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Posts tagged ‘SEX CHANGE OPERATION’

Data: U.S. Hospitals Transitioned Nearly 6,000 Kids From 2019-2023


By: Ashley Bateman | October 11, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/10/11/data-u-s-hospitals-transitioned-nearly-6000-kids-from-2019-2023/

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New data shows U.S. hospitals performed at least 5,747 gender-disfiguring surgeries on minors between 2019 and 2023, according to a database released by Do No Harm, an advocacy group of medical professionals. The data also show 13,994 American children received other transgender treatments, such as puberty-blocking and opposite-sex hormones, in those four years.

Most of the children receiving such procedures were girls between the ages of 12 and 17, the database indicates. Medical practitioners made more than $119 million from the procedures, the data says.

This week, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) kicked out of its vendor hall four young Americans who returned to affirming their given sex after experiencing transgender medicine. A similar group of “desisters” met a warm welcome last month in Orlando, Florida, at the Catholic Medical Association’s Annual Educational Conference. That medical conference hosted 750 medical practitioners from around the nation and featured a panel of detransitioned young adults.

At the CMA event, seven young adults who were permanently injured by sex-transition procedures publicly explained the harm these treatments cause. These young adults were given a voice at a U.S. annual medical conference for the first time, to inform and educate health practitioners about the irreparable harm caused by “gender medicine.”

“CMA’s decision to invite detransitioners to speak at this year’s conference signals a deepening in the divisions in the medical community about how to best address gender distress in young people,” a CMA press release notes. “It also shows the commitment by CMA leaders to recognize and provide care to those harmed by these common practices.”

Particularly in American “gender medicine,” negative and harmful effects have been ignored, and at times suppressed, by some major medical organizations, said Tim Millea, MD, the chairman of CMA’s Conscience Rights Protection Task Force. He said this contradicts the long-held scientific tradition of allowing “ideas to be discussed and debated in an open, honest and transparent manner.”

‘Medicine’s Ability to Harm Is Nearly Limitless’

Pediatrician Patrick Hunter, a Florida Board of Medicine member, organized the panel. He said he was aiming to “bring to light to the harm that is being done, and to improve the overall care for trans-identified youth.”

“No one should want what is happening to these youth and young adults,” Hunter said. “The fact that harm and regret is happening should not be tolerated by our profession. The lack of concern and the unwillingness to acknowledge it should concern everyone in the medical profession.”

One detransitioner, Prisha Mosley, told CMA attendees she was manipulated by activists and therapists into accepting testosterone injections and a double mastectomy as a minor.

“It is important for doctors to learn how to stop the damage and to try and heal what’s been done. It is wrong for the very profession who hurt detransitioners to also routinely turn us away,” she said in the CMA’s press release about the event. “I’m grateful for any medical professional who is willing to listen.”

Hunter said he has heard from nearly 100 youth who regret their transitions and found the panelists’ stories “very painful.” “Medicine’s ability to harm is nearly limitless, while the ability to cure does have limitations,” Hunter said.

“This is why the principle of ‘First, do not harm’ is sound and universally accepted,” he said. “It acknowledges our need for humility, our need to know where our limits lie, and when we should and should not act.”

Refusing to Acknowledge Detransitioners

Hunter said he proposed the panel to multiple medical organizations, encouraging more groups to hear detransitioners speak. Both the AAP and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) rejected the proposal, he said, matching the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) stance of ignoring detransitioners. WPATH’s leadership has said that recognizing these patients is “considered off limits for many in our community.”

“Patients are being harmed by sex transition. That cannot be disputed,” Hunter said. “Medical evidence fails to show that patients will reliably benefit. If the medical profession will not recognize and learn from those that are being harmed, we are failing as professionals, but more importantly we are failing the patients that are being harmed. The medical profession has lost its way.”

The Stop the Harm Database highlights a “dirty dozen” of the U.S. hospitals that perform the most sex-disfigurement surgeries on minors. They are:

  • The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
  • Connecticut Children’s Medical Center
  • Children’s Minnesota
  • Seattle Children’s
  • Children’s Hospital Los Angeles
  • Boston Children’s Hospital
  • Rady Children’s Hospital
  • Children’s National Medical Center
  • UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland
  • Children’s Hospital Colorado
  • UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh
  • Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center

The database also lists the employers of the U.S. doctors who billed the most for performing child mutilation surgeries from 2019 to 2023. The top-billing doctor for child sex surgeries in that timeframe worked at Boston Children’s hospital and charged more than $5 million for the procedures.

