Los Angeles Psychiatrist Sums Up Child Trans Culture: ‘Medical Malpractice’

Child psychiatrist Mark McDonald, M.D. warned that the rise of transgenderism among children and adolescents has led to “a medical cultural emergency” fostered by a medical system designed “against the health and safety and well-being of these young people.”

McDonald discussed his concerns during a Grand Rounds presentation hosted October 7 by membership-based health and wellness service GoldCare.

Image from GoldCare

Casting the political issues aside, McDonald focused on three points: the “false” narrative from trans activists that “somehow medical intervention … is the solution to the problem;” the causes or origins of gender dysphoria in order to better understand why this crisis happened in the first place; and whether young people with gender dysphoria can obtain “real treatment.”

The author of the COVID-era United States of Fear and subsequent Freedom from Fear, McDonald began by confronting the transgender industry claim heard by many parents: that failure to affirm their child’s “new” gender identity by refusing medical treatment will lead to a greater likelihood of their child committing suicide.

“Yes, yes, absolutely, it’s true,” he asserted. “People who call themselves transgendered do have exceptionally high suicide rates. The reason for this is not surprising. They’re mentally ill, and people who are mentally ill, specifically with depression or anxiety, do have higher rates of self-harm, higher rates of suicide and also higher rates of medical problems, which is also true with schizophrenics and bipolar disordered patients.”

Transgender activists have made the false claim that gender dysphoric young people are more likely to commit suicide if their parents refuse to accept their child’s chosen “new” gender and reject treatment with puberty blockers, hormone drugs, and, potentially, mutilating surgeries.

McDonald stated clearly, however, that “so-called treatments” for the young adolescent with this mental health problem should not include “cutting off their breasts or penis, flipping their vagina into a phallus, or injecting them with castrating and infertilizing hormones.”

“That is not treatment. That is medical malpractice, that is mutilation, that is child abuse,” he warned.

McDonald cited retrospective data from northern European studies that, according to the psychiatrist, “answer the question very clearly: is it in the best interest of these transgendered people to have surgical interventions and hormonal interventions?”

The answer, he said, is an “emphatic” no.

He observed one Swedish study of 350 post-surgical, self-identified, transgendered adults. Researchers found that 10 to 15 years after the surgeries, suicide rates were 20 times higher than in the general population.

“So, if surgery is the solution to the transgender problem, wouldn’t suicide rates after surgery be at or just slightly above, or hopefully even below that of the general population? Wouldn’t that be the expected result of a successful treatment?” he asked.

Similarly, a 42-year-long Dutch study of over six million people concluded in 2023 that those identifying as transgendered are seven to eight times more likely to attempt suicide than the general population.

“Not a big surprise,” McDonald said. “They’re mentally ill. They’re twice as likely as the general population to die from non-suicide medical problems, which is also interesting, and matches what I said earlier about how people with serious mental illness, like, for example, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, they tend to die at higher rates – younger ages than people who don’t have mental illness – similar to, let’s say, diabetics or people with congestive heart failure.”

“Mental illness produces early death. It creates health problems. This is not surprising, and it’s not even controversial,” he observed.

Further noting that, in the Dutch study, 43% of the people had a “comorbid, diagnosed psychiatric illness,” McDonald remarked the outcome was “not surprising, because transgenderism is a mental illness”:

It’s not a biological illness, it’s not a genetic illness. To some degree, it’s a social illness, but at its core, it actually is psychiatric, so it’s very rare to see somebody with a gender dysphoria diagnosis who does not also have a comorbid medical illness diagnosed and, perhaps, treated, such as severe anxiety, severe depression, bipolar, schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive disorder, all sorts of other disorders. They go hand in hand, and I would even argue that the comorbid psychiatric illness, in most cases, preceded the gender dysphoria and not the reverse.

A Danish study of 5000 trans-identified people also found that those who received cross-sex hormone treatment only had a higher risk of attempted suicide and completed suicide after their hormone treatment.

“So the hormone treatment, not correlatively, but causatively, increased the risk of suicide and death in these people,” McDonald noted, summarizing the studies. “Given the numbers and the power of all of this data collection and this research, and over a very long period of time, decades, in each case, it’s clear that the interventions that have been proposed here in the U.S. – unfortunately mutilating and castrating young people, often underage, mostly girls, is not helping them.”

“So, the argument that you hear often from the trans activists, which are politically motivated, not medically motivated people, is, do you wish to have a trans child or a dead child? In other words, if you do not intervene and surgerize these children or these young adults, or castrate them or make them infertile, you will not have a child at all because the child will commit suicide.”

“Well, it is true. It is absolutely true that your child or your young person, will have a higher risk of suicide simply by being transgender or identifying as such,” McDonald concluded, observing, nevertheless, that “it does not follow that these interventions help the children.”

McDonald then responded to the second issue of why the sharp surge in recent years in child gender dysphoria, noting how the demographics changed as well.

“Rather than seeing a huge surge in, let’s say, boys saying they wanted to be girls, we saw this huge surge in girls saying that they actually thought they were boys,” he observed, citing the work of Abigail Shrier, author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. “That’s interesting. Why would that happen so suddenly? Was there some kind of a genetic shift in the female population?”

Shrier, he continued, described “the locations where the greatest concentration of these coming-out transgender girls was largely in schools and urban areas where there are other transgender children that were also coming out and were supported in that by community centers, teachers and therapists.”

“In other words, one or two girls would say in their school, you know, I think I’m transgendered, and then there’d be, say, a club that would open up, and they would join this club, and then all of a sudden, 5, 10, 15, 20, more girls would show up in the next couple of months and come out as being transgendered,” he said. “Now that is the definition of a social contagion, and that’s not happening with the boys.”

