reveals the endgame of drugs and surgery to chemically castrate and irreversibly damage children physically and mentally. That endgame does not happen in isolation.

It begins at school.

Schools Indoctrinate Early

In the early years of children’s K-12 education, they get to read books like “It Feels So Good to Be Yourself,” an illustrated book for ages 4-8 that encourages kids to question their sex at any age. One example in the book is Ruthie, a biological boy who tells his parents that the doctors got it wrong, and he is now a girl. Ruthie is 5 years old.

As children get older and enter puberty, the books encouraging this only grow more plentiful. Students will often see titles such as “Beyond Magenta: Transgender and Nonbinary Teens Speak Out” prominently displayed in their school libraries

Meanwhile, school policies are changed to allow students to use the bathrooms and locker rooms of the sex with which they “identify,” to compete in sex-segregated athletic events pursuant to the sex with which they “identify,” and to be referred to by the “pronouns” they desire, regardless of whether other students and teachers have religious or moral objections.

Students who “identify” as a different sex are effectively given rights above and beyond everyone else. It’s no wonder young adolescents would deal with their growing pains in a way that gives them a feeling of acceptance, validation, and being part of a new “civil right.” In other words, a social contagion takes root.

Children are especially vulnerable to this phenomenon. When this was highlighted in Abigail Shrier’s book “Irreversible Damage,” the transgender lobby went on the attack, and her book was pulled from the shelves of Target. Those who dare suggest a social contagion is at play will be met with articles from corporate media citing so-called “experts” denying its existence. But now even a far-left whistleblower tells us of “clusters of girls” arriving at the clinic “from the same high school,” and says that “the doctors privately recognized these false self-diagnoses as a manifestation of social contagion.”

As this is all going on, schools work overtime to keep parents in the dark. Don’t like books encouraging transgenderism? Too bad, the book stays on the shelf and you had better hope you like being branded a “book banner.”

Even worse, schools require that staff not share with a student’s parents that their child is identifying as a different sex while at school. The reason? They consider transgender interventions to be health care, as articulated by President Joe Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services. Therefore, if you are not providing such health care to your child, you are a child abuser. They often won’t say this out loud or call Child Protective Services on you, but make no mistake — it’s coming.

Resisting the Profit Seekers

None of this is to say there aren’t actual cases of gender dysphoria that occur when a person feels a persistent incongruence or disconnect between their biological sex and the one with which they identify. These cases are extremely rare (in .06 percent of the population), and approximately 75 percent of children with gender dysphoria will age out of this condition.

Further, and as noted first by Shrier and then by the whistleblower herself, prior to the 2010s the vast majority of cases involved boys, but beginning in 2015, “teenage girls, many with no previous history of gender distress, suddenly declared they were transgender and demanded immediate treatment with testosterone.”

Dealing with the rare cases of gender dysphoria is not what is happening, however. Rather, the powers that be have set up academia to become a pipeline for a dangerous ideology that is gruesomely taking advantage of children and their parents. That ideology denies biology to provide customers for a rapidly expanding market that has experienced exponential monetary growth and is on pace to grow 11.23 percent over the next 10 years to become a $5 billion industry.

If you speak out, you will face repercussions. The activists in the space do not play by the rules, and they will seek to cancel and destroy you for daring to question the mutilation of children. But if we have learned anything from the St. Louis Children’s Hospital whistleblower, it is that people must stand up to stop this unethical, dangerous, and anti-science war of physical destruction being waged on children, regardless of politics.


Ian Prior is a senior advisor to America First Legal and author of upcoming book “Parents of the World Unite!”

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