The firestorm over the case of seven-year-old biological boy James Younger, on track to be “transitioned” to appear as a girl, has shined yet another light on the fact that no reliable scientific evidence exists to support the notion that young children benefit from “transgender” dress or puberty blockers.
Increasing numbers of parents, however, fear they are negligent if they do not immediately affirm a child’s claim of desiring to be a gender that is inconsistent with his or her biological sex. These same parents experience pressure to change their child’s physical appearance to conform to the new “gender identity” and to consider puberty-blocking drugs as first steps toward “transition.”
“Remarkably, this revolution is happening without any credible scientific evidence to support it,” wrote Jane Robbins, attorney and researcher on the transgender cultural phenomenon, at the Witherspoon Institute’s Public Discourse.
Robbins spells out that biological sex is fixed:
The concept of changing one’s biological sex is, of course, nonsense, as sex is determined by unalterable chromosomes. An individual can change his hormone levels and undergo surgery to better imitate the opposite sex, but a male on the day of his conception will remain a male on the day of his death. … [T]he idea that there is a real personal trait called “gender” that challenges or invalidates the identity significance of biological sex is equally fallacious. But the absence of genuine evidence is simply ignored, and faux “evidence” is created to validate the mania.
The American College of Pediatricians reports experts on both sides of the issue agree that “80 percent to 95 percent” of children with a diagnosis of gender dysphoria “accepted their biological sex by late adolescence.”
“This worldview began to shift, however, as adult transgender activists increasingly promoted the ‘feminine essence’ narrative to secure social acceptance,” the pediatricians added.
Despite both the data affirming the high percentage of children who naturally grow out of gender confusion and the clear science of biology, the College observes “there are now 40 gender clinics across the United States that promote the use of pubertal suppression and cross-sex hormones in children.”
The pediatricians explain gender clinic activists say the administration of puberty blockers will allow the child with gender dysphoria time to experience life with another gender identity and without the interference of facial hair or developing breasts.
“The standards followed in these clinics are based on ‘expert opinion,’” they say, yet add:
There is not a single large, randomized, controlled study that documents the alleged benefits and potential harms to gender-dysphoric children from pubertal suppression and decades of cross-sex hormone use. Nor is there a single long-term, large, randomized, controlled study that compares the outcomes of various psychotherapeutic interventions for childhood GD with those of pubertal suppression followed by decades of toxic synthetic steroids. In today’s age of “evidence-based medicine,” this should give everyone pause.
The College notes that, perhaps of “greater concern,” when puberty blockers are administered at about 11 years of age and followed by cross-sex hormones, children will likely be faced with sterility.
Other long-term effects of puberty blockers on children who take them are unknown, yet these drugs are increasingly being administered to those diagnosed with gender dysphoria.
Recently, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) documented thousands of adult deaths, linked to the same drugs approved for treatment of prostate cancer and endometriosis, which are now increasingly given to suppress puberty in children.
Lupron, for example, is being used — without formal FDA approval — as a puberty blocker on the increasing number of children and adolescents who are being diagnosed in the U.S. and the U.K. with gender dysphoria. This is being done — with the support of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society — despite no evidence existing that such hormonal treatments actually benefit children and adolescents with gender dysphoria.
According to the College, the combination of changing a child’s appearance to imitate another gender identity and the addition of puberty blockers generates “a single inevitable outcome (transgender identification) that requires lifelong use of toxic synthetic hormones, resulting in infertility.”
This outcome, the pediatricians say, “is neither fully reversible nor harmless.”
St. Louis-based pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Paul Hruz recently told the Christian Post not much is known about giving hormone blockers like Lupron to children.
“It’s often claimed that medical blockade of puberty allows a child more time to sort out issues of their gender identity, that it alleviates dysphoria in affected children, and that it makes it easier if and when they choose to go on and get other treatments, namely [sex change] surgery,” he said. “It’s also claimed that it’s completely safe and reversible.”
Hruz noted Lupron does influence bone density, and since adolescence is a time when young people accumulate the bone mass essential for the rest of their lives, there is cause for concern about if young people can regain bone density once they go off the drug.
“The reality is that there is no long-term data about treating children, and the only data that we have in adults indicates that medical interventions to align the appearance of the body to a transgendered identity does not fix the problem,” he said.
Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, confirmed to Breitbart News that Lupron “is off-label for lack of long-term studies.”
She added, “It undoubtedly causes irreversible loss of fertility and many other adverse effects that are potentially lethal. It does not turn a male child into a female child, only into a eunuch who will lose his full potential for growth and strength.”
The reality is that the brains of young children do not allow them to fully understand the effects of such life-altering drugs.
“Children have no capacity to comprehend these long-term consequences, so the use of this drug in gender-confused children constitutes unethical experimentation,” Orient said. “Informed consent is not possible.”