Detransitioners, healthcare professionals, and scientists are at last sounding alarms over the “ideological extremism” that is being pushed on our nation’s youth by “transgender activists.”
An opinion piece written by Pamela Paul for The New York Times shares the emotional and eye-opening stories of individuals who received life-altering “gender-affirming care” as minors, only to realize as they grew up that they had made a mistake.
“Grace Powell was 12 or 13 when she discovered she could be a boy,” Paul begins.
Like nearly every teenager on the planet, Powell “didn’t feel comfortable in her own skin.” She was being bullied at school and had received treatment for depression.
Then came puberty.
“I felt so detached from my body, and the way it was developing felt hostile to me,” Powell told Paul.
“Reading about transgender people online, Powell believed that the reason she didn’t feel comfortable in her body was that she was in the wrong body,” Paul writes. “Transitioning seemed like the obvious solution. The narrative she had heard and absorbed was that if you don’t transition, you’ll kill yourself.”
At 17, as a high school senior, Powell “started cross-sex hormones.”
“She had a double mastectomy the summer before college, then went off as a transgender man named Grayson to Sarah Lawrence College, where she was paired with a male roommate on a men’s floor,” according to Paul. “At 5-foot-3, she felt she came across as a very effeminate gay man.”
“At no point during her medical or surgical transition, Powell says, did anyone ask her about the reasons behind her gender dysphoria or her depression,” the columnist continues. “At no point was she asked about her sexual orientation. And at no point was she asked about any previous trauma, and so neither the therapists nor the doctors ever learned that she’d been sexually abused as a child.”
Looking back, Powell, now 23 and detransitioned, said, “I wish there had been more open conversations. But I was told there is one cure and one thing to do if this is your problem, and this will help you.”
Sadly, Powell’s story is a familiar one in a society that has turned the mental and physical well-being of children into a political football.
Paul writes:
Progressives often portray the heated debate over childhood transgender care as a clash between those who are trying to help growing numbers of children express what they believe their genders to be and conservative politicians who won’t let kids be themselves.
But right-wing demagogues are not the only ones who have inflamed this debate. Transgender activists have pushed their own ideological extremism, especially by pressing for a treatment orthodoxy that has faced increased scrutiny in recent years. Under that model of care, clinicians are expected to affirm a young person’s assertion of gender identity and even provide medical treatment before, or even without, exploring other possible sources of distress.
Many who think there needs to be a more cautious approach — including well-meaning liberal parents, doctors and people who have undergone gender transition and subsequently regretted their procedures — have been attacked as anti-trans and intimidated into silencing their concerns.
And while Donald Trump denounces “left-wing gender insanity” and many trans activists describe any opposition as transphobic, parents in America’s vast ideological middle can find little dispassionate discussion of the genuine risks or trade-offs involved in what proponents call gender-affirming care.
“What should be a medical and psychological issue has been morphed into a political one,” Powell said. “It’s a mess.”
Paul offers what is perhaps the most balanced look at the deeply complex issue.
“Many transgender adults are happy with their transitions and, whether they began to transition as adults or adolescents, feel it was life changing, even lifesaving,” she acknowledges, but notes that the “small but rapidly growing number of children who express gender dysphoria and who transition at an early age, according to clinicians, is a recent and more controversial phenomenon.”
She speaks to Laura Edwards-Leeper, “the founding psychologist of the first pediatric gender clinic in the United States,” who “doesn’t regret transitioning the earlier cohort of patients and opposes government bans on transgender medical care” but is alarmed that the majority of the patients she now sees “have no history of childhood gender dysphoria.”
“The population has changed drastically,” Edwards-Leeper said.
When seeing these young people, “you have to take time to really assess what’s going on and hear the timeline and get the parents’ perspective in order to create an individualized treatment plan,” she stated. “Many providers are completely missing that step.”
“Yet those health care professionals and scientists who do not think clinicians should automatically agree to a young person’s self-diagnosis are often afraid to speak out,” Paul writes.
The lengthy article shares the stories of other detransitioners, parents, and the perspectives of other experts and warns of the messages children are receiving on social media and in their classrooms.
“Many parents of kids who consider themselves trans say their children were introduced to transgender influencers on YouTube or TikTok, a phenomenon intensified for some by the isolation and online cocoon of Covid,” she writes. “Others say their kids learned these ideas in the classroom, as early as elementary school, often in child-friendly ways through curriculums supplied by trans rights organizations, with concepts like the gender unicorn or the Genderbread person.”
“[R]ather than being treated as patients who deserve unbiased professional help, children with gender dysphoria often become political pawns,” Paul states.
She explains:
Conservative lawmakers are working to ban access to gender care for minors and occasionally for adults as well. On the other side, however, many medical and mental health practitioners feel their hands have been tied by activist pressure and organizational capture. They say that it has become difficult to practice responsible mental health care or medicine for these young people.
Pediatricians, psychologists and other clinicians who dissent from this orthodoxy, believing that it is not based on reliable evidence, feel frustrated by their professional organizations. The American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have wholeheartedly backed the gender-affirming model.
“Instead of promoting unproven treatments for children, which surveys show many Americans are uncomfortable with, transgender activists would be more effective if they focused on a shared agenda,” Paul reasons. “Most Americans across the political spectrum can agree on the need for legal protections for transgender adults. They would also probably support additional research on the needs of young people reporting gender dysphoria so that kids could get the best treatment possible.”
“A shift in this direction would model tolerance and acceptance. It would prioritize compassion over demonization. It would require rising above culture-war politics and returning to reason,” according to Paul. “It would be the most humane path forward. And it would be the right thing to do.”
Writers and editors can be contacted at [email protected] with feedback, tips, or corrections.
Melissa Fine is the former executive editor of Casino Player, Strictly Slots, and Poker
Digest magazines. She is a UCLA graduate, news junkie, and dedicated Stargate SG-
1 fan. Melissa currently lives with her dog and two cats in a tiny town in the Sierra
Nevada foothills.
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