“California, one of the first states to declare itself a ‘sanctuary state’ for transgender procedures, also had the most irreversible surgeries, with 1,359 minors undergoing surgical procedures, followed by Oregon with 357, Washington with 330, Pennsylvania with 316 and Massachusetts with 300,” Fox News reported on the Do No Harm data.

Warring Medical Organizations

Many European countries have curtailed or halted gender medicine interventions in approximately the last year, based on experience and research demonstrating its serious damage to children. Yet most American medical organizations have remained staunch advocates, dismissing well-documented risks and complications associated with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and transgender surgeries.

The United Kingdom’s release of the Cass Review in April and leaked WPATH files indicating that organization pushes medicine without informed consent sent clear messages about transgender medicine that American medical organizations such as the AMA and the AAP have largely dismissed or ignored. They are ignoring “objective and evidence-based data,” Millea said.

Still, some U.S. medical organizations do oppose gender mutilation, including the American College of Pediatricians, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, American College of Family Medicine, and the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. The “Doctors Protecting Children Declaration,” published by ACPEDS, represents thousands of health care workers who want such practices ended.

“A number of cases have been and will continue to be filed in courts around the country, challenging the federal and state mandates for transgender interventions and the freedom of medical professionals to challenge these methods and refuse to participate in them,” Millea said.

The CMA will support court cases to halt this harm in medicine, joining other organizations’ challenges in the form of amicus briefs, and if necessary, serving as plaintiffs, Millea said.

Last month, state attorneys general sent a letter to the AAP president demanding the AAP defend its support of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical interventions for minors with gender dysphoria. The attorney generals requested a thorough explanation of this non-evidence-based policy by October 8.

“I heard from many attendees that the panel discussion was the most important thing they heard all week, and maybe at any conference,” Hunter said. “The medical profession cannot remain silent any longer. We must take action and speak out. We must seek regulation of the profession so that evidence-based, ethical, and effective care is provided for trans-identified youth. We must return medicine to its roots where we care for the individual, and not use the patient to make money, or forward social or political agendas.”

Ashley Bateman is a policy writer for The Heartland Institute and blogger for Ascension Press. Her work has been featured in The Washington Times, The Daily Caller, The New York Post, The American Thinker and numerous other publications. She previously worked as an adjunct scholar for The Lexington Institute and as editor, writer and photographer for The Warner Weekly, a publication for the American military community in Bamberg, Germany. Ashley is a board member at a Catholic homeschool cooperative in Virginia. She homeschools her four incredible children along with her brilliant engineer/scientist husband.

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Georgia, Iowa Overcome Near-Unanimous Democrat Opposition To Ban Child Mutilation Surgeries


BY: VICTORIA MARSHALL | MARCH 23, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/03/23/georgia-iowa-overcome-near-unanimous-democrat-opposition-to-ban-child-mutilation-surgeries/

Young boy celebrating transgenderism

Republican Georgia and Iowa lawmakers sent bills banning sex-change procedures for minors to their governors’ desks this week. Iowa has passed its bill into law, while Georgia’s bill awaits Gov. Brian Kemp’s signature. Kemp has not said whether he’ll sign it.

Georgia Senate Bill 140, which passed along party lines, prohibits injecting children with hormones and surgically mutilating their bodies “for the treatment of gender dysphoria.” Doctors may still be able to prescribe puberty-blocking drugs, however, as the bill only blocks  “irreversible procedures or therapies.” Puberty blockers do inflict irreversible physical damage, but their proponents claim otherwise.

Parental rights advocates still welcome the bill as a step in the right direction.

“This new measure will give Georgia children the legal protections they desperately need,” Kimberly Fletcher, founder and president of Moms For America, said in a press release. “Too many states continue to defend sexual mutilation of children by refusing to implement laws that would properly protect them. This must change.”

On Wednesday, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed SF538 into law, which states that Iowa medical professionals “shall not knowingly engage in or cause any” treatments “for the purpose of attempting to alter the appearance of, or affirm the minor’s perception of, the minor’s gender or sex, if that appearance or perception is inconsistent with the minor’s sex.” The law also prevents doctors from removing a healthy or non-diseased body part or tissue, as well as banning the prescription of hormone blockers to complicate puberty.

