In California, Chloe Cole filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against her doctor and Kaiser Permanente, claiming doctors ignored her mental health issues, including the trauma of sexual assault. Instead, they prescribed her puberty blockers at 13, then began testosterone injections and performed a double mastectomy, all before she was 17. In less than a year, she began to regret the permanent loss of the ability to breastfeed. Cole’s lawsuit states that doctors hid the harms of these interventions and the lack of long-term studies. Instead of disclosing the strong possibility that gender dysphoria could resolve naturally, doctors told her parents that without this radical regimen, their daughter would be more likely to commit suicide. Cole recently testified before Congress, asking it to end “the largest medical scandal in history” to prevent other youth from becoming victims of pediatric gender transition.
Whistleblowers on both sides of the Atlantic are confirming medicine’s betrayal of young patients. In Missouri, Jamie Reed says Washington University’s gender clinic did not allow her to schedule patients for psychological care even though they had autism, ADHD, depression, and anxiety. Reed says the clinic lied to both patients and their parents. And at Tavistock, psychiatrist David Bell says leadership treated him with hostility when he raised concerns about the medical transition of children as young as eight. Bell says, “What matters is the truth. I hate the weaponisation of victimhood, the fact that the fear of being seen to be transphobic now overrides everything. . . It’s about free thinking, the kind that will result in better outcomes for all young people, whether transgender or not.”
As more stories like these surface, doctors who performed pediatric gender transition are now being held to account by former patients-turned-advocates. Since 2021, more than 20 legislatures have enacted laws to protect children from the irreversible harm these procedures can cause. Detransitioner Prisha Mosley, for example, recently filed a medical malpractice lawsuit for pediatric gender transition surgery that left her in constant pain and fearful that she is sterile. Yet the AAP and other medical organizations continue to turn a deaf ear toward stories like hers and the growing evidence against these procedures. Instead, they oppose legislative limits that protect children from irreversible harm. Some judges have sided with them and enjoined laws in Arkansas, Alabama, and Florida. But recently, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit issued a decision upholding Tennessee’s law protecting children from medical transition. The court rightly concluded that it is the role of the legislature—not the courts—to determine whether such procedures should be available to children.
The medical establishment’s complicity with the eugenics movement of the last century should have led to serious evidence-based inquiry before subjecting another vulnerable population to irreversible harm; however, the country’s leading doctors are embracing ideology and eminence over scientific evidence and sound ethical principles as much now as in the age of Buck v. Bell.
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I will take comments on this submitted by email only to KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.
