By Calvin Freiburger
Article Source
The Biden administration’s Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) endorsed surgical and chemical transformation of gender-confused minors’ bodies one day after President Joe Biden affirmed the “resilience, strength, and joy of transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people.”
Documents from the HHS Office of Population Affairs and HHS Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration’s National Child Traumatic Stress Network released Thursday both endorse “gender-affirming care” for “ transgender and nonbinary children and adolescents.”
The former document is more focused on specific procedures – including puberty blockers, testosterone or estrogen injections, and surgeries to alter or remove breasts, genitals, and reproductive organs – claiming they “improv[e] the mental health and overall well-being of gender diverse children and adolescents.”
The latter document is broader, and does not specifically mention surgery, but declares that “care … may include evidence-based interventions such as puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormones,” as well as indulgence of transgender pronouns, access to opposite-sex sports teams and restrooms, and an overall commitment to not only LGBT dogma but the broader far-left doctrine of intersectionality, i.e., “continually asking yourself questions about the power and privilege you have based on your own gender identity, sexual orientation, race, provider status, and other aspects of your intersectional identities.”
“Providing gender-affirming care is neither child maltreatment nor malpractice,” the NCTSN claims. “There is no scientifically sound research showing negative impacts from providing gender-affirming care.”
In fact, a range of scientific literature indicates that while reinforcing gender confusion may give a patient short-term satisfaction, over the long term it often fails to prevent, or actually exacerbates, significant emotional harm up to and including attempted suicide (with or without surgery), because fixating on “gender affirmation” tends to distract from exploring other issues that may be the actual root of a patient’s mental or emotional unrest.
On top of those issues, experts outside the medical establishment warn that surgically or chemically reinforcing gender confusion imposes irreversible harm on children such as infertility, impairment of adult sex function, and reduced life expectancy, as well as the psychological toll of being “locked into” physical alterations regardless of whether they change their minds when they mature. Studies indicate that more than 80% of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, unless their confusion is reinforced by adults.
Medscape recently covered a handful of firsthand accounts affirming the above from “detransitioners” around the world who shared the pain and regret that often follows child “gender reassignment,” as well as the biases, blind spots, and negligence on these points from the medical establishment.
Further exploration of these issues can be found in the book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, by the Wall Street Journal’s Abigail Shrier. The book explores the phenomenon of rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD), a term coined in 2018 by Brown University behavioral scientist Lisa Littman. She found that a significant percentage of gender dysphoria among minors came not from innate feelings of discontent with one’s true sex but from outside influence.
For her book, Shrier “dug deep into the trans epidemic, talking to the girls, their agonized parents, and the counselors and doctors who enable gender transitions, as well as to ‘detransitioners,’” according to the product description. “Coming out as transgender immediately boosts these girls’ social status, Shrier found, but once they take the first steps of transition, it is not easy to walk back.”
The new statements follow the president’s “Transgender Day Of Visibility” proclamation Wednesday, in which Biden “celebrate[d] the activism and determination that have fueled the fight for transgender equality,” and derided an “onslaught” of state legislation to keep sexual proselytizing out of elementary school, protect children from physical mutilation and chemical castration, and ensure female athletes don’t have to compete with males in sex-specific competitions as “undermin[ing transgender] humanity and corrod[ing] our Nation’s values.”
