Trump HHS Explodes The 'Trans Kids' Fad

'Umbrella Review' includes a history of medical ethics in ideological capture

Imagine the mental anguish that a progressive person would experience if they were forced to admit that Donald Trump was right about this while they were wrong the whole time. Of course the denial continues. They think of themselves as the good people, surely they could not have been so wrong. Imagine how much personal inventory will be required for someone to come around, now, and agree that the ‘trans kids’ are victims of medicalized gay shame.

The short version of this sordid history is that the gender-magic failed on adults, so then a group of gender-magicians tried it on kids. “In many areas of medicine, treatments are first established as safe and effective in adults before being extended to pediatric populations,” reads the new HHS report Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices. Setting aside normal medical ethics, “clinician-researchers developed the pediatric medical transition protocol in response to disappointing psychosocial outcomes in adults who underwent medical transition.”

Clinicians thought they needed to start earlier to get better cosmetic results, which would improve mental health outcomes, so they started blockading normal puberty in children, who then proceeded to cross-sex hormones and surgeries. When the results of these experiments in political medicine on the bodies of children inevitably disappointed their designers, the woo-wizards of pediatric sex lobotomy stopped publication of the results. Their ‘science’ was always a sham. Outside the minds of the activists who peddled the patent medical fraud of ‘gender identity,’ the science was never, ever ‘settled.’

Imagine that the NAACP had endorsed the US Public Health Service’s Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee, an historical episode of failed scientific medical ethics that this report references. That is how badly the civil rights institutions have failed gay and lesbian Americans. Of course the good progressive people don’t want to hear that from Trump, but really they don’t want to hear it at all, ever, from anyone. It hurts too much. It is too much truth for them to handle. They will have to hear it, though.

As the Review explains, and any well-studied TERF could have explained years ago, this ethical compromise exists throughout ‘gender medicine’ because doctors want insurance reimbursement, while activists demand to be de-stigmatized. ‘Gender’ is therefore treated as cancer rather than a mental health condition. A child who professes to have sad feelings about their gender will have those ephemeral feelings pathologized like cancer, now. Puberty blockers are in fact an off-label use of anti-cancer drugs.

Likewise, the alphabetical organizations that once defended gay and lesbian people are being fanatically defensive about the new HHS Review. They know a robust scientific medical literature going back decades has shown the targeted group to be overwhelmingly gay, lesbian, or bisexual in adulthood. All sorts of children have been harmed by the pediatric sex lobotomy craze, but it is the gay and lesbian adults of the next generation who have been harmed most.

The big orgs knew what they were doing. The real historical record of the pediatric sex lobotomy craze is damning, but the Review does not indulge in damnations. It “seeks to provide the most accurate and current information available regarding the evidence base for the treatment of gender dysphoria in this population, the state of the relevant medical field in the United States, and the ethical considerations associated with the treatments offered.”

On this level, it succeeds. Using neutral language throughout, the report is instead careful to remain as unbiased as possible and reference systematic medical reviews using objective measures of reliability. Far from a ‘settled science,’ what the report calls “pediatric medical transition” (PMT) has always been clinical sorcery. The “umbrella review” finds that “clinical practice in this field of medicine is exceptional and concerning” because it acts so differently from other fields, because those fields are based on actual science.

Just like every systematic medical review of the literature on ‘gender medicine’ ever conducted, HHS has determined the evidence of supposed benefits “concerning the effects of any intervention on psychological outcomes, quality of life, regret, or long-term health, is very low.” All those clickbait articles extolling the supposed science of improved mental health and well-being and ‘trans joy’ were trumpeting results from the lowest tier of scientific evidence. “This indicates that the beneficial effects reported in the literature are likely to differ substantially from the true effects of the interventions.”

Moreover, most gender clinicians are not even following the recommendations of WPATH or the Endocrine Society, even though they are quite liberal and unrestricting, HHS notes. This is not evidence-based medicine, it is the realm of magicians and alchemists using scientific words from personal grimoires as they conduct their experiments on the bodies of children.

