Why Oregon Has So Many Kids On Hormones
State law, policy, and priorities all reflect the WPATH affirmation program
Oregon’s Intermountain Education Service District fired social worker Roderick E. Theis II in November 2023 for the crime of displaying the books He is He, She is She, and Johnny the Walrus in his La Grande Middle School office. Last week, a divided federal appeals court ruled that Theis was not protected by the First Amendment when he showed the books to students who asked to see them.
Judge Lawrence VanDyke noted the majority ruling is “irreconcilable with Supreme Court precedent.” Other school system employees have been allowed to display contentious symbols, such as Pride flags. A “free and open American society appropriately recoils at the prospect of public school teachers becoming involuntarily conscripted apparatchiks of any administration’s particular orthodoxy”, VanDyke, a Trump appointee, wrote.
The two-judge majority, which was appointed by Presidents Obama and Biden, ruled that a lower court judge had “acted appropriately ‘given the robust body of precedent holding that educators speak as government employees when they convey messages to students within the four walls of a school.’” A single staff member had complained that the books were “transphobic”.
Despite the indoctrination of the federal judiciary that is evident in the 9th Circuit ruling, the original judge in the case made a ruling that is entirely consistent with the gender-affirming character of the state government and its constituent school systems. Oregon has systematically inscribed politics on the bodies of children for over a decade, overriding parental rights at the slightest sign of resistance to medicalization.
Social pressure against the non-affirming parent would be bad enough without state pressure. Oregon is now the leading state in sex rejection medicalization of young people because the state adopted ‘affirmation’ as official policy in 2014 when the Health Evidence Review Commission (HERC) decided to cover sex rejection for adults and minors under the Oregon Health Plan (Medicaid).
HERC based this decision on the 2012 ‘Standards of Care’ published by WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries are all considered “medically necessary” in Oregon because WPATH says so. This alleged necessity has empowered children to circumvent or overcome parental guidance at scale.
The numbers are telling. “According to a new study published in Research Connections, at age 17, roughly 1 in every 240 girls and 1 in every 630 boys in Oregon received cross-sex hormones for “gender dysphoria” between 2016 and 2023”, Leor Sapir and Paul Terdal recently revealed.
“These figures are triple and double the national average for girls and boys, respectively.” The children subject to indoctrination the longest are the most at-risk, in Oregon. “For younger children the disparity is even greater: Cross-sex hormone use in the study was four to five times the national rate among 14- and 15-year-olds, and puberty-blocker use was more than five times the national rate at age 14.”
