The left has long touted puberty blockers, hormone therapies and sex change surgeries as the go-to method for saving gender dysphoric children from depression or suicide. Now, the practitioners of gender ideology are on the defensive, as lawsuits pour in, whistleblowers speak out and parents bring brutal testimony on the outcomes of the left’s trans agenda.
States across the nation are cracking down on child sex change surgeries across the country, including in Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee and Oklahoma. Detransitioners are suing the doctors who performed sex-change surgeries on them as minors, and major hospitals are facing lawsuits over their careless use dangerous cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers.
A case manager at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital recently revealed that doctors rushed children into puberty blockers and sex-change treatments at the facility. Jamie Reed, who identifies as “queer” and is married to a transgender person, detailed how in one case a mother of a 10-year-old “tomboy” brought her daughter in for transgender treatment. When the girl’s father objected to his daughter’s transition, a judge sided with the mother after a hospital worker testified against him.
Reed’s allegations have prompted an investigation into the clinic by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, who said in a statement that his office is “thoroughly investigating to make sure children are not harmed by individuals who may be more concerned with a radical social agenda than the health of children.” (RELATED: ‘Sold Kids Out’: Democrats Vote In Support Of Schools Keeping Gender Transition Secret From Parents)
“They’re forcing all these kids who show up at these clinics, instead of giving them psychological treatments and therapies, they’re putting them on drugs and then referring them for surgeries,” Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, board chair of Do No Harm, a group that opposes child sex changes, told the Daily Caller. “But I think this is closing in on them.”
This is a sickening account of forced sterilization and child abuse. Happening in Missouri at an institution that receives federal taxpayer funds. Today my office is launching an investigation. Missouri children deserve to be protected https://t.co/oDvPaRC1qs
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) February 9, 2023
A large number of key studies used to justify sex-change treatments for minors have fallen apart under scrutiny. One study, which outlets like NBC, U.S. News and The Hill touted as disproving the theory that “social contagion” contributes to the rise in transgender-identified youth, was methodologically flawed. The study, which was led by LGBT activist Dr. Jack Turban, assumed that transgender respondents were giving their biological sex when asked, “What is your sex?” but it is unclear if respondents were actually giving researchers their preferred gender identity, according to University of Oxford sociologist Michael Biggs. This hypothesis would help explain anomalies such as the finding that respondents who said they were male were 2.5 centimeters shorter on average than those who reported as female.
Turban was also forced to issue multiple corrections to a much-touted article from Psychology Today, which purported to prove that “gender-affirming medical care improves mental health for trans youth.” In several of the studies mentioned in the article, a sentence was added explaining that the studies’ own authors did not believe that sex-change procedures necessarily improved the mental health of trans-identified youth.
Two Dutch studies also concluded that gender dysphoria, a patient’s sense of incongruence between his or her body and identity, lessened as sex-change treatments and procedures were provided. Organizations such as the Endocrine Society and the seventh version of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) Standards of Care then used these studies as “evidence” for the success of child sex changes. But participants in the study were also offered psychotherapy, making it nearly impossible for researchers to accurately determine whether it was the medical interventions or the therapy that helped alleviate the dysphoria. Researchers in the 2011 study also included only “best case scenario” patients in their results, ignoring patients who rejected cross-sex hormones and procedures after being put on puberty blockers. In the 2014 study, 15 of the 70 participants were removed from the study after they suffered from obesity and diabetes, with one participant even dying. (RELATED: Child Sex Change Ban Will Likely Sail Through State House After Detransitioner’s Testimony)
What studies do appear to show, however, is that in cases of children experiencing gender dysphoria, the vast majority will desist. A 2013 study for Steensma found that the majority of children desisted later in adolescence. A 2008 study found that 88 percent of girls desisted in followups after feelings of gender dysphoria. A 2021 study confirmed that an average of 87.8 percent of dysphoric boys become comfortable with their biological sex in later years. But in cases where puberty suppressants, which are often touted as a cost-free way to delay the onset of puberty in a dysphoric child, are offered, patients are far more likely to go on to receive hormone therapies and surgeries.
