What is the proper role of a pediatric physician? Core pediatric training largely focuses on normal growth and development of children. Understanding normal progress allows the physician to recognize deviations from normal. The pediatrician should help guide children from birth through childhood, and eventually to becoming sound, functioning adult members of society.

Somewhere along the way some in the pediatric community lost the plot and abandoned that core principle. I believe that this began along with the emergence of Adolescent Medicine as a subspecialty within Pediatrics. In its early days Adolescent Medicine took the stance that teens deserved some degree of autonomy. Teens being teens, this unsurprisingly led to a three-party conflict involving parents, teens and physicians over all sorts of issues (drugs, alcohol, sex, you name it). The doctor's role eventually shifted from being a mediator to being a partisan arbiter who always took the side of the child. Validating the feelings of the child, even if their choices became self-destructive, became paramount. With the emergence of "gender dysphoria" as the greatest thing since the hula hoop, adolescents have learned that being a bully brings results. Parents and doctors alike, in their eagerness to please the child, are susceptible to intimidation. These days a threat of "If I don't get my way I'll kill myself," only has to be implied to get a result. When dealing with a 4 year old who throws a tantrum the first rule of parenting should be "We don't negotiate with terrorists."

Fast forward to today, with the transgender fad exploding in America; where have children's hospitals ended up?

On January 28th the White House announced an Executive Order titled Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical mutilation. Briefly, that EO bans so-called "gender affirming care" for children less than 19 years old to be enforced by withholding of federal funds for noncompliance. Colorado hospitals initially paused so-called "gender affirming" care on February 6th. Three states (WA, OR, MN) sought an injunction, which was granted in mid-February. Now, according to this report in the Denver Post in the wake of Colorado joining the lawsuit over the EO and anticipating the restraining order being extended to include CO, Children's Hospital Colorado (CHCO) is rushing to reinstitute their gender clinic activities.

"Children's Hospital Colorado believes that families know what is best for their child," the hospital said in a statement. I find it odd that they don't feel the same way when it comes to school closures, masking and vaccinations. I also notice that no named spokesperson for CHCO was actually quoted. Just "The hospital said..."

CHCO's gender clinic is ironically named The TRUE Center. A couple of years ago the TRUE Center's webpage was masked from public view. Searching on CHCO's main website for the search term 'gender' did not result in a link to the gender clinic. The TRUE webpage could be reached from outside links, but was apparently hidden from casual searching on the CHCO site. Now however, searching for 'gender' brings up a first result of TRUE Center, loud and proud. I'm not sure what that shift signals, but it seems they are more confident in revealing their true agenda.

TRUE stands for Trust, Respect, Understand and Emerge. You can trust us. We'll respect you. We understand you. And at the end of the process you can emerge as your true self. Or stated differently it says 'we will cater to your delusion and your wishes will be fulfilled'. These are confused children, not butterflies emerging from a cocoon. The CHCO TRUE Center has abandoned truth in favor of delusional ideology. If should be renamed the "FALSE" Center.

CHCO has taken the position that they never performed elective mastectomies on patients younger than 19 years old though they did perform mastectomies on young adults prior to 2023. But if you look at the TRUE Center webpage you will find this little nugget: "We can also refer you to additional services at your request within Children's Colorado as well as a variety of other community resources." I read this as "surgery, wink, nudge".

It seems to me that general Pediatricians are loath to speak out about the whole-hearted embrace of disfiguring gender procedures and advocacy by organizations such as CHCO, AAP, WPATH and HHS. Vice President JD Vance spoke in Munich recently about the dangers of squelching free speech. It is our moral duty to stand up for what is objectively and obviously true and proper, to decry the great disservice that the medical profession is inflicting on children while claiming they are protecting them from harm.

In early February when CHCO initially paused their gender altering activities, an enabling mother was cited:

E.R. who has a 15-year-old transgender son who received a testosterone prescription from Children's, said she's trying to figure out how to keep a promise that he would stay safe. For now, her son looks like a typical boy of his age, but he could face assault or harassment if he runs out of medication and starts to develop more female shape, she said.

TRANSLATION: She has a daughter who is pretending to be a boy and uses testosterone to produce a more male-like external appearance and is afraid that natural pubertal development will emerge and she will get breast development and probably menstruation. She is objectively NOT a boy.

At the end of the day, this issue really is not a question of science. You don't need a scientific expert to see the fallacy of claiming you can turn a girl into a boy. Instead it is a question of perversion, subversion, arrogance, and ultimately morality. Advocates of puberty blockers, gender-based hormone therapy and elective mastectomies for children are perverting observable reality in pursuit of some twisted illogic. Those who push these supposed therapies are subverting parental rights and intercalating the expert into the family, between parent and child. Whinging that denying this "critically needed medical care" will cause irreversible harm is counterfactual and arrogant. Promising children that a wave of the magic hormone wand or a snip and tuck surgery will make them happy is immoral. It's akin to your child announcing he can fly and you telling him to go ahead and jump off the balcony.

Shame on Children's Hospital Colorado and the TRUE Center. They are an embarrassment to the field of Pediatrics. They have abandoned their primary purpose of promoting normal maturation, growth and development. They had one job to do and they have failed. I pray that sanity returns to the fields of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. It breaks my heart to see CHCO take this stance.

Dr. Schroeder is a retired pediatric physician with many years of prior professional connection to CHCO from the 1980s until his retirement in 2019, both during training and later as a faculty physician at University of Colorado School of Medicine.