Unlike any other condition which calls for such interventions, “the diagnosis of gender dysphoria is based entirely on subjective self-reports and behavioral observations, without any objective physical, imaging, or laboratory markers. The diagnosis centers on attitudes, feelings, and behaviors that are known to fluctuate during adolescence.” Social media undoubtedly plays a role here by popularizing diagnostic ‘identities’.

Whereas gender dysphoria might feel crippling to a 13 year-old, “it will remit without intervention in most cases.” Time alone heals this wound. “No test can reliably predict the natural course of an adolescent’s identity development.”

And: “Medical professionals have no way to know which patients may continue to experience gender dysphoria and which will come to terms with their bodies.” Permanent medicalization is the proposed solution for temporary problems. A higher burden of proof ought to have been met first, before the experiments started.

To anyone versed in the actual science of the human life-cycle, none of this is surprising. Of all branches of medicine, only PTM demands that everyone forget everything they ever knew about the normal, observed maturation of human beings and pretend instead that children are mere meatsuit-vessels in which the gendered essence of a person abides.

Maintaining this quasi-religious premise requires further inversions of normal medical practices. Because “surgeries to remove healthy and functioning organs introduce a unique set of iatrogenic harms not encountered in other areas of medicine,” they must be justified as ‘life-saving’ for insurance purposes.

The evidence for benefit of pediatric medical transition is very uncertain, while the evidence for harm is less uncertain. When medical interventions pose unnecessary, disproportionate risks of harm, healthcare providers should refuse to offer them even when they are preferred, requested, or demanded by patients. Failure to do so increases the risk of iatrogenic harm and reduces medicine to consumerism, threatening the integrity of the profession and undermining trust in medical authority.

In plain terms, ‘gender medicine’ has always been fundamentally risky and cosmetic. Indeed, the Review notes that gender clinicians have been observed shifting away from the narrative of medical necessity to one of cosmetic satisfaction for some time. If the 19 year-old child is happy with their looks, then the magic has worked. This is a “consistent pattern across interventions for children and adolescents with GD,” the reports authors note.

Never mind the long-term damage from the urinary tract infections, or the hollow bones, or other consequences that will shorten and immiserate lives in their 20s and 30s. Never mind the iatrogenic harms. The disease was the cure all along, because don’t they look pretty? #ProtectTheDolls.

This permanent solution for temporary distress became a one-size-fits-all approach, even a panacea, for comorbid mental health issues, autism, and trauma associated with ‘gender dysphoria’ (GD).

As referrals shifted toward patients with adolescent-onset distress, this assumption of permanence was generalized to all adolescent GD regardless of whether it intensified in adolescence or appeared for the first time in adolescence. The belief that any GD in adolescence is likely permanent and warrants medical treatment remains “central to the rationale for medical intervention” in adolescents.

Whereas the ‘Dutch Protocol’ was relatively stringent, attempting to identify children whose dysphoria would be permanent, no such effort is made in American gender clinics. Most of them hand out puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones after only brief consultations, while there is still no evidence that longer assessment times can predict anything.

Kids who have felt this way for years are lumped together with kids who have felt this way for five minutes. All of them are affirmed in their “embodiment goals” because their transness is supposed to be a permanent state, justifying the permanent interventions. This is what social justice warriors mean when they say the word ‘equity.’ It is used to pervert the concept of ‘patient consent.’ A toddler ‘knows who they are,’ therefore they can choose to be chemically castrated and surgically altered to look like the opposite sex. Abracadabra: children can legally consent to sex change before they can legally consent to sex.

Even non-medicalized trans identification has profound psychosocial effects on the child. “The benefits and harms of social transition remain unknown; PBs, CSH, and surgeries consistently produce certain physical and physiological effects; and there is considerable uncertainty regarding their psychological and long-term health outcomes.”

