The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is ignoring its own subagency’s warning on puberty blockers, according to a letter written by HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which is an HHS subagency, ordered several puberty blockers to include a warning that the drugs may cause increased skull pressure. However, a proposed HHS rule requiring doctors to provide puberty blockers and sex-change operations or face discrimination lawsuits does not acknowledge potentially dangerous side effects of the procedures. Becerra ignored questions about the FDA reports in the letter to congressional Republicans, instead asserting that puberty blockers “have demonstrated positive impacts on youth mental health outcomes.”
“Major medical associations in the United States, including the American Medical Association (AMA), the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the Pediatric Endocrine Society, and the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine, hold that gender–affirming care is medically necessary, safe, and effective care for transgender and nonbinary children and adolescents,” Becerra wrote in the letter, obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller. “Puberty blockers have been safely prescribed to cisgender children for many decades.”
Read the letter here:
3. Response to Rep. Miller Final_clean.docx_Completed by Michael Ginsberg on Scribd
The FDA’s warning details the possibility of patients developing pseudotumor cerebri, a condition impacting roughly one in 100,000 Americans that is most commonly found in overweight women between the ages of 20 and 44. All six cases were observed in girls between the ages of five and twelve. (RELATED: Doctors Are Giving Gender Confused Children ‘Puberty Blockers’ Used To Castrate Sex Offenders)
The HHS rule requires insurance providers to cover sex-change operations and other procedures deemed “gender-affirming care,” and Becerra previously confirmed that the Biden administration supports using taxpayer dollars to fund the procedures. The rule does not mention adverse affects of the operations or drugs, and does not mention legal liability for doctors who are sued after following the rule.
“We cannot allow Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services to put their political transgender activism ahead of children’s safety. I am proud to join my colleagues in holding the Biden Administration accountable for refusing to acknowledge their own FDA’s warning of the harmful effects puberty blockers have on children. The Left’s radical ‘gender ideology’ is putting our children at risk,” Miller said in a statement to the Daily Caller.
HHS did not respond to the Daily Caller’s request for comment on the matter.
Assistant HHS Secretary Rachel Levine recently told a Connecticut conference that those pushing for child sex-change operations have “support at the highest levels of the federal government.”
“I am positive and optimistic and hopeful that the wheel will turn after [the 2024 election] and that this issue won’t be as politically and socially such a minefield,” Levine said.