I recently came across this article from an individual who spent almost five years working at a pediatric transgender center. The author who identifies as "left of Bernie Sanders" is also married to a transgendered man, so she is a biased source in favor of this form of "care." I distinctly remember at least three times on this website I've argued someone into a corner about how barbaric and damaging these practices are, only for them to eventually retreat to "well we need to trust the experts" and ignoring everything I've had to say. Unfortunately, experts can be just as ideologically blinded as the rest of us and it's often the case that someone who chooses to focus their career in certain fields may be more ideological than most. This article is interesting because it provides a first hand account of what minors have to do to get on "gender affirming" drugs, and what those drugs actually do. Needless to say, it's beyond obvious that offering these "treatments" to mentally ill minors doesn't have a defensible basis. Some choice quotes below:
On the explosion of "transgender" identification among mentally ill teenaged girls:
"Until 2015 or so, a very small number of these boys comprised the population of pediatric gender dysphoria cases. Then, across the Western world, there began to be a dramatic increase in a new population: Teenage girls, many with no previous history of gender distress, suddenly declared they were transgender and demanded immediate treatment with testosterone.
I certainly saw this at the center. One of my jobs was to do intake for new patients and their families. When I started there were probably 10 such calls a month. When I left there were 50, and about 70 percent of the new patients were girls. Sometimes clusters of girls arrived from the same high school.
This concerned me, but didn’t feel I was in the position to sound some kind of alarm back then. There was a team of about eight of us, and only one other person brought up the kinds of questions I had. Anyone who raised doubts ran the risk of being called a transphobe.
The girls who came to us had many comorbidities: depression, anxiety, ADHD, eating disorders, obesity. Many were diagnosed with autism, or had autism-like symptoms. A report last year on a British pediatric transgender center found that about one-third of the patients referred there were on the autism spectrum. Frequently, our patients declared they had disorders that no one believed they had. We had patients who said they had Tourette syndrome (but they didn’t); that they had tic disorders (but they didn’t); that they had multiple personalities (but they didn’t).
The doctors privately recognized these false self-diagnoses as a manifestation of social contagion. They even acknowledged that suicide has an element of social contagion. But when I said the clusters of girls streaming into our service looked as if their gender issues might be a manifestation of social contagion, the doctors said gender identity reflected something innate."
On how minors qualified for access to untested treatments with lifelong consequences:
"To begin transitioning, the girls needed a letter of support from a therapist—usually one we recommended—who they had to see only once or twice for the green light. To make it more efficient for the therapists, we offered them a template for how to write a letter in support of transition. The next stop was a single visit to the endocrinologist for a testosterone prescription.
That’s all it took. "
Examples of the side effects:
"When a female takes testosterone, the profound and permanent effects of the hormone can be seen in a matter of months. Voices drop, beards sprout, body fat is redistributed. Sexual interest explodes, aggression increases, and mood can be unpredictable. Our patients were told about some side effects, including sterility. But after working at the center, I came to believe that teenagers are simply not capable of fully grasping what it means to make the decision to become infertile while still a minor."
....
"We found out later this girl had had intercourse, and because testosterone thins the vaginal tissues, her vaginal canal had ripped open. She had to be sedated and given surgery to repair the damage. She wasn’t the only vaginal laceration case we heard about.
Other girls were disturbed by the effects of testosterone on their clitoris, which enlarges and grows into what looks like a microphallus, or a tiny penis. I counseled one patient whose enlarged clitoris now extended below her vulva, and it chafed and rubbed painfully in her jeans. I advised her to get the kind of compression undergarments worn by biological men who dress to pass as female. At the end of the call I thought to myself, “Wow, we hurt this kid.”
There are rare conditions in which babies are born with atypical genitalia—cases that call for sophisticated care and compassion. But clinics like the one where I worked are creating a whole cohort of kids with atypical genitals—and most of these teens haven’t even had sex yet. They had no idea who they were going to be as adults. Yet all it took for them to permanently transform themselves was one or two short conversations with a therapist."
"Doctors" using these life altering drugs with poorly studied long term side effects as a catch-all treatment:
"That same thought came up again with another case. This one was in spring of 2022 and concerned a young man who had intense obsessive-compulsive disorder that manifested as a desire to cut off his penis after he masturbated. This patient expressed no gender dysphoria, but he got hormones, too. I asked the doctor what protocol he was following, but I never got a straight answer. "
In 20 years when this stuff is viewed the same way as we view lobotomies, nobody is going to admit they were in favor of it. What an abject failure and betrayal by the very people who take an oath to do no harm. It is beyond any reasonable doubt that an unknown, but likely six figure, number of children have fallen into this trap. Their mental illness manifests in dislike of their changing bodies, so under the flimsiest of justification they've been prescribed cancer drugs, chemical castration drugs, or given permanent surgeries. Their minds and bodies are permanently altered chasing an impossible to reach goal, one that the so called experts lied to them about.
