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‘Detransitioners’ Are Being Abandoned by Medical Professionals Who Devastated Their Bodies and Minds


BY: KELSEY BOLAR | FEBRUARY 10, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/10/detransitioners-are-being-abandoned-by-medical-professionals-who-devastated-their-bodies-and-minds/

detransitioner Prisha Mosley sits on a bed in her room telling her story
Health providers won’t help detransitioners who seek to undo the damage of transgender surgery and hormones.

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After being swarmed by health providers who enabled her to medically transition as a minor, Prisha Mosley now says she’s been abandoned by the medical community as she attempts to navigate a complicated and painful detransition.

“I was under the impression that my doctors, who were transitioning me, loved me. They said they didn’t want me to die, they were saving my life, they were worried about me, and they wanted me to be healthy and happy,” Prisha told me. “Clearly, they don’t love me. As soon as it’s not profitable, they don’t want to help.”

Prisha has a slew of medical complications dating back to the more than five years she spent on testosterone and a double mastectomy that a plastic surgeon performed shortly after she turned 18. Many of those complications surround her endocrine system, which encompasses the hormones that regulate nearly every process in the body, from metabolism to growth and development, emotions, mood, sexual function, and sleep.

“I was hoping that if I could get my endocrine system working, I could be on less psychiatric medicine because low testosterone and estrogen will cause depression and anxiety, both of which I’m medicated for and don’t really like being medicated for,” she said.

Prisha also hopes that with estrogen supplements, she’ll experience some muscle and fat redistribution. After years of testosterone broadened her neck and shoulders, she now carries more weight in her upper body, which causes her chronic pain. Her throat is sore, she can no longer sing or raise her voice, and she suffers hair loss, as well as hair growth on her body, which she has to treat with costly laser hair removal sessions.

Another side-effect Prisha is seeking medical attention for is severe sexual dysfunction, which is so bad, she says she can no longer use tampons.

“I used to be able to, and now I can’t,” she said. “And that sucks. There’s pain, there’s irregular periods, and atrophy.”

No Medical Professionals Will Help

Hormonal care to fix her endocrine system, she hopes, could help her become more feminine — and perhaps fertile again. But she said every primary care physician, endocrinologist, obstetrician, and gynecologist she’s approached on her insurance list has turned her away or said they can’t help.

“I could call and be rejected every single day,” according to Prisha.

Professional organizations that represent many of these providers claim to offer open, inclusive, supportive care for “transgender” and “gender diverse” individuals. That offering, it appears, doesn’t apply to individuals seeking to detransition.

Prisha isn’t the only detransitioner who feels abandoned by the medical institutions that pushed her into wrong-sex hormones and surgery. Over the past year, Independent Women’s Forum has documented multiple stories of detransitioners who also report being abandoned by medical and mental health professionals after deciding to detransition.

“I reached out to every physician, every therapist who is involved with this, and I haven’t really gotten any help at all,” said Chloe Cole, an 18-year-old who was fast-tracked down a medical transition as a child by a team of eager doctors. Left to navigate the detransition process on her own, Chloe stopped taking testosterone “cold turkey,” and is still struggling with urinary and other complications that doctors have yet to help fix.

Cat Cattinson, a woman who medically transitioned to a wrong-sex identity in her 20s before realizing it was a major mistake, said access to medical care from providers who are knowledgeable is one of the major barriers detransitioners face:

Because of the experimental nature of gender medicine, doctors know very little about the long-term effects of medical transition and even less about the health-care needs of those who detransition. Surgeries, obviously, are irreversible, but hormonal interventions can also have lasting effects requiring treatment to mitigate. Testosterone caused irreversible changes to my vocal cords, resulting in daily discomfort and pain, but most ENTs [ear, nose, and throat doctors] and other voice ‘professionals’ are not informed about how testosterone affects a female voice or how to help someone in my situation.

Prisha doesn’t know why she’s been turned away from so many doctors and medical providers — whether it’s about money, politics, or a lack of knowledge to help. If it’s the latter, one might ask why medical professionals are allowed to put individuals, including minors, on drugs and “treatments” that they’re unable to later undo or address, should that patient change his or her mind.

Whatever the reason, the inability to access medical attention is having a profound effect on Prisha, beyond her physical health.

Prisha’s Mental Health Struggles

Prisha, who attends school in Big Rapids, Michigan, has a long and complicated history with borderline personality disorder, anxiety, depression, and other mental illnesses. Now 24, Prisha says she used transitioning as a cover for her deeper-rooted mental health issues.

Since detransitioning, Prisha’s been in dialectical behavior therapy to manage her borderline personality disorder — therapy she credits with saving her life.

“When I treated that, all of the symptoms started getting better,” she said. “Nothing that I did to transition treated those things that were causing me mental suffering.”

