Many More Young Americans Identify as Transgender in Recent Years
- The number of young Americans who identify as transgender has increased tremendously in recent years, nearly doubling between 2017 and 2022. Today, about 5% of young people say they identify as transgender or non-binary, meaning they do not identify as male or female.
- The mainstream response to gender-questioning youth, in our schools and medical system, has been to encourage experimentation with new “gender identities” and to offer medical gender-transition treatments.
The Mainstream Response to Gender-Questioning Youth Comes With Serious Risks
- The medical interventions include puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries intended to alter the body to be more like the patient’s opposite-sex gender identity. But these treatments come with serious risks.
- These risks include irreversible harm to sexual function, reproductive health, and general health.
- Gender transition patients sometimes lose the ability to orgasm, experience sexual pleasure, reproduce, or breastfeed. They are also at higher risk of osteoporosis, seizures (in epileptic patients), cardiovascular problems, stroke, heart attack, and other health problems.
Patients Deserve to Understand the Risks Associated with Gender-Transition Treatments
- Gender-transition patients should be informed of the risk-benefit analysis of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries.
- To ignore or minimize the very serious risks associated with gender transitions is to fail to give patients the opportunity to provide informed consent.
- This area of medicine deserves greater study, scrutiny, oversight, and accountability.
Click HERE to read the policy focus and learn more about the risks of gender-transition treatments in adolescents.