California Endocrinologist: Biden Encouraging Transgender Hormones and Surgeries for Children ‘Beyond Irresponsible’

The Biden administration released a set of documents Thursday that encourage children and adolescents to move ahead with “gender-affirming care,” that includes puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and transgender surgeries, including elective double mastectomies.

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California-based endocrinologist Michael Laidlaw, M.D. told Lumen-News, “I think it is beyond irresponsible for the White House to endorse procedures for kids that are unethical, medically harmful, and cause irreversible damage to kids’ bodies.”

Fox News drew attention to a document, released by the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of Population Affairs, titled “Gender Affirming Care and Young People,” which describes “gender-affirming care” as a “supportive form of healthcare.”

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The document states:

For transgender and nonbinary children and adolescents, early gender-affirming care is crucial to overall health and well-being as it allows the child or adolescent to focus on social transitions and can increase their confidence while navigating the healthcare system.

HHS goes so far as to say, “Research demonstrates that gender-affirming care improves the mental health and overall well-being of gender diverse children and adolescents.”

“It is unethical to put kids on a pathway to sterilization as early as age 8 or 9, before they know anything about sex or human development,” Laidlaw asserted, however. “Blocking normal puberty can be permanently harmful to the bone, brain, and social development of kids.”

He described the dangers to children of both sexes from cross-sex hormones: 

Giving doses of testosterone to girls that are 10 to 100 times higher than what their bodies would ordinarily produce can lead to future heart disease and death, not to mention irreversibly altering and damaging their reproductive tracts and voice boxes.

High dose estrogen like what is being given to boys is also harmful with a forty six times increased risk of male breast cancer, a five times increased risk of blood clots which may be deadly, and a two times increased risk of stroke. 

https://twitter.com/HHSGov/status/1509552798572199941

Another HHS agency – the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s National Child Traumatic Stress Network – also released a document dubbed “Gender-Affirming Care is Trauma-Informed Care,” which places a positive spin on potentially body-mutilating treatments. The document also dismisses forced violation of the privacy of others and the rights of girls and women to compete fairly in sports against others of their biological sex:

Gender-affirming care broadly refers to creating an environment that facilitates youth to move through the world safely as the gender they know themselves to be. This includes developmentally appropriate, evidence-based care provided by medical and mental health experts in partnership with youth, parents, and caregivers. It may include evidence-based interventions such as puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormones. Gender-affirming care also includes access to opportunities that all children should have, such as playing team sports, safely using bathrooms in their schools and other public places, and positive relationships with supportive adults.

“Providing gender-affirming care is neither child maltreatment nor malpractice,” the document states, likely a reference to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) policy identifying gender-affirming treatments for children as “child abuse,” reports of which should be investigated by Texas Child Protective Services.

“There is no scientifically sound research showing negative impacts from providing gender-affirming care,” the Biden HHS document insists.

For Laidlaw, nothing could be further from the truth.

Transgender surgeries, he explained to Lumen-News, “cause irreversible damage, and the healthy organs that are removed – such as breasts, ovaries, and testicles – can never be replaced.”

“Furthermore, there are many detransitioners who deeply regret being medicalized by this experimental treatment, and their voices need to be heard,” he said.

Abigail Shrier, author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, noted that, with its declarations today, the Biden administration, “now owns this absurd position at precisely the moment that many European countries (France, UK, Sweden and Finland) are backing away from these interventions, having examined a decade of evidence that *failed* to establish the purported benefits.”

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The Biden Department of Justice (DOJ) – already known for labeling parents who show up at local school board meetings as potential “domestic terrorists” – will now zero in on any states that do not “affirm” individuals who claim to be a gender that is incompatible with their biological sex. The DOJ threatens those who do not comply with “gender-affirming care” with a loss of federal funding.

Biden’s Justice Department actually makes the statement:

A state or local government must meet the heavy burden of justifying interference with that right since it is well established within the medical community that gender-affirming care for transgender youth is not only appropriate but often necessary for their physical and mental health.

An Observer editorial, just published March 20 at the UK’s Guardian, noted that former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health Dr Hilary Cass, has released an interim report on the quality of care for children with gender dysphoria in England.

Cass’s findings stress “a profound lack of evidence and medical consensus about the best approach to treating gender dysphoria in children,” the editorial states, adding:

Yet the NHS’s [National Health Service’s] specialist Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) takes a child’s expressed gender identity as the starting point for treatment. This “affirmative approach” leaves little space for exploration of the potential relationship between their dysphoria and neurodiversity or psychosocial needs, including those arising from childhood trauma or internalised hostility to same-sex attraction. GIDS has compounded this lack of evidence with its own failure to track patient outcomes.

Most young people now referred for gender dysphoria “have other complex mental health issues or neurodiversity, but GIDS has failed to assess these needs in the round,” the editorial observes, adding the reason for the failure is “the polarised nature of the adult debate about gender identity.”

“There has been a deplorable tendency by some to mislabel clinical concerns about the affirmative model as transphobia,” the editorial continues, noting that, despite Cass’s findings, the gender-affirming clinicians still want to shut down debate about their model, suggesting their “clinical” model is inextricably tied to their “ideology.”

“These adults must examine their consciences, because it is children whose care is compromised as a result of their ideology,” the editorial concludes.