Of the small sample set used in the Dutch study that began the PMT fad, three developed diabetes and one died as a direct result of gruesome surgery to invert his micropenis, a result of the puberty blockade, using part of his colon. “Every public health authority that has conducted a systematic review of the evidence has concluded that the benefit/risk profile of PMT is either unknown or unfavorable.”

“Systematic reviews of evidence have found no evidence of adverse effects of psychotherapy in this context,” the report says. What the gender industry calls ‘conversion therapy’ is simply therapy, a guided exploration of the mind instead of chemical or surgical alterations to the body.

What they fear is that nonbelievers might prevail upon a ‘trans child’ to accept themselves in their healthy body rather than spiralling into profitable, dangerous medicalization. For “despite changes in care of the transgender population over five decades, the elevated mortality risk has persisted, not declined,” the report notes.

Suicide risk is also not reduced. “When the focus turns to preventing suicide mortality, there is no evidence that hormonal interventions are effective.” The genderwoo magic doesn’t work. It has never worked. It will never work.

There have always been some humans who wanted to be the opposite sex. What has changed in modern times is that scientific medicine pretends to fulfill this dream. Most such people have always been same-sex attracted. George Jorgensen, the American GI who became Christine in Denmark, was gender nonconforming from youth, married a man, but expressed homophobic attitudes.

Christian Hamburger, the doctor who helped Jorgensen ‘become’ a woman, received hundreds of letters from around the world by people interested in sex change. “Homosexuality predominated among the men and was universal among the women” corresponding in 1953, the report notes. “No less than 10 women say, in so many words, that they want their sex changed in order to be able to marry their female friend or to have the relationship legalized.”

The Dutch Protocol began with a study group of 70. Just one of them reported heterosexual attraction, while “the other 69 reported either homosexuality (62), bisexuality (six), or ‘don’t know yet’ (one).” Too often, the ‘trans kid’ is a gay kid. “Compared to their age-matched peers, same-sex attracted youth are significantly overrepresented among patients presenting to gender clinics” in the United States, where the Dutch are practically conservative by comparison.

Ben Appel, a gay man who learned as a boy to reject everything ‘sissy’ about himself, now sees something of himself in “femme-presenting gay men identifying as transwomen or as nonbinary.”

And it’s not just about a new name and pronouns. A lot of these men are medicalizing with hormones and undergoing high-risk surgeries (including castration). These interventions do not “free them from the bonds of heteronormativity.” They rob them of their futures.

Claire Blaze, who runs a support group for women who detransition, writes that transition has offered a deceptive shortcut through the discomfort of being a gender nonconformist. Growing up hurts, but the only cure for it is growing up.

The concept of “distress tolerance” is a foundational element of dialectical behavioral therapy that refers to a person’s ability to manage and endure uncomfortable experiences without trying to escape from them or resorting to maladaptive coping behaviors. Distress tolerance is important because in order to grow, we need to be able to accept and work through difficult situations. For many, rather than developing a tolerance to the distress of being GNC, transition was a way of avoiding that distress. There are plenty of lesbian, gay, and otherwise GNC people who developed this tolerance and are stronger and healthier for it. They retained their healthy, functioning bodies, and they strengthened their mental health through self-acceptance. Those who were immediately and automatically shuffled down a path of medical transition, without learning about this other option, were denied the opportunity to preserve their physical health and to potentially strengthen their mental health.

“The lack of quality evidence chronicled here isn’t news,” Lisa Selin Davis writes.

What’s different about this report is the inclusion of chapters on language, ethics, and therapy—chapters either never written or excised in WPATH’s latest so-called “standards of care.” The posing of questions raised by that low-certainty evidence—questions about what’s actually being treated, issues of informed consent, and the ethics of the offerings of the gender-affirmation industry—that’s what’s new, and certainly what’s been missing from the debate (if we can call the culture war a debate).

