Gender Medicine Failure

Gender Affirmation Care Is Not Comprehensive Healthcare

Photo by Bermix Studio on Unsplash

The parent groups I attend or participate in believe everyone deserves respect. We focus our concern on the ideology and the medicalization model of drugs and surgeries, which promises young people a quick-fix solution to complex issues. We direct our worry at the lack of protection for children and vulnerable young adults before drugs are prescribed or surgeries are performed aimed at changing the exterior appearance of the chest and genitals.

The lack of safeguards increases the possibility of regret and long-term damage to the young person’s body and health. Kids may dress and style themselves in expressive ways and call themselves what they like, but when they believe their bodies are the problem, this troubles most parents. Cross-sex hormones and radical and invasive surgical procedures rarely solve mental health or nuanced underlying issues. Medicalizing gender identities is currently pushed as the first treatment option instead of the last-resort option for distress. Parents and many others do not find merit in an activist- and profit-driven care model that is a non-scientific, experimental approach to fast-track elective cosmetic sex-trait modifications. Ignoring the underlying reasons and motivations for altering one’s natural body and health isn’t a comprehensive medical healthcare model.

Gender affirming care sounds nice to the ears, but it does not address complex comorbidities. Puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and genital surgery harm kids, and the ideology behind this “care” seems cultist and dystopian. When asking questions has been deemed intolerable, bigoted, and transphobic, we have lost the ability to engage in a differential diagnosis, critical thinking, and respectful conversation that may include differing viewpoints and perspectives. In the current social justice culture, parents are often viewed as uninformed for their views that medicalizing gender identifies may not be in the long-term best interest of the child or young adult.

It is time to question the assumption that parents are wrong when they advocate for preserving their child’s natural body. When parents are canceled and vilified for wanting a holistic assessment and the root cause of distress addressed, the cancellation often represents a transactivist agenda or an ideological capture. Gaslighting gender-critical parents is a tactic to cut the tether to a reality-based life. If someone can remove parents as a grounding compass in our child’s life, the child can be manipulated to do the activist’s bidding and become a drug customer for life.

There seems to be a great deception going on: kids are told that they can be born in the wrong body and that sex is an arbitrary guess and temporary assignment at birth. They are told that they can change their sex for any reason and at any time in the future by their thoughts, feelings, and wishes. Due to the sensitivity of past discrimination against homosexual individuals, people have been misled to view “trans” as “the new gay,” and therefore, they say a “trans” self-ID cannot be questioned. Transgenderism should not be teamed with or conflated with same-sex attraction, as many organizations advocate for same-sex rights and spaces. LGB Alliance is one such organization.

Activists propagate the idea that we can help members of the younger generation who have come to believe they are trapped in the wrong body by allowing, upon demand and at any age, unlimited and full access to drugs and bodily procedures. Self-diagnosis, often coming from the internet or social media and peer influence, is not a standard of quality medicine used in any other category. The Cass Review indicates there is insufficient evidence to justify the use of medical interventions for the treatment of gender dysphoria. So why is a substandard care model endorsing self-harm still being promoted and accepted by the public?

On behalf of parents who don’t see the removal of healthy body parts as a good decision or utilization of critical thinking skills, we ask that there be a consideration for our views, as well as a thorough investigation of the agenda behind this type of radical medical approach. Each time you see a girl who had her breasts removed or a boy trying to look like a girl, remember that they are somebody’s daughter or son. For those on the outside of this medical scandal, just be aware that each time you see a “medicalized” girl or boy, there might be a mom and dad who could not stop her or him from engaging in self-harm, or they were pressured to agree to surgery due to emotional blackmail and misinformation by an agenda-captured medical system. And this youth may have lost the opportunity to grow up with a healthy, intact body with normal sexual function. These kids will be handcuffed to the pharmaceutical industry for the rest of their lives, forever dependent on multiple drugs, constant monitoring, and frequent doctor visits.

Parents who affirmed and accepted drugs and sex-trait modifications of their child to try and look like the opposite sex may still experience sadness, even if they keep it private and don’t speak of it to others. A grandmother or grandfather might not comprehend “trans” and might say that they cannot understand why their grandchild is pretending to be someone else. It is often inconceivable that kids are persuaded that they can only be their authentic selves after they disassociate with, disown, and cut off parts of themselves. Seeing one’s children or grandchildren reject their natural bodies and medicalize those bodies is often agonizing, even traumatic, for the family. Normalizing, enabling, glamorizing, and celebrating the self-harm of kids is a troubling development in medical care and humankind’s evolution. Parents ask that you stop participating in it.

Medicalizing kids creates additional problems as time goes on. Be aware that many kids have new distress from complications and pain after drastic surgeries or adverse effects of cross-sex hormones. Some kids experience immediate regret, and others may report euphoria for a while after their procedures; however, the issues they blamed on their bodies, those issues they tried to run from or hoped to solve through drugs and surgeries, eventually resurface, and the initial, artificial high often fades. Parents want their kids to look forward ten, twenty, or thirty years into the future. What will their world be like? What will their modified body look like, and will they miss the parts they removed? Parents want their young adult children to think hard about what their lives will be like when they hit middle age and older. Will “transition joy,” as sometimes promised and described by online influencers, stretch into decades and translate into “happy” after age forty, fifty, or sixty-plus? Are kids capable of knowing if surgery to remove body parts is the answer to what troubles them, particularly if the reasons why they wanted surgery were never considered? Have they spent time interacting with detransitioners to learn from their experience before starting on drugs or scheduling surgeries?

When kids ask for a prescription for cross-sex hormones, they need to know it is an elective drug that will disrupt their body’s endocrine and other natural systems with side effects, which will create a need for more drugs and will foster drug and medical dependency for life. How can a child or young adult give informed consent for potential sterility, compromised sexual function and fulfillment, and general health havoc, including medical and pharmaceutical dependency? If left alone, they could have enjoyed natural health and the normal function of their organs, glands, and bodily systems. They should know that a profit industry is waiting for their bodies to need more and more drug interventions from the adverse effects of cross-sex hormones.

Parents have valuable wisdom and protective instincts that this “affirmation-only” care model is a failure. It is inappropriate to belittle, push aside, and exclude parents in the vital matters of their kids’ health. And it is unacceptable that some social workers, teachers, medical professionals, and activists usurp and undermine parents, claiming they are saving kids when they are strangers who know hardly anything about the child’s history, underlying issues, and comorbidities and won’t be there for them in the decades to come. Their proposed misguided mission will likely result in kids who will be incapable of navigating life naturally after they step onto the gender identity conveyor belt of social affirmation followed by medicalization. Thank goodness some doctors are finally speaking up and mobilizing, such as the organizations Doctors Protecting Children and Do No Harm.

If an error is being made while sorting out research, conducting new studies, and investigating activist-driven and profit-driven motives, might it be better to err in not removing healthy body parts and healthy reproductive organs? If caution is considered wrong, then we have lost our senses. Once you know what is behind “gender affirmation care,” you won’t call it “care” or vote for it, and you will likely be appalled by what is happening. You will also reconsider whether it is wise to call a girl a boy or a boy a girl. There may be a day when guilt and shame overwhelm those who participated in gender ideology or looked the other way while kids and families were harmed. It should have been yesterday, but today is better than tomorrow. It is time to wake up and speak up. There must be a better way to help distressed kids than gender affirming care. Let’s look for it because the body is not the problem.

Lisa Shultz advocates for parents’ and women’s rights. She is deeply concerned about the influence of gender identity ideology and the lack of comprehensive, ethical care for children and vulnerable adults.