“Children should not be pushed to receive experimental medical treatments that can leave them permanently sterile and physically marred for life,” Jeff Edler, a Republican state senator, told The Des Moines Register. “Iowa has a duty to protect its citizens, especially our children.”

In addition to banning body mutilation surgeries for children, Reynolds also signed SF482, a law that would prevent transgender-identifying students from using the opposite sex’s public-school bathrooms.

“Denying the truth that we are either male or female hurts real people, especially vulnerable children,” Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Matt Sharp said in a press release. “By enacting this legislation, Iowa has taken critical steps to protect children from radical activists that peddle gender ideology and pressure children into life-altering, experimental procedures and drugs. Young people deserve to live in a society that doesn’t subject them to risky experiments to which they cannot effectively consent.”

Georgia and Iowa join eight other states that have passed protections for children from sex-change surgeries, including Mississippi, Florida, Utah, Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, South Dakota, and Tennessee. Missouri and Kentucky’s legislatures have passed similar bills that are awaiting their governors’ signatures.

Victoria Marshall is a staff writer at The Federalist. Her writing has been featured in the New York Post, National Review, and Townhall. She graduated from Hillsdale College in May 2021 with a major in politics and a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @vemrshll.

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Doctors: Biden Administration’s Dangerous Push for Trans Treatments for Kids Falsifies Science


REPORTED BY: JANE ROBBINS | APRIL 19, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/04/19/doctors-biden-administrations-dangerous-push-for-trans-treatments-for-kids-falsifies-science/

pride parade

HHS isn’t run by honest medical professionals. It’s in the grip of ideologues determined to destroy troubled children.

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The nation’s public-health establishment lost all credibility during the Covid era by either ignoring or politicizing scientific data. But health bureaucrats seem to have learned nothing. With respect to the highly charged issue of gender dysphoria, they continue to substitute politics for science when necessary to advance the leftist narrative.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently released an official document designed to enshrine experimental medical interventions as the standard treatment for transgender-identifying children. Prepared by HHS’s Office of Population Affairs (OPA), the document is a political statement unmoored from actual medical research.

According to “Gender-Affirming Care and Young People,” medical interventions such as puberty-blocking drugs, wrong-sex hormones, and surgical mutilation are “crucial to overall health” of young people confused about their sex. (For what it’s worth, OPA falls under the supervision of Dr. Rachel Levine, a man who identifies as a woman.) The document complements a proposed rule announced by HHS in March, mandating insurance coverage for such “gender-affirming care.”

But the claims made in HHS’s new release have been deftly dismantled by an organization of physicians and scientists who still care about reality, and about ethical medical practice. The Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) — which exists “to promote safe, compassionate, ethical and evidence-informed healthcare for children, adolescents, and young adults with gender dysphoria” — points out that HHS’s discussion is deeply misleading and indeed dangerous. SEGM identifies seven serious misrepresentations of fact crammed into the two-page HHS document. Most of these involve cherry-picking, distorting, or simply ignoring the results of studies on the many facets of so-called gender-affirming treatment.

HHS Mischaracterizes Studies

For example, HHS flatly mischaracterizes a study that failed to find any benefits of “social transition” (presenting oneself as the opposite sex, with a new name, hairstyle, dress, etc.). As SEGM notes, the HHS document cites that study for the opposite conclusion, “wrongly assert[ing] that social transition improves functioning.” HHS presumably assumes readers won’t read the actual study and thus will accept the agency’s false claims about its findings.

SEGM identifies other falsifications of the supposed mental-health benefits of wrong-sex hormones and surgeries. HHS’s “claims of benefits coming from cherry-picked studies do not hold up when the entire body of evidence is properly evaluated in a systematic and reproducible way,” according to SEGM.  

The design of the studies cited by HHS made it impossible to link medical interventions and improved mental health, SEGM observes. By contrast, multiple European studies “concluded that there is a lack of convincing evidence for the mental health benefit for children and adolescents of either puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones.”

SEGM notes, in fact, that the Swedish health authority warned that “the risks of puberty suppressing treatment . . . and gender-affirming hormonal treatment currently outweigh the possible benefits, and that the treatments should be offered only in exceptional cases.”