The report considers “the centrality of sexual health to overall quality of life” as a key long-term mental health challenge for children put through PMT. Doctors, teachers, therapists, and even parents lie to them about their prospects for future romantic happiness. As seen in the example of Jazz Jennings, now in his mid-20s and utterly clueless about what he is supposed to feel for someone, these children struggle to form relationships as adults because they never properly grew up.

The report authors write that “the framing of PMT as a civil rights matter may have contributed to premature and uncritical support at both the individual and institutional levels. Most medical professionals are broadly supportive of civil rights.” They think of themselves as the good people.

Activists can capture medical organization policies from within because fellow members also want to be among the good people. “US specialty committees often frame PMT as a morally righteous or progressive cause, leading many professionals reflexively to adopt supportive positions.”

Rather than scientific medical terminology, “clinicians providing PMT routinely employ euphemistic and morally loaded language, which can mislead or unduly influence patients and their guardians.” Hey mom and dad, don’t you want to be good people?

“Liberal media dismiss these concerns,” the LGB Courage Coalition sadly notes. Co-founded by gender clinic whistleblower Jamie Reed, the organization advocates for the human right of same-sex attracted people with gender dysphoria to evidence-based care.

The New York Times, The Washington Post, Science and CNN regard the report as an attack on PMT. They fail to engage with the overrepresentation of same-sex attracted youth diagnosed as trans by gender clinics. The AAP shares this blind spot. Its 2018 policy notes 50–70% of gender-diverse youth are same-sex attracted but deems this incidental. Its affirmative model assumes evaluations address homophobia, dismissing the HHS report’s 80–90% prevalence claim. While citing PMT’s mental health benefits, the AAP overlooks ethical concerns about misdiagnosing gay youth.

Because all morality must be inverted, WPATH whines that the HHS report “misrepresents existing research and disregards the expertise of professionals who have been working with transgender and gender-diverse youth for decades.” Translation: WPATH is terrified that people will read the report for themselves, conclude that its membership has harmed thousands of American homosexuals, and think poorly of them for it.

“It is deeply troubling to see the country’s top authority on health publish a collection of recommendations that seemingly have no basis in following established health care best practices, science, or input from providers who actually administer the type of health care in question,” Casey Pick complains. Why were no wizards involved in this scientific literature review?! Pick is director of law and policy at the nonprofit Trevor Project, which posts ominous warnings about “conversion therapy” under YouTube videos discussing children and gender quackery.

Three organizations — the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), and the Endocrine Society — have publushed “guidance documents that have shaped the United States‘s approach to pediatric GD,” the report says. None of them can be trusted “due to serious problems in their development methodology” — mainly conflicts of interest. Pick is complaining that the conflicts of interest might not work anymore.

“This Review describes the enforced professional insularity of the field of pediatric gender medicine and the intense and hostile nature of the debates around PGM,” reads the Review. “Stakeholders should keep these in mind when presented with claims of medical consensus among US medical organizations,” it concludes. Despite its emphasis on neutrality and objectivity, or rather because of those things, the HHS report reads like a TERF wrote it. ‘Gender criticals’ have always sounded like this, and now the Trump administration sounds like us.

“The real value of the Review is as a resource for reaching the leadership in the medical and mental health community who, up to now, have been willing to leave this matter in the hands of a small group of activists,” writes Peter Sim. It has already prompted Senate legislation to ban pediatric interventions nationwide, and may also show up in courtrooms where WPATH and pediatric interventions are on trial. (Speaking of which: immediately following the release of the Review, plaintiffs dropped their challenge to Alabama’s Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act.) We have not seen the end of the impact of this Review.

We have yet to know who wrote it. Their names are currently being withheld pending peer review. Nevertheless, they have written a full and accurate history of how medical safeguarding went by the wayside for an ideology that was grounded in stereotypes rather than science. The authors ask the most important question that needed asking: is any of this necessary for anyone, let alone a child? and conclude the evidence-based answer is ‘probably not.’

Think of all the well-meaning activists on the wrong side of this history. Pity them, for they would rather not know what they do.