By Mecca Fowler
Editor’s note: The opinions expressed here are those of the authors. View more opinion on ScoonTV.
The increasing trend of young people identifying as the opposite gender is alarming. What’s even more alarming is that there are adults encouraging children to medically transition if they desire. This social phenomenon is happening all over the world. This entire culture of surgically altering children under the guise of “gender-affirming care” has gone too far. The things doctors and parents are doing to “trans” children are unethical, immoral, and dangerous.
First, let’s break down what the term “gender-affirming care” means. Gender-affirming care is an umbrella term used to describe services for gender-confused people that may include medical, surgical, mental health, and non-medical services for transgender and nonbinary people
Most of the population looking for gender-affirming care suffer from a form of gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria is defined as “psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one’s sex assigned at birth and one’s gender identity.” It is designated in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). A Cedars-Sinai study found that most gender dysphoria issues are established by age seven in children.
James Esses, a trainee psychotherapist, and volunteer children’s counselor made the most logical comparison to gender dysphoria, in my opinion. He wrote “Gender dysphoria remains the only mental health condition I’m aware of, in which the proposed treatment is to affirm the distressing thoughts inside one’s head and physically modify one’s body. We don’t treat anorexia with liposuction.”
Esses is exactly right. If a major reason that people transition is that they suffer from a mental health condition, why aren’t we addressing the root causes of that condition? Why are some professionals in the mental health field bypassing the mental health aspect of this condition and greenlighting the physical and medical transitioning of children? Some of the remedies considered gender-affirming care include putting children on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgically removing genitals. My issue is the hyper-focusing on the surgical and medical aspects of gender-affirming care for children and not the mental health aspect.
Puberty blockers are used to block and/or delay testosterone and estrogen from developing. They are dangerous for several reasons. They can lead to sterility. The Food and Drug Administration has warned that puberty blockers can cause brain swelling and loss of vision in children. Lupron, an injection given to trans youth to suppress hormones, has also been used to sterilize inmates and sex offenders.
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) has stated that some of these interventions are irreversible. Some experts have even likened these surgeries to mutilating children. Others have blatantly stated that sex reassignment does not sufficiently address the psychosocial challenges that transgender people experience, according to medical research.
Some children will grow up without ever having the chance to have their own children because of these medical interventions such as hysterectomies. Already, there is a community of detransitioners who regret their surgeries and the medications they took to be the opposite sex. Dr. Marci Bowers, a gender-affirming surgeon, admitted that children who transition before puberty may likely never attain sexual satisfaction later in life.
De-trans activist Chloe Cole who has transitioned, testified before state legislators about the dangers of transitioning. Cole, born female, believed she was a male and was put on puberty blockers at age 13. She later had a double mastectomy at 15. She has since transitioned back to female. In her speeches, she discusses the doctors that exploit vulnerable children for profit.
There are many more stories like hers. The subreddit r/detrans is full of horrific and painful stories of people in regret because they did not fully understand the implications of their decisions.
There are stories of transitioned people who have severe health complications after medically transitioning. In one instance, a transgender man couldn’t urinate properly after starting a phalloplasty. Another transgender man expressed regret for transitioning after realizing he was “living a delusion.” Scott Newgent, a transman that appeared in an interview with conservative commentator Matt Walsh titled “What is a Woman,” spoke about his complications with medically transitioning and having constant urinary tract infections because of it.
Although advocates of transitioning youth would tell you that these surgeries aren’t happening on a wide scale, there have been a couple documented instances of hospitals and clinics offering them to minors. Just this year In England, the Tavistock gender clinic, a gender identity clinic for children and young people, was told it would have to shut down after an independent review by the National Health Service found the clinic’s level of quality of care and services were not sufficient. The clinic has been accused of fast-tracking young people into transitioning by failing to examine the psychological and social reasons why children wanted to transition. Approximately 1,000 families are suing the clinic for rushing their children on puberty blockers.
Children have to live with these physical conditions and consequences for the rest of their lives much of the time. There is no concrete science on the long-term implications of surgically or medically transitioning children. The longest extensive follow-up study of sex-reassigned individuals was done in Sweden, where transgender people are quite accepted. The suicide risk among people who had received sex-reassignment surgery increased up to 20 times that of their counterparts ten-to-fifteen years after the procedure.
Children should be allowed to grow up without these medical interventions. They should be able to decide when they are adults if they want to proceed with these life-altering procedures. These interventions have severe risks to them and are too new to be introduced at such an early age.
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