Sex Change for Children Should Be a Line in the Sand

B oston Children’s Hospital offers “a full suite of surgical options for transgender teens and young adults,” according to its website. As if it’s the most routine medical procedure, a woman doctor cheerfully explains on an official video from the hospital:

A gender-affirming hysterectomy is very similar to most hysterectomies that occur. Hysterectomy itself is the removal of the uterus, the cervix — which is the opening of the uterus — and the fallopian tubes, which are attached to the sides of the uterus.

The video fails to include any note of caution, and it’s very much in the spirit of the current Department of Health and Human Services, which encourages children who say they are born in the wrong body to get puberty blockers and gender-affirming surgery, and to play on the sports team of the gender they are identifying with this season.

Boston Children’s Hospital, of course, didn’t start the fire, but they are proud to go along with the trend. TikTok videos evangelize to young people who feel awkward. It’s a terrifying time to be a parent, since anyone who was ever a teenager knows that teens often feel awkward. Children can be cruel, and instead of acknowledging that reality, adults are putting dangerous ideas into kids’ heads — and at times over the objections of the parents.

Pediatrics just published a shoddy study claiming that there’s no social aspect to this trend of young people identifying as trans. Academics who agreed with the study’s goal — to debunk “rapid onset gender dysphoria” — admitted, “While this study was admirable, we find that the results were overinterpreted and that the theoretical and methodological shortcomings of the article run the risk of being more harmful than supportive.” But the American Academy of Pediatrics published the supposedly peer-reviewed article anyway.

To their credit, I guess, one of the Boston Children’s Hospital videos does explain that once a female’s breasts are removed, that person will never be able to breastfeed and will have nipples that will likely be forever numb. If you need to issue such a warning, shouldn’t the Hippocratic oath kick back in and make you wonder whether you’re doing harm in insisting that young people be “empowered” (to use a current HHS word) to make unalterable changes to their bodies?

Public schools in Portland, Ore., have adopted a curriculum that presents “the gender binary” as having been introduced by colonizers as a tool of oppression. Children as young as four and five, in kindergarten, see graphic descriptions introducing the concepts of “person with a penis” and “person with a vulva,” because the curriculum claims that some girls have penises and some boys have vulvas. “Any gender and kid can have any type of body.”

The Independent Women’s Forum has released video testimony of a mother whose eleven-year-old girl decided she was a boy. School officials referred to her by a boy’s name, using male pronouns. Her fifth-grade teacher (a man) even went so far as to ask her whether she wanted to stay in the boys’ cabin during an overnight trip. After canceling a meeting in which a school therapist was going to help the girl come out as transgender to her parents, the parents took her out of public school and kept her offline. Identifying as a boy no longer had the same hold on her — even in a house with two brothers. During an online art class and in school, concepts were being presented to her as edgy, as who she “really” wanted to be, because others were undergoing the same transformation. Describing the experience of her family and other families with kids who “transition,” the mother in the video said it was “like we have gone to war together.”

The trailer for The Detransition Diaries: Saving Our Sisters from the Center for Bioethics and Culture features young women who explain how they came to believe themselves trans. At age 18, one girl was prescribed testosterone over the phone by Planned Parenthood. Another said she was told that if she didn’t feel comfortable in her body, that meant she was trans. Again, do adults remember being teenagers? Another young woman remembers thinking that she didn’t really feel like a man, but she felt “like a man with her breasts cut off.” Another woman in the documentary, advocating for girls, warns:

We do all our girls a disservice when we lie to them and tell them they don’t want to be women. We tell them they can be anyone they want to be. But we have forgotten to tell them to love being who they are.

It’s possible to be sensitive to confusion — and even a real illness such as gender dysphoria — without pressuring children and teens and even adults, and coercing them to adopt a transgender identity. Life is messy and confusing, and transitioning to another gender is not a solution to the imperfections of life. Children need adults to protect them from physical and mental harm.

President Biden issued a video message this spring saying that “affirming your child’s identity is one of the most powerful things” that parents of “transgender children . . . can do to keep them safe and healthy.” Around the same time, the Department of Justice sent a letter to the attorneys general nationwide warning that denying children such “care” might be a civil-rights violation.

Mandatory “sex denial” — as some critics have put it — is the policy of the current administration and the medical experts we should be able to rely on to tell the truth.

Brave parents and detransitioners are increasingly on the front lines, sounding an alarm. As it is happening before our eyes, we should join them in protecting our youth from unnecessary and irreversible harm.

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.