But now as a detransitioner, even her therapy treatment is in disarray. A few months back, Prisha lost her health insurance because she couldn’t afford it. Under her new insurance, instead of being charged $10 per therapy appointment, she is being charged $96, an increase she wasn’t aware of for five months. Prisha now owes nearly $3,000 to her therapist, a service she depends on.

Upon going public with her story, Prisha started a campaign to raise money for breast reconstructive surgery, something she wishes to pursue to resolve the “phantom breast syndrome” she often experiences, and to appear more feminine. 

But because the surgery is not deemed “a medical necessity,” Prisha would have to pay for it fully out-of-pocket. She would also need at least two surgeries to stretch her skin and reconstruct her breasts, estimated at more than $11,000 each. During this process, Prisha says she was told she would risk losing her nipples, which her plastic surgeon removed and reattached in more masculine positions.

The dream of breast reconstructive surgery and the $4,000 she’s raised for it thus far were put on hold, as Prisha is left using every penny she has to pay for her therapy and basic health insurance coverage.

“I feel like it’s like a bottomless pit — the medical needs, and I need the therapy because I can barely do this,” she said. “And I’m absolutely not going to, once again, medicalize my body without taking care of my mind.”

Now in debt and being rejected by one doctor after another, Prisha is at a loss for what to do. In an act of desperation, she turned to Plume, a company that has raised millions of dollars to connect patients with physicians who can prescribe them “gender-affirming hormone replacement therapy” online, including a “one-time medical letter of support for surgery with a one week turnaround time” for a fee of $150. But this time, instead of affirming her identity as the opposite sex, Prisha sought the help of Plume to get blood tests and hormone treatments to affirm her true sex: a woman.

Screenshot of Plume website.

After paying $99 and scheduling an appointment with a provider, Prisha said she was “ghosted” 40 minutes before the appointment. Plume hasn’t responded to Prisha’s requests for an explanation or even a refund. She suspects the provider canceled last minute because Prisha disclosed that she was “detrans” in initial paperwork she completed just minutes before the canceled appointment. After she submitted her intake forms, “All contact dropped off,” Prisha said. She then took to YouTube to share her devastation.

“I don’t know what to do, I don’t know who to go to because no one will help,” Prisha said through tears. “I was really hoping that they would care about me and help me. I just want to feel better. I just want to be better. I don’t want my body to be like this anymore. I’m in pain. … I can’t take it anymore.”

Independent Women’s Forum reached out to Plume to ask whether the company offers its services to detransitioners. Plume did not respond to our request. 

The situation led Prisha to consider self-medicating. But due to her family history with mental illness and addiction, she’s doing everything in her power to resist that path.  

“I’m feeling pushed to go that route because no doctor will help me,” she said. “It is deeply triggering my [borderline personality disorder] abandonment and rejection issues. It’s really easy to slip into the mindset that everyone hates me, I’m a medical monster, I’m bad and evil, and I deserve this.”

“It’s just being abandoned,” Prisha added. “I feel abandoned.”

Kelsey Bolar is a contributor to The Federalist and a senior policy analyst at Independent Women’s Forum. She is also the Thursday editor of BRIGHT, a weekly newsletter for women, and the 2017 Tony Blankley Chair at The Steamboat Institute. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband, daughter, and Australian Shepherd, Utah.

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Masculinity Isn’t Toxic, Our Erasure of It Is


BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE | JANUARY 17, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/01/17/masculinity-isnt-toxic-our-erasure-of-it-is/

Sam Smith
Those who wrote off masculinity as ‘toxic’ never truly understood the concept.

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Sam Smith does not look healthy.

Last week, conservative journalist Andy Ngo published screenshots of the singer’s Instagram page. On the left, Smith is seen handsomely seated with his prestigious Oscar. The ensuing photos highlight his attempt to transition into someone who is “non-binary,” or a person who believes he was born a third sex or above the sexes altogether. The logic defies everything we know about human biology down to the binary nature of our chromosomes.

No one seems to know what a woman is these days, but does anyone even remember what a man is? Smith’s progression in Ngo’s photos underscores the erasure of cultural masculinity declared “toxic” by millennials. When you lose sight of what it means to be a man — what it means to look like a man, act like a man, and live like a man — you de facto lose the values that form the foundation of healthy masculinity. But our culture doesn’t even know what a man is.

Around this time last year, my Federalist colleague John Daniel Davidson provided a definition.

“If we’re going to defend manliness as good and virtuous and necessary for a healthy republic, then we need to be clear about what it is and what it is not,” he wrote, continuing:

Yes, men should be physically strong. They should also exemplify traditional masculine virtues like courage, independence, and assertiveness. But why? Not so they can sh-tpost about how ripped or good-looking they are compared to libs, but so they can protect and defend those who are weak.

