Aaron Sibarium today in the Washington Free Beacon profiles an autistic boy, Fred, who after cycling through many obsessive viewpoints in his childhood, began to identify as transgender. Hyper-aware that this could be a phase driven by his developmental issues, Fred’s parents tried to enroll him in the Gender and Autism Program at Children’s National Hospital. The clinic is the only one in the country to specialize in autistic youth, Sibarium notes.
But the clinic had a waitlist of a year. So, shortly after his 18th birthday and when his parents were out of town, Fred visited Planned Parenthood. It took only 39 minutes for Planned Parenthood to fill Fred’s estrogen prescription at CVS.
Instead of a months-long evaluation by expert psychiatrists, a nurse practitioner had, in little over 30 minutes, prescribed [Fred] a powerful drug without [his mother or father’s] knowledge or consent.
“It’s criminal what Planned Parenthoods all over the country are doing,” Fred’s mother, a New Jersey pediatrician, said. “And most people have no idea this is happening.”
Fred’s story—corroborated through nursing and medical board complaints, locational data, prescriptions, text messages, emails, and other documents reviewed by the Free Beacon—is a microcosm of how the nation’s largest abortion provider is eroding the already thin guardrails on gender medicine in America. As waitlists swell at clinics like Children’s National, and as concern mounts about the perils of rushed transition, many young people are using Planned Parenthood to skip the line and circumvent the safeguards, making it much more difficult to gatekeep what was once a tightly regulated treatment.
That dynamic has sparked criticism of the organization from an unlikely source: the liberal psychologist who helped bring pediatric gender medicine to the United States.
“I have always been a very strong supporter of Planned Parenthood and am pro-choice,” said Laura Edwards-Leeper, who co-founded the nation’s first pediatric gender clinic, at Boston Children’s Hospital, in 2007. “But they have taken on something that they are not equipped to handle.” The lack of gatekeeping is so bad, she added, that some of her patients received hormones from Planned Parenthood before coming to her for an assessment.
It’s getting harder to call stories like Fred’s extreme. There’s been a massive increase in “gender-affirming care” visits at Planned Parenthoods across the country, and many Planned Parenthoods can give patients hormones without any therapy at all. It’s a horrifying situation for anyone — let alone for special-needs individuals who don’t receive warning of (or have the means to comprehend) hormone therapy’s long-term effects.
Planned Parenthood’s treatment of human life already was abhorrent, so its approach toward gender-affirming care was predictable. Clinics recommend and affirm baby-killing sometimes with no questions asked. Just as the organization made abortion a casual procedure, Planned Parenthood will try to normalize cross-sex hormone prescriptions until a 30-minute consultation to get life-altering, fertility-stunting drugs is standard protocol.