The evidence for child sex changes is, at best, inconclusive. Small wonder then that medical experts in Europe are becoming far more squeamish about offering and approving these “treatments” for minors.
Travistock Clinic, which operated with a policy of unquestioningly affirming children who expressed gender identities that did not align with their biological sex, has been ordered to shut down by the England’s National Health Service (NHS). The clinic, the country’s only gender clinic for children, is being replaced with regional facilities take a more holistic approach to treating trans-identifying kids, including mental health counseling. England’s NHS is also advising against social transitions for kids and moving to ban puberty blockers for minors outside strict clinical trials.
“The best we can do is affirm, validate & allow for the exploration, if in a few weeks or months, a student wants to go by their legal name and pronouns that match their sex assigned at birth, no harm was really done in affirming them.” @DailyCaller https://t.co/Phpb5Ie35G
— Laurel Duggan (@laureldugg) February 16, 2023
Sweden has backtracked on a previous policy touting cross-sex hormones as “safe,” and has banned sex change procedures for minors in all but limited circumstances because “the risks outweigh the benefits currently.” The move came after reports of minors who experienced “serious side effects” after the procedures.
“They’ve decided that they’re not sure how many kids they’re harming compared to how many kids they might help,” Dr. Goldfarb said of this trend in Europe. “They have no idea. Once you have a situation where you’re doing more harm than good, you can’t do that.”
“I think the whistleblower Jamie Reid is really going to turn the tide and I hope that other people who know how unethical it is in these pediatric gender clinics, I hope that more start to come forward just like what happened in Tavistock,” said January Littlejohn, a mother who is suing a Florida school district for asking her 13-year-old daughter what bathroom, pronouns and name she wished to use, without her mother’s knowledge.
Littlejohn isn’t the only one bringing legal action against the purveyors of gender ideology. A growing group of “detranistioners” are speaking out after they were offered harmful and often irreversible hormones, blockers and surgeries at a young age. These individuals say they were too young to consent to such medical procedures, and are still bearing the consequences. (RELATED: ‘Groomed And Preyed Upon’: Young Woman Was Pressured Into Mastectomy, Testosterone As A Child — Now She Regrets It)
Detransitioner Chloe Cole’s parents were told that if they did not affirm Cole’s new identity as a boy, they would lose their then-teenage daughter to suicide. Cole underwent cross-sex hormones and a double mastectomy between the ages of 13 and 17. Now, Cole is suing the healthcare group Kaiser Permanente, which administered the medical procedures.
“My breasts were beautiful, now they’ve been incinerated for nothing. Thank you, modern medicine.” My public comment at the Florida Board of Medicine meeting in Orlando today. pic.twitter.com/NUuouffjqM
— Chloe Cole ⭐️ (@ChoooCole) October 28, 2022
Camille Kiefel and Jay Langadinos and also are bringing similar lawsuits, alleging that the sex change industry lied to them as minors, telling any adult who objected to their transition that they were driving a child to suicide.
“I do think this is the beginning of the end of pediatric gender clinics in our country,” Littlejohn told the Caller.
Some states have considered laws to counter the real-life harm gender ideology inflicts on children. In the Virginia legislature, one mother recounted how her daughter Sage was sex trafficked and raped after her Sage’s school claimed that her family would “misgender” her. The state removed Sage from her mother’s custody, keeping her in a boy’s children’s home where she was repeatedly assaulted. A bill that would have exclude “misgendering” from the definition of child abuse and required schools to inform parents if their children socially transitioned passed Virginia’s Republican-controlled House, but Democrats in the state Senate blocked the bill.
“Society is pushing adult decisions on children by not allowing Sage’s Law to pass. The schools are forcing children to live a double life!” Sage’s mother told the Caller in a statement after the vote. “This will certainly not bode well for the mental health of our children. It will break them.”