That is the organizing principle behind the entire concept of manliness: it is not a style or a pose or an adornment. It is a way of being, of living according to the principle that you are responsible for the welfare of others, and should sacrifice yourself for their sake.

What does that mean in practice? It means stepping in to help those in need, whether it’s a woman being harassed or a stranger whose car has broken down. It means risking your own safety to protect someone being attacked, instead of just filming the attack on your phone and posting it online like a beta.

It also means marrying and remaining faithful to the same woman your entire life, and raising a family with her. It means working whatever hours and at whatever job in order to provide for that family. It means going to church every Sunday, whether you feel like it or not, to pass your faith on to your kids. It means getting up in the middle of the night to feed a colicky baby. It means taking your two-year-old daughter to swim class and singing all the songs — your own sense of dignity be damned.

I’m not sure I could write a better definition, amplifying the stoic virtues of physical strength, mental fortitude, and sacrificial living driven by a desire to strengthen the weak and protect the vulnerable.

Where we break is sexuality, and writing as a gay man, I know we don’t see eye to eye on certain fundamental differences. I may never live up to the picture of masculinity Davidson’s worldview prescribes, and I may never have children, but we can agree to disagree like adults. And that’s where the left has gone mad.

Gay men are often allergic to any kind of conversation surrounding masculinity because they’ve been mocked by a class of macho men as “queer,” a slur-turned-term-of-endearment that now qualifies one for the left’s privilege points. True masculinity, however, extends safety for the victims. Those who vilified it never truly understood the concept.

Before Davidson’s column, I’m not sure I remember even thinking critically about manhood — perhaps during a conversation with my father in high school. But beyond that, these discussions seem to have been choked out by a culture eager to dismiss masculinity as universally toxic.

If you question Smith’s regression — the legitimacy of it, the integrity of it, and even the consequences of it — you’re a heretic to the woketopian ruling class that’s hellbent on dictating acceptable speech.

But it isn’t just Smith. There’s a deeper mentally disturbed current pulsing beneath the decline of healthy masculinity and femininity. Consider that nearly 60 percent of people who call themselves “non-binary” report having a mental health issue. And that’s despite both difficulties in diagnosing mental illnesses and the fact that gender dysphoria itself is a mental sickness included in the latest psychiatric manual of mental disorders, meaning the real percentage is far higher.

See for yourself. How is this not a mental illness? Why are we not allowed to call it that? And why on Earth is it unacceptable to ask questions about the twisted state of the sexes?

These people are obviously struggling with a pain that’s very real. Their so-called gender identities might be made up, but their pain undeniably exists. Contrary to parental blackmail by family therapists, data shows gender-confused people are even more likely to commit suicide if they move forward with some kind of transgender transition.

The intolerance of questions surrounding gender dysphoria is baked into the elimination of masculine virtues, which promises peace and coexistence — or the allure of a projected $5 billion surgical industry by the end of the decade. But we need to understand what in the world is going on with men, and we need to be able to ask these questions.

Men today are not working. Their suicide rates are rising as high as their testosterone levels are falling low: While men make up nearly half the population, they represent 80 percent of suicides, and testosterone levels have dropped by double digits since the 1980s.

Men’s low testosterone levels reflect a population that’s not eating right, not exercising right, and not acting on their underlying ambitions. They’re becoming apathetic pot smokers stuck in the pursuit of cheap dopamine hits through Netflix and porn. And these low “T” levels are threatening fertility, which is already on the decline, in the long term, while guaranteeing a generation of fat, lazy men with no hormonal motivation in the short term.

The death of masculinity — its public execution brought about by its supposed toxicity — is the existential crisis nobody’s talking about.

Note: this is the first post in the author’s new conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. If you liked this post and the topics addressed, consider subscribing here.

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.

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These Detransitioners Have A Message For Distressed Girls: Mangling Your Body Is A Sickness, Not A Cure


BY: JORDAN BOYD | SEPTEMBER 28, 2022

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/these-detransitioners-have-a-message-for-distressed-girls-mangling-your-body-is-a-sickness-not-a-cure-2658350471.html/

“The Detransition Diaries”

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“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.

At 18 years old, Cat used Planned Parenthood, which has taken a recent interest in getting kids hooked on hormones, to get drugs that would make her look and feel more masculine.

“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.’”

As Abigail Shrier, author of “Irreversible Damage: the Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters,” once noted, “America has essentially become an unlocked medicine cabinet for gender medicine seekers as young as 15.” And it’s hugely problematic.

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.

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Planned Parenthood Profits Big from Getting Kids Hooked on Transgender Hormones Through The School-To-Clinic Pipeline


REPORTED BY: JARED ECKERT AND EMMA SOFIA MULL | MAY 10, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/05/10/planned-parenthood-profits-big-from-getting-kids-hooked-on-transgender-hormones-through-the-school-to-clinic-pipeline/

Planned Parenthood building

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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