HHS ignored all this research, which would have led honest medical professionals to at least acknowledge the scholarly debate about the wisdom of these interventions. But HHS isn’t run by honest medical professionals. It’s in the grip of ideologues determined to drive troubled children and their families into the clutches of the trans industry.

Dishonest Use of Data on Suicide

SEGM also criticizes the HHS document for dishonesty about the related issue of suicide among trans-identifying youth. In claiming alarmingly high rates of suicidal ideation in this population — a claim routinely used to pressure desperate parents into consenting to dangerous medical interventions — HHS relies only on “a low quality, non-probability online survey.”

In fact, SEGM reports, “recent research from one of the world’s largest pediatric gender clinics estimated the rate of suicide in trans-identified youth as 0.03% over a 10-year period, which is comparable to youth presenting for care with mental health problems.”

Even more critically, despite HHS’s strong implication that drugs, hormones, and surgeries reduce suicide rates, SEGM clarifies that “no study to date has demonstrated that transition reduces the rate of serious suicide attempts.” Is HHS afraid that telling the truth about suicide will make parents less likely to place their troubled children on the trans-industry conveyor belt?

Puberty Blockers Are Not Fully Reversible

The mendacity of HHS extends beyond misrepresenting or ignoring studies. For example, the document states, without supporting citation, that puberty blockers are fully reversible (i.e., natural puberty will resume once the drugs are discontinued). But SEGM warns about the utter dearth of research supporting this claim. In fact,

concerns have been raised that puberty blockers are psychologically irreversible (since over 95% of all treated youth proceed to cross-sex hormones), that they may harm bone development, may permanently alter the brain, that it is not yet known how they affect other vital organs, all of which undergo significant structural changes during uninterrupted puberty.

Once again, public-health agencies in Europe are more honest. As SEGM reports, Britain’s National Health Service says that “[l]ittle is known about the long-term side effects of hormone or puberty blockers in children with gender dysphoria.”

But ignoring the risks of these interventions is HHS’s modus operandi. SEGM calls out the HHS ideologues for mentioning only the supposed (in some cases imaginary) benefits of interventions while failing to mention documented risks to bone development, cardiovascular health, and the mental health of patients who later regret their transition decisions.

Sterility Expected After Trans Treatments

SEGM particularly targets HHS’s failure to mention the effect on reproductive health, which is supposed to be the focus of Levine’s Office of Population Affairs. “When puberty blockers are administered in early puberty and followed by cross-sex hormones,” SEGM notes, “sterility is expected.”

HHS is silent about this potentially devastating consequence. Nor does it acknowledge the “serious ethical questions about whether adolescents can be considered competent to waive their future reproductive rights at an age when they are unlikely to be able to appreciate or predict the importance of fertility to their adult selves.”

Ethics, it appears, is not HHS’s strong suit.

HHS also misleads in stating that mutilating surgeries are “typically used in adulthood or case-by-case in adolescence.” In fact, as SEGM notes, draft recommendations from the influential (though highly politicized) World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) urge broad availability of mastectomies to patients at age 16.

Even worse, patients as young as 13 had their healthy breasts removed as part of a study funded by the National Institutes of Health – i.e., by you and me through our tax dollars. The HHS bureaucrats who prepared this report surely knew this, but distort the facts.

This HHS document, then, is a farce. As SEGM summarizes, HHS inadequately reviewed the scientific literature, issued “biased recommendations that do not acknowledge the low quality of evidence,” failed to solicit input from professionals and patients whose experiences contradict the government narrative, and utterly ignored possible alternatives to medical interventions, such as psychotherapy. The result:

This incomplete representation of the relevant issues is likely to mislead the public to believe that this is the best and only alternative, particularly when no other alternatives are mentioned. The public is also likely to erroneously assume that the risks of affirmative care are low. Patients and families are not capable of providing valid informed consent when the information they receive is inaccurate and incomplete

If the public-health establishment wants to rehabilitate its tattered reputation after the Covid debacle, this isn’t the way to do it. Health policy is too important to be entrusted to political hacks.

Jane Robbins is an attorney and a retired senior fellow with the American Principles Project in Washington DC. In that position she crafted federal and state legislation designed to restore the constitutional autonomy of states and parents in education policy, and to protect the rights of religious freedom and conscience. She is a graduate of Clemson University and the Harvard Law School.

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