(LifeSiteNews) — With Texas becoming the largest U.S. state to halt “gender affirming care” for children, controversy is growing around the increasing moves in America to halt access to life changing hormones and surgery for minors.
The Texan bill, which became law four days ago, sees the Lone Star State become the 20th to enact legislation to halt or restrict the provision on demand of supposed “transgender” surgeries and drug prescriptions, often euphemized as “gender affirming care,” to those under 18 years of age.
Yet evidence is mounting in Europe which seriously undermines the claim that the procedures involved constitute a form of care in any reasonable sense of the word.
What is ‘gender affirming care’?
Gender affirming care is the title given to the rewarding of transgender ideation with hormones to halt or suppress puberty with the option of surgery to remove the genitals. This means that if your child exhibits signs of being “trans,” they should be presented with the option of irreversible hormone programs and surgery.
According to established medical protocol, this should occur following a notable period of “gender dysphoria” in children. What this means is a point of contention in itself, as agencies compete to define what exactly this means in a child’s imagination.
The promotion of this “care” is encapsulated in the remarks of Richard Levine. A U.S. health official who claims to be a woman, he is a vociferous advocate for the provision of hormones and surgery to children. Echoing the highly charged rhetoric of the “trans” rights activist movement, he repeated in a 2022 NPR interview the claim that to question his ideology is tantamount to murder:
The language of medicine and science is being used to drive people to suicide […]
There is no argument among medical professionals – pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, etc. – about the value and the importance of gender-affirming care.
As we shall see, this is a belief which Levine has made up in his own head – to the exclusion of the emerging scientific consensus.
Evidence versus belief
The European approach, not itself without scandal, has long been founded on a somewhat precautionary principle. Known as the Dutch Protocol, due to its origin in the Netherlands, it dates from a research paper published in 2006. Before this, the prescription of hormones to halt puberty was extremely rare. Yet European practices are changing as the old model is shown to have no evidence base at all.
The Dutch Protocol, proposed by Dutch clinicians in the mid 1990s, is the practice of suppression puberty in minors experiencing gender dysphoria (defined as the persistent desire to become the opposite sex through physical interventions such as surgery and hormone therapy) and, since the mid 2010s, has been standard practice in adolescents with that diagnosis.
Clinicians justified this practice with claims that it was reversible and could be used as a tool for diagnosis. [Emphases added]
Aside from the problem of definition – familiar to anyone who uses the word “woman” – the protocol also relied on a basic claim which is false: that the suppression of puberty by hormones is reversible.
This claim has been retired by European health authorities such as the U.K. National Health Service, which altered its guidance in accordance with reality on June 30, 2022.
In recent research presented to the pro-transgender WPATH, or World Professional Association for Transgender Health patients, the evidence base for “gender affirming care” is said to be non-existent.
Titled “The Myth of ‘Reliable Research’ in Pediatric Gender Medicine,” this January 2022 paper found that two Dutch studies “formed the foundation and the best available evidence for the practice of youth medical gender transition.”
We demonstrate that this work is methodologically flawed and should have never been used in medical settings as justification to scale this ‘innovative clinical practice.’
This means the template on which international “gender affirming care” has been built is dangerously misleading. How?
Life ruining care
The paper is damning about the fictional narrative surrounding “gender affirming care”:
In our recent paper on informed consent for youth gender transition, we recognized a serious problem: the field has a penchant for exaggerating what is known about the benefits of the practice, while downplaying the serious health risks and uncertainties (Levine et al., Citation2022a). As a result, a false narrative has taken root.
It is that ‘gender-affirming’ medical and surgical interventions for youth are as benign as aspirin, as well-studied as penicillin and statins, and as essential to survival as insulin for childhood diabetes – and that the vigorous scientific debate currently underway is merely ‘science denialism’ motivated by ignorance, religious zeal, and transphobia.
In fact, there is no evidence at all on the long-term effects of puberty suppression in childhood. A study done on sheep in 2017 showed “irreversible cognitive impairment” following the use of puberty suppressing hormones. The indications are not good.
A study published in April 2023 in the journal Current Sexual Health Reports concluded that there is little to no benefit at all in giving children this apparently “lifesaving care”:
Systematic reviews of evidence conducted by public health authorities in Finland, Sweden, and England concluded that the risk/benefit ratio of youth gender transition ranges from unknown to unfavorable. [Emphasis added]
Given these findings, the promotion of sterilizing hormones and surgery to children seems to be the emotional defense of a principle of harm.
Harm principles?
The evidence for the benefits of “gender affirming care” exists in the imagination of those promoting, selling, and demanding it. As the above report says, medical practice in Europe is changing as evidence emerges to replace make-believe ideology.
As a result, there has been a shift from ‘gender-affirmative care,’ which prioritizes access to medical interventions, to a more conservative approach that addresses psychiatric comorbidities and psychotherapeutically explores the developmental etiology of the trans identity.
The authors note that the issue has yet to be explored in similar detail in the USA.
Debate about the safety and efficacy of ‘gender-affirming care’ in the USA is only recently emerging.
Yet the central claim of “pro-trans” activists has no basis in reality. Far from being “life saving,” access to these treatments appears to do more harm than good.
Results of long-term studies of adult transgender populations failed to demonstrate convincing improvements in mental health, and some studies suggest that there are treatment-associated harms.
Since both the effects of hormones and surgery are impossible to reverse, “life-ruining” may be a description supported by the evidence. The evidence does not support the emotional claims of the defense of the rights of “trans kids,” instead suggesting that the treatment itself leads to increased depression and suicide.
It is the pro-trans lobby and their allies which, in reality, are promoting the life-threatening harm to children they denounce in the prudent.
These findings will soon make their way into an issue which is woefully misrepresented as a “culture war” issue. It is one whose promotion relies on make-belief, has become an industry, and which is supported and transmitted by a donor class directly profiting from the resulting industry of injury.
As the European example shows, make-belief does not make for evidence. The issue should not be whether children are provided with access to “gender affirming care,” but that the claim of care cannot be justified at all.
If you would like to know more about the origins, funding and posthuman future of the transgender culture, you can read my series on SubStack.