Over the past decade or so, special interest groups funded by Big Pharma have pushed to make what was recently unthinkable mainstream: policies making the removal of healthy body parts and resulting in the sterilization of our nation’s children. It was once unthinkable to take away parental rights over medical decision-making, but the Biden Administration has embraced these dangerous Pharma Fads.
Just take this Office of Population Affairs (OASH) handout as an example. OASH defines “Gender-Affirming Care” for “Young People” to include “medical” and “surgical” interventions for transgender and nonbinary young people. Gender-affirming care treats young people by, among other things, “aligning their outward physical traits with their gender identity” and also consists of drugs designed to block puberty and replace naturally-occurring hormones. Even more unthinkable, some states are stripping parental involvement in these medical interventions, and schools are developing policies to secretly facilitate the gender transition of children without parental knowledge. A child may go to school as a boy, his God-given sex, and spend the day pretending to be a girl while taking an irreversible cocktail of dangerous artificial hormones.
It wasn’t that long ago that even the idea of surgically altering a minor, prescribing puberty blockers, or allowing teenage boys into girls’ locker rooms was considered scientifically unsound and, generally, crazy. Excluding parents from major decisions at school, let alone decisions leading to medically irreversible procedures and drugs, would be a school-closing scandal. These developments were not a realistic possibility or even on the radar of the vast majority of educators just a decade or two ago.
Yet this is exactly what the “wisdom” of our government and the Ivy League ivory tower has been pushing. One must wonder, why would this be? The answer, according to OASH, is based upon the current pharma fad claiming that these treatments lower the rates of mental health outcomes.
But this understanding is purely a recent trend that is not science-based. This fad comes from organizations like the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and other known progressive advocacy organizations that exist under the thin disguise of science-based professional organizations. In reality, WPATH manipulated data to suppress conclusions that contradict gender-affirming care. Indeed, outside independent reviews of those standards have found that another prominent gender-affirming care advocate, the Endocrine Society, uses science that is “at odds with” what outside systemic reviewers found and that the science is based upon “weak evidence.”
In reality, this “treatment” is anything but that. Truly, it is solely permanent damage to young people’s bodies that leaves them as shells of their former selves, sterile, and outside the image in which God made them. Surgical interventions such as “top” and “bottom” surgeries leave young people without body parts essential in the hormone regulation process. Puberty blockers can impede and, in some cases, prevent males from later being able to produce or develop sperm, meaning that these young people become sterile. Other concerns with this treatment include higher cancer risks and brittle bones due to bone density problems.
Indeed, when young people come to the realization that they have permanently altered their bodies, that they may not have children, and that they are barreling toward severe health problems, the mental toll of that realization often causes more psychological distress, not less. One study found that suicides among minors increased in 2015 in states that began allowing “cross-sex medical interventions.” A study from the Netherlands showed an increase in suicide during every stage of transitioning.
It is no wonder that England has made the decision to stop gender transition for youths, taking the lead of other European countries like Sweden and France. The English decision was motivated by a report that found “conflicting views about the clinical approach.”
While the Biden administration seized upon the previous fad of gender politics that pushed expensive and invasive medical interventions that leave people perpetually dependent upon a broken healthcare system, President Trump should develop policy consistent with the internationally accepted method of family support and psychological treatment for minors.
It is time for United States policy to focus more on developing healthy young people into healthy adults. Reform should start with policy changes within the Department of Health and Human Services (and its subagencies) and the Department of Education by framing gender-affirming care as bad science while recognizing that parental rights include parenting their children.
Big Pharma has no place at the dinner table.
Martin Hoyt is the Director for Public Health Reform Alliance, a nonpartisan organization committed to increasing transparency and oversight on the public health system, so it works better for all Americans.