Child Protection Laws Under Attack
Initiated state laws to protect children from dangerous gender medical interventions are under attack. There is a frenzied backlash against these laws. At this writing, 22 states have passed gender-affirming treatment bans for minors but the bans are delayed in Indiana, Arkansas, Alabama and Florida due to court injunctions. Moreover, Statisitca reports that bans are also threatened in Idaho, Louisiana, West Virginia and Montana.
These state bans cover everything from prohibiting the medical use of puberty blockers and hormone therapy in children under 18 to prohibiting trans “boys” playing on girls’ sports teams, mandatory pronoun rules in schools and even gender change on birth certificates. Many, likely most, in the U.S. support curtailing the “trans agenda” which has infected so many of our young people. So, how have these virulent backlashes taken hold?
Most backlashes start out with biased coverage from mainstream news outlets such as the Associated Press, Reuters, the New York Times, NBC, Business Insider, PBS, Texas Monthly, the Advocate and daily newspapers. These outlets extoll the benefits of “gender care” for young kids, itemize serious “dangers” if such care is delayed and manipulatively enlist bereaved parents in their reportage.
For example, Business Insider lamented that, “The mother of a transgender girl sobbed in federal court Wednesday as she contemplated having to move away from her Navy officer husband to get health care for her 12-year-old if Florida’s ban on gender dysphoria treatments for minors is allowed to take effect.”
A 2023 article in Texas Monthly titled “State of Terror Anymore: Some Families With Trans Children Are Leaving Texas,” perpetuated the alarmism. “We can’t stay here and know that our child isn’t fully supported or that she would be denied medical care,” the magazine quotes a mother who moved from Texas to Los Angeles saying.
News 5 Cleveland also got into the act in 2023. “The Zingarelli family moved back to Ohio, in part, because Missouri’s legislature introduced anti-trans bills,” the news outlet reported. “Now a bill blocking gender-affirming care is on Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s desk.” Once alarmist articles appear from established news outlets quoting distraught – and often misinformed parents – pressure groups form to spawn legal injunctions and otherwise block or delay youth protection laws.
“Gender Care” Is Dangerous in Youths
Pro childhood gender care news outlets often quote established medical voices in their trans cheerleading, such as the AMA, pediatric groups and government agencies like the Office of Population Affairs. But less quoted and even absent are the financial windfalls to hospitals, surgeons, insurers and drug makers that emanate from the trans gender agenda. In addition to more than $100,000 per gender patient in for hospitalization, gender surgeons “can expect to make somewhere between $300,000 to $350,000” a year according to the website med school insiders.
Then there’s the cost of puberty blockers and hormones, the medical remedies on which “gender care” rests. High priced puberty blockers which allow the gender confused to begin early “transitioning” can lead to bone-thinning and worse. AbbVie’s puberty blocker Lupron brought in $752 million of revenue in 2020 for the drug maker and the puberty blocking implant Supprelin LA has a list price of $37,300.
Nor are hormones in children safe according to medical sources. “Since most people who start hormones take them for life, doctors say there also isn’t enough research into the long-term impact of taking estrogen or testosterone for what could end up being 50 to 70 years,” reported Frontline. “If we start testosterone today, will you have the cardiac risk profile of a male or female as you grow older? Will you develop breast cancer because we’re administering estrogen?,” asks Rob Garofalo, MD in the 2015 article.
Is Gender Confusion a “Phase” and Do Psych Drugs Play a Role?
Some have asked what is the harm in delaying medical gender interventions until a child is over 18? Surely, the child can resume their transition once of age.
Moreover, research published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry declares that, “Any children who experience gender dysphoria (GD), a sense of discomfort from incongruence between their gender identity and assigned sex, will not continue to experience dysphoria into adolescence and adulthood.” Additionally, rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, which can seem to explode in adolescents like a craze, is now a recognized medical condition.
There are also questions about the many non-gender-related drugs now routinely given to young children.
A health policy expert who I interviewed, believes that psychiatric drugs are an important driver of the trans craze. “The younger generations have been treated with antidepressants, ADHD drugs, mood stabilizers and other psych drugs at a level never seen before and they often started at a young age,” the expert told me. “These drugs, cause personality changes which is especially concerning in people whose identities haven’t even formed yet. It is not surprising that young people have serious identity crises from them including gender confusion.”*
“Trans identifying people have three to 13 times the mental health conditions of their cisgender counterparts,” said Tracy A. Becerra-Culqui, PhD, MPH, of the Kaiser Permanente Southern California Department of Research & Evaluation. “Among these young people, the most prevalent diagnoses were attention deficit disorders in children, 3 to 9 years of age and depressive disorders in adolescents, 10 to 17 years of age.” Few of these ballooning childhood condition are untreated with drugs.
In fact, when parents say their child exhibited gender confusion at age 3 were they also giving the children extreme and even suicide-linked psych drugs, at age 3?
“Detransitioning” and Suicide
Many mainstream news outlets dispute high rates of suicide after “gender care” as well as transitioners who elect to “detransition” – because it threatens the agenda. For example, the National Institutes of Health asserts that only 6% of trans patients detransition. However 2022 research published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism found that between 70.2% to 81% of transitioned patients were pleased with their gender care.
And what about suicide? While pro-trans sources usually say that suicide in patients is reduced after gender care, other sources disagree. According to Ryan T. Anderson, Ph.D, writing for the Heritage Foundation, 10 to 15 years “after surgical reassignment, the suicide rate of those who had undergone sex-reassignment surgery rose to 20 times that of comparable peers.”
What Explains the Trans Agenda?
The number of children believing they are the opposite gender – especially girls – has skyrocketed. Stanley Goldfarb, MD, a founder of a child protection group, calls the trans craze a “mythology.” Kids in America “show up at a clinic, and they say, ‘Yep, you’re trans. We’ll start you on the puberty blockers. Then we’ll start you on the hormones.”
Other explanations for the trans agenda of those I have interviewed include:
The growing number of young people identifying as trans is a demonstration of the phenomenon of “mass hysteria,” said a Northwestern university academic I interviewed. Seen during the Salem witch trials, at a Lancashire cotton mill in 1787, in Tanzania in 1962 during the laughter epidemic and as recently as the 2015 Outwood academy in Ripon in the UK, the social anomaly is now called mass psychogenic illness (MPI).
The aunt of two nieces who are “transitioning,” told me the trans popularity is about rebellion and attention, pure and simple. “When young people announce that they are really a different gender and demand another name and pronoun be used, the whole family will revolve around them,” she said. While they might have been “previously been ignored, they are now a star.”
Students I interviewed at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. in 2023 told me that the peer group pressure of social networks like Tiktok made mental disorders like depression, ADHD, mood problems, autism and bipolar disorder “cool” – as well as the drugs that are prescribed to treat them.
Clearly, the trans gender agenda is a pernicious and growing craze with the number of young people disputing their true gender between 2014 to 2014 growing by 35.8%. Laws to protect young people are crucial and the backlash against such laws is regrettable and harmful.
*The health policy expert’s hypothesis stands in striking contrast to the words of Angela Goepferd, MD, medical director of the Gender Health Program at Children’s Minnesota hospital who told the New York Times in 2022 that, who said “It’s developmentally appropriate for teenagers to explore all facets of their identity – that is what teenagers do.”
That doesn’t sound like child protection.
