A doctor offered up by the American Medical Association as an expert on transgender health care claimed that kids as young as 3 years old have a “stable” view of gender identity and that puberty blockers are reversible, according to footage published Wednesday by The Ben Shapiro Show.
Dr. Jesse Krikorian, a transgender-identifying woman, argued during a conversation with Michigan State Rep. Brad Paquette that kids can identify as transgender from a “very young age” and that puberty blockers don’t have permanent impacts on their development. The conversation was arranged by the American Medical Association President Bobby Mukkamala, who referred Krikorian to Paquette after the lawmaker asked the medical association to point him to an expert on transgender procedures.
Video footage of Mukkamala’s conversation with Paquette was published on Tuesday by Shapiro. In that conversation, Mukkamala said his organization endorsed transgender procedures on kids because that was what the experts told them. When asked for a more detailed explanation on the alleged expert science in support of transgender procedures, Mukkamala connected Paquette with Krikorian.
Throughout the conversation, Krikorian downplayed the impacts of puberty blockers, claimed young teens are able to make informed decisions about their future fertility, and dismissed studies from England and the Department of Health and Human Services critical of transgender procedures.
“Developmentally, kids generally have a pretty sense, a pretty stable sense of gender identity starting around age three,” Krikorian told Paquette, according to footage obtained by Shapiro. “They may not tell us unless we asked, but it’s generally there around that age just developmentally. That’s when that comes in.”
Krikorian is a family medicine doctor who told Paquette that she was currently thinking about moving to Canada because of laws being passed in the United States to ban transgender procedures on kids. She told the Republican lawmaker that she has worked with many transgender identifying kids before, including one 7-year-old boy who identified as a girl, whose biggest concern was the “appearance of a bulge in her ballet leotard.”
While discussing the American Medical Association’s designation of Krikorian as an expert, Shapiro said that with no other medical issue, you could be cited as an expert because of your personal experience.
“But suddenly with ‘gender-affirming care’ the most prominent expert the [American Medical Association] could offer is a trans person who is a family physician. That is not expertise, that is projection,” Shapiro said on his Wednesday show.
When Paquette questioned the wisdom of placing kids on puberty blockers, Krikorian argued that puberty blockers were just needed to “buy time” for a child to figure out their gender identity.
6/ Krikorian claims:
– Parents know if their 5yo is trans.
– Doctors are transing kids to appease their concerns about how other people perceive them.
– A 13/14yo is ready for permanent decisions after their pubertal (and brain) development has been blocked for a couple of… pic.twitter.com/13gtfQC2zg
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) August 27, 2025
“There’s nothing about starting puberty blockers that means that you have to continue them. There’s nothing about starting hormones. That means you have to continue them,” she said. “It’s only if you like the results that you’re getting, if you’re happy, if you’re feeling good, if you’re feeling better about yourself and more able to function in society, that you keep going with them.”
When asked about potential side effects of puberty blockers, Krikorian acknowledged that bone density would be impacted, but argued that kids can “catch up” once they are taken off the blockers. “Every drug has side effects for sure. Puberty blockers are very reversible,” she said.
Despite Krikorian’s claims, studies have shown that puberty blockers can have irreversible impacts on bone growth and cause sexual dysfunction, voice damage, and infertility.
At a different point, when discussing putting males on estrogen and females on testosterone, Krikorian said that “most of the side effects are things that people are looking for.”
“You know, they’re looking for beard growth if they’re taking testosterone. They’re looking for a deepening voice if they’re taking testosterone. Or they’re looking for that softer skin, they’re looking for the more feminine distribution of fat if you’re taking estrogen,” she said.
She later claimed that, because “being transgender is really hard,” she doesn’t “worry too much about these patients” since they are not doing it to have fun, but to address their identity issues.
When discussing the impacts that transgender treatments can have on fertility, she said that “a lot of people are willing to make this trade off.” She said that 13 and 14-year-olds had some “insight” into the possibility of not being able to have kids if they underwent transgender procedures.
“In other words, according to Dr. Krikorian, cross-sex hormones don’t sterilize kids, but even if they do, it’s okay because these kids can plan to adopt or buy someone else’s sperm one day,” Shapiro said on his show. “That is of course insanse and dystopian. My kids don’t even know what they want for lunch let alone make a decision about adopting a child of their own in 20 years.”
She also suggested that males wanting to identify as female should save up their sperm before starting estrogen if they wanted to have kids.
“If your life plan involves genetic children, go ahead and bank sperm,” she said. “Sperm is not that hard to come by. You can buy it. You can access it. If you’ve got a partner who can carry a pregnancy, you guys can make it happen.”
4/ That doesn’t seem to bother Dr. Krikorian much though, because if a boy suffers one of the extremely likely outcomes — such as permanent sterilization — from pumping estrogen into his body, “sperm is not that hard to come by. You can buy it.” pic.twitter.com/cQw9o6FDWA
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) August 27, 2025
Paquette asked Krikorian if she had reviewed the Cass report or the recent Department of Health and Human Services study that documented the flaws with many of the problems with transgender medicine.
She said that the Cass Report, a British report that criticized transgender medical procedures for kids, was not good evidence and that the HHS report was “politically motivated” and not “sound science.” Krikorian admitted that she had not read through the entire HHS report, only portions of it.
12/ In fact, Dr. Krikorian hadn’t even read @RobertKennedyJr @HHSGov‘s Report on Gender Dysphoria — the most extensive US report on the topic she is an alleged specialist in, authored by our nation’s top health agency.
Krikorian, the AMA’s choice-expert calls it “politically… pic.twitter.com/IzlR5v71cq
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) August 27, 2025
Paquette ended the conversation with Krikorian by suggesting that they could possibly have a future call to discuss the HHS report in more depth.
“At this point the AMA is now indistinguishable from other leftist activist organizations like the Human Rights Campaign or the ACLU. They don’t engage in science,” Shapiro said. “They’re not interested in protecting patients. They are a lobbying arm for quacks and a mouthpiece for leftists who prey on children.”
Paquette supports shielding kids from transgender procedures and introduced a bill in May that would have banned them in Michigan. He joined Shapiro on Wednesday to discuss his conversation with the American Medical Association and Krikorian.
The more he pushed back on transgender ideology, the more Paquette said he was told to “trust the experts.”
“A lot of folks said, ‘well, you’re not a doctor Brad,’ even though I talked to a lot of them. And ‘well the AMA supports this,’ and so I went to the AMA. I started to talk to their experts and came to find that they have no idea what they’re talking about,” Paquette said.
He said he wants to expose the “no understanding, no grounding in evidence-based medicine”
WATCH THE FULL CONVERSATION: