
Why sex transitions harm gender dysphoric children
“The prospect of completely changing your body, your life,
your identity, is very compelling to a teenager who’s just learning to cope
with mental health issues,” said Cari Stella. As she explained on her YouTube
channel, Stella was 15 years old when she became sure that deep down she was a
boy. Per the guidance of her therapist, she began taking testosterone
injections, and eventually had both breasts surgically removed. Seven years
later, Stella was devastated by the decision she had made. “I am a real, live
22-year-old woman, with a scarred chest, and a broken voice, and a 5 o’clock
shadow because I couldn’t face the idea of growing up to be a woman, that’s my
reality.”
Stella was just one of many youth exploited by the
increasing trend among therapists to quickly affirm and physically transition
children who have gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria is a condition in which
one’s self-perceived gender disagrees with their biological sex. Over the past
decade, hundreds of gender clinics have opened with the purpose of physically
transitioning children with GD by means of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones
and, eventually, sex-reassignment surgery.
Similar to GD, Body Integrity Identity Disorder is a
condition in which one feels trapped inside the wrong body. Sufferers of BIID
feel like disabled persons stuck inside of healthy bodies, and often become so
distressed that they seek to “cure” their ailment by amputating healthy limbs
or severing their spinal cord. However, unlike with GD, the medical response to
those with BIID has typically been psychological treatment rather than physical
transition. This is because while cutting off healthy body parts may provide
temporary emotional relief among those with BIID, it does nothing to address
the underlying psychological problem.
In the same way, cutting off one’s breasts or penis merely masks
the psychological problems causing GD. Stella acknowledged this after she
recovered from her gender dysphoria, explaining that physically transforming
her body was a “maladaptive coping mechanism.” Children with GD need much more
than a “coping mechanism.” Over half of transgender people are depressed, and
nearly one third have attempted to kill themselves. That is a staggeringly high
suicide rate, and according to the Williams Institute, the rate doesn’t go down
after sex transition. In Sweden alone, individuals who had received
sex-reassignment surgery had a suicide rate twenty times greater than that of
the general population, despite Sweden being the most LGBT-affirming nation in
the world. “It can be damn hard to figure out that the treatment you’re being
told is to help you is actually making your mental health worse,” recalled
Stella.
Perhaps the most crucial fact in all of this is that
children with GD will end up identifying with their biological sex by late
adolescence 80-95% of the time, if left unhindered by “gender-corrective”
intervention, according to the Journal of Sexual Medicine. But when those same
children are pushed to embrace a transgender identity and physically altered
body, it becomes very difficult to leave GD behind. The consequence is that a
previously avoidable burden of psychological distress and suicidality is
imposed upon children who otherwise would likely have grown up to be happy,
healthy adults.
Children and young teenagers are developmentally incapable
of properly evaluating the risks of such a decision. This is seriously
concerning when one considers that sex transition has admittedly “not been
proven safe,” according to Youth Trans Critical Professionals, an online group
of left-leaning medical and academic experts. Even without reassignment
surgery, puberty blockers, if followed by cross-sex hormones, will permanently
sterilize any child who receives them, as well as arrest their bone growth,
likely prevent brain maturation, and possibly put them at risk for breast cancer.
“There is a serious ethical problem in allowing irreversible, life-changing
procedures to be performed on minors who are too young themselves to give valid
consent,” said Michelle Cretella, one of over 500 pediatricians opposed to the
transitioning of dysphoric children.
Unfortunately, due to the spread of leftist gender ideology,
any attempt to help dysphoric children move past their GD has been labelled as
hateful and transphobic. Instead, they are encouraged to undergo treatment
which will sterilize them, destroy healthy body parts, and reinforce a
self-perception linked with depression, anxiety and suicide. All this despite
the fact that the overwhelming majority of those children would have eventually
accepted their biological sex if left alone. As former transgender Walt Heyer
explained, teaching children that there’s something intrinsically wrong with
their bodies is not “affirmation,” it is “child abuse.” Children should be
encouraged to love their bodies, not hate them. That is how we truly affirm
them.