The Human Cost Of Gender Dysphoria Treatments Must Soon Be Paid

The legacy media took little note this last Thursday when the sixteen member board of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) met at its headquarters in the Chicago suburb of Itasca. Insofar as the board portrayed its meeting to the press and the public as a routine follow-up reaffirming its 2018 guidance that pediatricians should continue providing gender affirming care to children presenting with gender dysphoria, there was no particular reason why the media should have taken much notice.

But the board did something besides reaffirm its current treatment guidelines, and this was no routine meeting.

You see, the AAP board also approved what is known within the medical community as a “systematic evidence review” of its existing treatments. Now our self-proclaimed cultural elites certainly would not want to admit that this is a big deal (which it is), because “gender-affirming care” is progressive code for the use of  puberty blockers, hormones, and life-altering surgery on children.

While the full extent of the AAP’s review is yet to be determined, it is widely expected to include a re-evaluation of the existing data regarding the use of puberty blockers and hormones on children, as well as the surgical removal of their reproductive organs. As I said, all of this was little noted by the left-wing media, which was no accident. As we well know, the left never sounds retreat, unless the alternative is complete annihilation.

Recall that the American medical establishment, including not just the American Academy of Pediatrics, but the American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists, the American Psychiatric Association, and even the American Medical Association itself, all came out in support of the treatment guidelines promulgated by the AAP. Those doctors critical of the gender-affirming treatment protocols have been cowed by persistent threats to their reputations, professional careers, grant applications, and incomes, so why should the big, powerful, and heavily politicized medical organizations be worried in the slightest? Well, it turns out that there are a lot of reasons why they should be worried. An impending medical apocalypse is now just around the corner, and they are between a rock and a hard place.

Firstly, the data and evidence on which the original treatment protocols were established were defective and based on very small numbers of patients. Secondly, the sad fact is that the pediatric community has for years administered these irreversible treatments to distressed, vulnerable children with multiple psychiatric issues, on the assumption that gender dysphoria was the root cause of all the other conditions. This wasn’t true in the vast majority of cases, with tragic results. Thirdly, the number of children presenting with gender dysphoria has exploded over the last seven or so years by several thousand percent, when throughout all of previous human history gender dysphoria was an extremely rare condition.

Something somewhere has obviously gone completely haywire.

Ultimately, the problem here is that progressive ideology was allowed to triumph over medical science and common sense, for which mistake tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of children must pay the cost in human suffering. Since Karl Marx trod the earth in the late Nineteenth Century, left-wing ideology, first as Marxism, then as Neo-Marxism, and now as progressivism, has taught the false belief that mankind can do anything it so wills, including changing one’s sex on command. Proverbs tells us, however, that “Pride cometh before the fall,” and the Greeks actually had a name for this, hubris, or excessive pride, which was always followed by the goddess of retribution, Nemesis.

And retribution there will surely be, as more evidence comes to light that the continuing administration of puberty blockers and hormones, as well as the use of gender reassignment surgery on kids, is not only medically inadvisable but morally indefensible in almost all cases. Because the politicized American medical establishment went so far out on an ideological limb, it is only now facing the realization that its very own treatment guidelines are the problem. Yet it well knows that a retraction of these guidelines will precipitate massive litigation for decades to come!

From a medical perspective, even here in our horribly divided country ever increasing numbers of clinicians are becoming far more cautious in their approach to the treatment of gender dysphoria in children. And the American medical establishment is being forced to take account of developments overseas, as these very same treatment regimens are being radically scaled back in Sweden, Finland, the United Kingdom, Norway, and France- the very countries which developed them in the first place!

From a political perspective, conservatives and those remaining common-sense liberals have added their voices of alarm and are successfully fighting back by passing state laws against the administration of these inaptly-named “gender-affirming” treatments. At last count, twenty-one states had prohibited their use in cases involving minors, and more states are expected to soon follow.

Last but not least, the lawyers are beginning to smell blood upon the water, and there is oh-so-much blood. Litigation in gender dysphoria malpractice cases is already rapidly increasing. In the coming years and decades, these children will grow up to realize that their gender dysphoria would otherwise have been a passing phase. Sadly, they will be locked in a dysfunctional body which doesn’t work very well and then only if they take handfuls of dangerous hormones every day.

There will be legal consequences in addition to the human tragedy, for which the medical community, and those who use their services, namely us, will be required to pay.

Louis Gurvich is the Chairman of the Republican Party of Louisiana.