“So, in terms of numbers and in terms of demographics, we’re seeing a completely new phenomenon that we’ve never seen before,” McDonald said, “which then leads to the question of, well, how and why is this happening?”

For girls, the child psychiatrist suggested, adolescence is a time of body change and its accompanying insecurities, while boys with gender dysphoria who adopt a female identity “just put on an identity like a costume,” without significant struggle.

Transgendered girls, McDonald said, have been “getting tons of support, social, emotional, medical, economic, from all aspects of our culture.”

“They’re even getting a kind of valorization of virtue signaling, really, of their goodness,” he said. “They’re coming out almost like a Mother Teresa – well, if you become a transgender, from girl to boy, you’re a better person. And this happens on social media as well … which is a horrible place for a young girl to be, under the assault of people criticizing her and making fun of her and bullying her.”

McDonald said his work also leads him to believe that young transgendered people often “come from families with very narcissistic parents” who have “induced a form of self-hatred into the child, perhaps inadvertently, which then leads to an attack on the body.”

“And the greatest attack on the body, of course, is to cut off your sexual organs,” he observed. “You see it often with young people that are getting all kinds of crazy, tribal tattoos, sleeves, very unusual, primitive, multiple body piercings, especially in unusual places like in the face and the nipples and the web of the hand. This is also an attack on the body, and it also is an example or a display of a lack of love for the self.”

As for how to treat young people claiming a different gender identity, McDonald asserted that “we do not jump on the popular bandwagon, which is being pushed by the American Academy of Pediatrics, by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, by the Family Medicine Council, by the state medical boards, etc.”

“I know that when you have a non-body related problem, meaning a mental illness or an emotional problem, the appropriate tool is not a tool that changes the body, it is a tool that changes the mind, and that would be therapy,” he said. “There should be nothing controversial about offering therapy for young people who have emotional problems, whether or not you want to diagnose it as an illness or simply a challenge. The way to approach emotional problems is to talk about them, and then to diagnose the cause … But it all starts with a conversation.”

McDonald asserted such real mental health treatment “cannot be done by an LGBTQ XYZ activist” who works for a “grooming program” that is “unmonitored by clinicians and staffed primarily by very disturbed individuals who also have problems with their mental health and do not have any basis of training or ethics or foundational understanding of the human psyche to offer advice, much less treatment, to people who are disturbed emotionally and mentally.”

The reality, however, is that parents seeking ethical mental health treatment often come up empty.

McDonald warns that competent and ethical mental health professionals “have been threatened by their peers, by local institutions that they might be affiliated with or even employed by or have co-affiliate part-time, faculty, professorship, assistant professorship associations and by the governing boards for their licensure,” he said. “They have made it very clear that if you do not go down the road of gender-affirming care, meaning enabling, castrating, and inducing infertility through hormones, you are persona non grata in your profession, and you may actually not only be suspended or delicenced, you may actually be sued civilly for failure to protect and inducing, God forbid, suicide in your patients.”

“So, the good clinicians have either fled the states where they are at risk of this happening to them, or they are being cowed and intimidated into remaining silent, or they’re just working in the dark,” McDonald explained. “They’re being incredibly quiet and they’re not speaking out, and I understand that.”

McDonald’s presentation came on the same day the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Chiles v. Salazar, a case involving a Colorado licensed counselor who challenged the state’s law that bans voluntarily sought mental health treatment for minors focused on issues concerning sexual orientation or gender identity.

While some media concluded after oral arguments that a majority of the Court appeared “skeptical” of Colorado’s law, leftist media – allies of the transgender lobby which refers to such treatment as “conversion therapy” – provided the following biased headlines to their readers:

Salon: Anti-trans activists pray SCOTUS upholds “conversion therapy”

Truthout: Will SCOTUS Greenlight Conversion Therapy Even Though the UN Calls It ‘Torture’?

The Advocate: The sham of oral arguments on conversion therapy is meant to show SCOTUS is ‘unbiased’

GoldCare Academic Director Richard Amerling, M.D. raised the issue of how enriched the transgender industry has become.

“This has now become big business,” Amerling said. “Multi-billion dollars are being spent on these drugs, the surgeries, and the lifelong follow up that will be needed for these poor kids who are going to have chronic medical issues for however long they live – and they won’t live normal lifespans. None of this would have happened if people were having to pay for it out of pocket. So, these procedures and drugs are all covered.”

Additionally, Amerling raised the fundamental ethical issue of informed consent with child trans procedures.

“There’s no way that a kid can understand what it’s like to become infertile and to be able to lose their sexual organs,” he asserted. “They have no idea how bad it’s going to be down the line in terms of medical and surgical complications – and they are horrific – and they’re never told this stuff. They’re told that their fantasy is going to come true, that they’re going to magically turn into a boy, which is simply impossible.”

McDonald urged doctors to embrace moral courage and their oath to “do no harm.”

In most cases, support for children with gender dysphoria and their parents generally leads to a normal reversal of that “delusional belief,” he said.

“It is a delusion. You cannot be a girl or a boy if you’re the opposite sex by the time that child reaches adulthood and passes through adolescence,” he emphasized. “So, if at the face of it, at the base of all of our medical training, no matter what field you’re in, what specialty we observe, first, do no harm, then we should not be introducing hormones of the opposite sex to boys and girls. But rather, at the very least, we should simply be waiting if we’re going to do nothing at all, we should be waiting and not intervening, because that produces the best possible outcome.”