The Florida Board of Medicine voted Friday to ban the practices of sterilizing and mutilating children in the name of “gender-affirming care.”
Such procedures have become extremely controversial as the public became aware that they were happening to children and learned the lengths American doctors will go to create lifelong patients and, therefore, streams of income.
The Board said their decision was based on the irreversibility of drugs and treatments (something doctors have been lying about for years) and the growing number of de-transitioners. The decision will apply to all children in the state, including those who are currently undergoing the treatments.
The Board held a workshop Friday to discuss new statewide rules as well as hear public testimony.
One person, de-transitioner Chloe Cole, spoke out against the use of puberty blockers and other procedures on children and detailed her own heartbreaking story.
“My breasts were beautiful, now they’ve been incinerated for nothing,” she said after explaining that she had a “gender-affirming” double mastectomy at the age of 15. “Thank you, modern medicine”:
“At 13, I started taking puberty blockers and testosterone, and at 15, I underwent a double mastectomy in which my breasts were removed and my nipples were grafted,” Cole said. “And yet, at 16, after years of medically transitioning, I came to realize that I severely regretted my transition.”
Cole then went on to describe the lie she and her parents were sold by doctors who said transition was the only way she would live.
“During my diagnosis for dysphoria and the consultations for these treatments, the overall picture of my life just went completely unaddressed,” she said.
She explained that she “was quite a very feminine girl,” but early access to social media gave her body image issues.
“I was introduced to inappropriate content and an echo chamber of far-left ideology, such as that sex and gender are separate, women are inherently victims, men are inherently superior in every way, and that dysphoric children need hormones and surgeries in order to live,” Cole explained.
“These reductive ideologies have crept their way into science and by extension, medicine,” she continued. “I unknowingly gave my mind end eventually my body to an anti-science movement that reduces womanhood to long hair, Barbie dolls, dresses, and false self-perception.”
Cole said she developed more psychiatric issues the further her transition went, despite doctors assuring her that she needed to transition to feel normal.
“I was on the verge of suicide for nearly all of high school,” she said. “Some things went undiagnosed for years until after I stopped transitioning, like autism and body dysmorphia.
“All the talk about mental health, self-perception, pronouns, and ideology leads me to the question: ‘Why is a mental health epidemic not being addressed with mental health treatment looking at the root causes for why female adolescents like me want to reject their bodies?'” she asked. “I was not suicidal before going on hormones, and yet doctors asked my parents the question: ‘Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?'”
“This is not how medical professionals are supposed to talk,” Cole exclaimed. “This is how activists talk.”
Cole then talked about the “cost of treating mental health with barbaric surgeries,” explaining that two years after her double mastectomy, she still has bandages on her chest because her nipples leak fluid and stain her clothes.
“I have no breasts,” she continued. “I want to be a mother someday, and yet I can never naturally feed my children, my future children.
This move by the Board of Medicine rejects standards created by the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Endocrine Society — all of which have a vested monetary interest in keeping these procedures alive.
Despite these medical groups’ advocacy, many European countries are sounding the alarm about such treatments because there is “scarce and inconclusive evidence to support clinical decision-making.”
Medical watchdog Do No Harm also submitted a comment to the Board, saying, “Much of the medical establishment has abandoned compassion for ideologically driven demands. With unwarranted certitude, providers and policymakers are broadly promoting an approach they call ‘gender-affirming care.'”
“Make no mistake: This phrase is a euphemism for encouraging children and adolescents to embrace a gender transition journey from which there is often no return yet much regret,” a letter to the Board stated.
Describing the issue further, the letter from DNH chairman Dr. Stanley Goldfarb goes on:
So-called gender-affirming care typically involves administering puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children. These treatments can have permanent physical effects, including sterilization and loss of bone density. Countless young people who have been subjected to these treatments say that nobody told them about the risks. And gender surgeries – including cutting off the breasts and genitals of teenagers – are life-altering in the profoundest ways imaginable. These permanent and irreversible treatments are being promoted to children even though gender dysphoria is often temporary and is strongly linked to a child’s social environment and social media use.
DNH Florida Trans Comment v2 by Breitbart News
Breccan F. Thies is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @BreccanFThies.