protecting children from “Gender Affirmation”

WoLF supports legislation that protects children and adolescents from unnecessary, life-altering, and permanent medical interventions.

At alarmingly high rates, healthcare providers provide experimental medical services to children and adolescents, including cross-sex hormones, puberty-blocking drugs, double mastectomies, radical hysterectomies, and numerous other procedures. 

Over the past few years, increasing numbers of children in the United States have indicated that they identify as “transgender,” “non-binary,” “gender fluid,” or as other types of identities that do not necessarily conform with socially-created sex stereotypes. According to GLSEN, around 92% of these children are female. These children and their parents have been informed by myriad special interest groups, as well as some healthcare providers, that radical and permanent medical interventions will help improve the children’s mental health. However, long-term studies suggest that individuals’ mental health actually worsens after medical interventions. Some special interest groups and healthcare providers even claim that medical interventions will save children’s lives; they insinuate – and sometimes even directly state – that children who do not receive so-called “gender affirming treatment” will die by suicide. This claim is not supported by evidence.

It is extremely important to consider the profound impact that “gender affirming” treatments have on children and adolescents. Many parents are convinced their “transgender” children need these interventions to transform into the opposite sex. However, humans cannot change sex, and these unnecessary medical interventions are permanent – they cause a variety of problems into adulthood, including a loss of fertility, a loss of sexual pleasure, and numerous mental health issues.

Across the United States, hundreds of clinics offer a range of experimental medical services to children and adolescents, including cross-sex hormones, puberty-blocking drugs, double mastectomies, radical hysterectomies, and numerous other procedures. Independent for-profit surgeons also advertise to children on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Young people immersed in online social media are, in many instances, swept into an online fantasy, fueled by shiny, glossy stories of the “wonders” of permanent physical modifications such as double mastectomies. Increased public promotion of drugs and surgeries to alter children’s superficial appearances, along with threats that their children will die by suicide if they do not receive these treatments, have caused many parents to believe that it is appropriate and even necessary for their children and teenagers to undergo permanent and life-altering medical interventions.

Unnecessary surgeries, puberty-blocking medications, cross-sex hormones, the removal of healthy body parts, and other cosmetic surgical procedures on young people have harmful, long-lasting, and often permanent effects. It doesn’t matter if a child is 10, or 14, or 17 – the child will undoubtedly be affected for the rest of his or her life by medical professionals deciding to impose medical interventions who were responsible for profound, life-altering decisions about the child’s body, future health, and future fertility.

However, we do want to note that many medical professionals have been repeatedly informed by their professional associations, mentors, and colleagues that “gender affirming” treatments are the only appropriate responses for minors who might be gender dysphoric or for minors who identify as transgender, non-binary, etc. In fact, some professional associations now normalize or encourage “gender affirming” treatments and medically unnecessary interventions for children. Therefore, medical professionals may be placed between “a rock and a hard place” when it comes to making decisions about how to respond to minors’ requests for surgeries, puberty-blockers, and other medical interventions. We would like to urge caution against assuming that all healthcare providers are malicious or are intentionally taking advantage of vulnerable children. Some (or perhaps many) medical professionals simply follow advice and guidance that is now considered mainstream or even “best practice.”