In January, the New England Journal of Medicine published the results of a government-funded study on experimental medical interventions for gender-confused youths. The results were alarming: two subjects committed suicide, 11 others experienced suicidal ideation, and the rest are at risk for permanent bodily damage as a result of the hormonal drugs they were given.

The study analyzed 315 participants between the ages of 12-20. Two hundred and forty of these participants were minors. They were prescribed puberty blockers, or hormonal drugs intended to block the natural production of hormones and thus reduce the effects of puberty, and monitored over a two-year period. Keep in mind: these drugs have not been approved for the treatment of transgenderism, and their long-term effects in children and young adults have never been studied. This study’s two-year window was hardly an attempt to rectify this glaring lapse in data.

Three hospitals recruited the study’s participants: Boston Children’s Hospital, University of California, San Francisco, and Chicago Lurie Children’s Hospital. The research was directly funded by the National Institutes of Health, which granted the hospital’s researchers $474,444 in a five-year grant. In other words, the federal government paid medical professionals to experiment with the health and well-being of children as young as 12 years old, likely in the hopes that these experiments would produce results confirming their irrational gender fanaticism.

Instead, the study confirmed what has long been evident: medical interventions for gender-confused people — especially young, impressionable minors who cannot be relied upon to recognize the near-term consequences of their decisions, let alone the long-term ones — are unscientific, dangerous, and harmful.

A group of House Republicans who submitted a letter demanding more information on the study from the NIH put it this way: “It is alarming that vulnerable young people died by suicide while participating in a taxpayer-funded study that will almost certainly inflict devastating physical harm on those who participated,” the letter reads. “Twenty-four participants in this study received cross-sex hormones after puberty suppression or ‘in early puberty’ and are likely sterile as a result. Further, participants are now at increased risk for cardiovascular disease, blood clotting, and a list of other complications.”

Predictably, the researchers reached a very different conclusion.

“During the study period, appearance congruence, positive affect, and life satisfaction increased, and depression and anxiety symptoms decreased,” Lurie Children Hospital’s Dr. Diane Chen, who led the study, wrote of the study’s alleged findings.

Chen conveniently failed to mention that she could not determine whether these so-called positive effects were directly related to puberty blockers since the study lacked a control group.

Chen also neglected to elaborate on the obvious suffering at least 13 of the study’s participants experienced. In their own letter to the NIH this week, Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) pointed out that the study “does not identify the age of the participants who died or contemplated suicide, nor does it explain what measures, if any, the researchers took to prevent these tragic deaths.”

The white-coat ideologues pushing these experimental treatments, and the bureaucrats backing them, are deliberately distorting scientific research to push an agenda. The most extensive studies on this topic all confirm that gender interventions do much more harm than good. In fact, a number of European countries, including the United Kingdom, Norway, and Sweden, which were the first to push medical “affirmation,” have been so alarmed by these treatments’ effects that they’ve significantly reduced their availability or banned them altogether.

Meanwhile, our government is spending taxpayer dollars on pseudo-research, the conclusion of which was established well before the study even began. The deaths and near-deaths of 13 participants are mere afterthoughts, unimportant details that distract from activists’ agenda, and casualties in the Left’s pursuit of ideological domination.