News – and good news, mostly – on the puberty blocker and ‘gender affirming care’ front. The United States Secretary of Health, Robert Kennedy Jr, has just released a declaration entitled ‘Safety, Effectiveness, and Professional Standards of Care for Sex Rejecting Procedures on Children and Adolescents’.
Put succinctly, the declaration is a sharp and comprehensive take-down of gender affirming care, including calling out the various medical associations for relying almost exclusively on the disgraced WPATH organisation and preferencing the ideology of medicine.
As Secretary Kennedy noted in his media stand up, “… needless and irreversible sex rejecting procedures that violate their sacred Hippocratic oath and endangering the very lives they are sworn to safeguard …”
The declaration states:
Sex-rejecting procedures for children and adolescents are neither safe nor effective as a treatment modality for gender dysphoria, gender incongruence, or other related disorders in minors, and therefore, fail to meet professionally recognised standards of health care. For the purposes of this declaration, “sex-rejecting procedures” means pharmaceutical or surgical interventions, including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries such as mastectomies, vaginoplasties, and other procedures, that attempt to align an individual’s physical appearance or body with an asserted identity that differs from the individual’s sex.
The declaration also notes the growing international evidence and consensus regarding puberty blockers. The declaration notes particularly the UK, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark have all drawn back from using puberty blockers, and how the likes of Italy, Australia, and Brazil are implementing restrictions.
Family First notes, therefore, the sad irony that as these countries and now the United States are taking clear stances, the recent New Zealand High Court judgement by Justice Wilkinson-Smith has taken the opposite tack. Instead of affirming the government’s correct decision to ban puberty blockers, the judge relied on outdated ‘evidence’, ideology, and the perspective of radical trans-activist group, PATHA (linked to the disgraced WPATH organisation) to allow them to continue being prescribed.
Secretary Kennedy has proposed six actions in response, and these include:
- Releasing the above declaration, stating that sex-rejecting procedures (to us the US term) are not safe or effective.
- Stopping federal funding to hospitals that continue to provide sex-rejecting services.
- Proposing to stop any federal Medicaid funding for gender-affirming procedures for children under 18.
- Telling Medicare to stop funding sex-rejecting procedures.
- Having the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warn manufacturers of breast binders about their product, and prohibiting marketing of their products to children.
- Proposed a rule change to exclude gender dysphoria being defined as a disability (which in turn allows people to access federal funds via Medicare and Medicaid).
Also, a recent poll in the United Kingdom has show that almost two-thirds of adults disagree with the proposed clinical trial of puberty blockers on children. The trial run being run via Kings College London and called Pathways is seeking to experiment on approximately 220 young children experiencing gender dysphoria. Critics are highlighting this is medical experimentation on children who cannot consent, and using drugs (puberty blockers) with known harms.
The poll was commissioned by UK group, Transgender Trend, who are concerned about the growing rise of transgenderism in children and the push for ‘affirmation only’ care.
The results are compelling. Sixty-three per cent of adults stated the Pathways trial should be stopped. Only 14 per cent thought it should proceed. Even more adults agreed that puberty blockers should never be given to minors (under 18 years of age) even if part of a trial – with 67 per cent of adults stating this. For those surveyed with children under 18 years of age, the percentage opposing puberty blockers and the trail rises even further – to 70 per cent opposing puberty blockers and the trial.
Importantly, those surveyed showed strong support for providing non-medical interventions for young people experiencing gender dysphoria. Seventy-four per cent of adults surveyed believed that psychological care was the best option for such children. As Family First has often noted: heal the mind not the body.
As we noted earlier, it is extraordinary that as countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States of America move to protect children by stopping medical experimentation on them, here in New Zealand a judge of the High Court decides such treatments are OK and should proceed.
This article was originally published by Family First New Zealand.
