Some little girls go through a tomboy phase.
Perfectly normal and no big deal, but I’m guessing that this can be a pretty treacherous passage nowadays.
“Enlighted” and sympathetic adults, you see, may rush to “affirm” the child’s supposed identification with the opposite sex. Before you know it, the kids are in medical programs to “change” their sex. And an equally enlightened doctor will be happy to go along.
There is such a thing as “gender dysphoria,” but it is rare and many of the children who are enrolled in medical programs to “transition” to another sex don’t have it.
Abigail Shrier, author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze is Seducing Our Daughters, has an alarming piece in City Journal about how the medical establishment is ignoring science in dealing with these kids.
Shrier says that medicine for transgender people has become so politicized that doctors rush to provide treatments, even though this is a field in which results are still largely unknown and untested. “Puberty blockers,” some previously used in the chemical castration of sex offenders, are prescribed. Shrier doesn’t think this is wise:
Proponents of puberty blockers often make claims resembling those recited by Jack Turban, a Harvard psychiatrist and specialist in adolescent sexuality, in a New York Times op-ed. Turban says that blockers are perfectly “safe”; that they reduce suicidal behavior and are thus life-saving; and that “broad consensus” exists among doctors about the salutary nature of these interventions. None of this is true—and the appearance of consensus is manufactured only by suppressing dissent.
In fact, a dizzying array of dangers plagues these treatments: interference with brain development; inhibition of normal bone-density development, leading to greater risk of osteoporosis; permanent loss of sexual function.
Since no good long-term studies exist on children who took puberty blockers to arrest healthy puberty, no one knows the full extent of these risks. All that is known for certain is that adolescents who proceed from blockers to cross-sex hormones—the next step in medical “transition”—will become permanently infertile and may never develop the capacity for orgasm.
After puberty blockers, most of these kids go on to cross-sex hormones, that will help them develop characteristics that simulate those in the putatively desired sex. We’re too often seeing this as ho-hum normal, when in fact it is nothing of the sort, argues Shrier:
Contrary to proponents’ claims, identifying as the opposite sex and arresting healthy puberty are psychologically radical interventions. It’s no small thing to send a girl off to high school with the sexual development of an 11-year-old, as many psychologists have told me in interviews. Unlike her peers, such a girl will have no breasts, no hips; she will have never had a period and may never have had a teenager’s sexual curiosity or desire, either. At that point, it may be easier for her to plow ahead with cross-sex hormones than to admit the mistake and scramble to rejoin her peers.
‘What we are doing now is a massive uncontrolled medical experiment on children without adequate informed consent and without the backing of any kind of institutional review board,” said pediatrician Julia Mason of the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, a recently-formed international consortium of clinicians who oppose the prevailing approach to transgender medicine.
Seems many respected members of the medical establishment have submitted to political correctness before scientific answers are in, thus potentially destroying the lives a innocent children.
Remember the lobotomy craze that damaged so many lives? I fear something similar is happening now, with the unscientific rush to transition kids to a different sex. It likely to cause a great deal of suffering.