Outrage is growing after news leaked about a top secret study launched by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) during the Obama Administration that has been designed to “affirm” the use of dangerous puberty blockers in children as young as eight-years-old who are suffering from gender dysphoria.
Breitbart is reporting on the five-year study, entitled “The Impact of Early Medical Treatment in Transgender Youth” which is costing taxpayers $5.7 million. The study, which has been kept under tight wraps, will soon come to a pre-determined conclusion in favor of administering powerful drugs to young children even without any real knowledge of the long-term risks.
“The NIH study is being conducted by four researchers who already promote transgender affirmation therapy for children in their respective practices. In fact, the researchers are using the children from their four sites to examine ‘the physiological and psychosocial outcomes of existing medical treatment protocols for transgender youth with gender dysphoria’,” Breitbart reports.
For example, one of the researchers, Dr. Johanna Olson, is medical director of The Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles and says she’s pleased to see “transgender medicine taking its place on the national health agenda.”
Another researcher, Dr. Robert Garofalo, head of Adolescent Medicine at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago runs a clinic that, according to Chicago Magazine, is “pushing the boundaries of treatments for the growing population of transgender kids,” even as he himself admits, “[T]here haven’t been many studies on the long-term effects of estrogen on young people.”
Dr. Stephen Rosenthal, medical director of the Child and Adolescent Gender Center at Benioff Children’s Hospital in San Francisco is also involved in the study. Rosenthal believes that providing medical treatments to children at younger ages allows them to change their sex with fewer surgeries and less cost later in life.
“It makes it a lot easier for that person to blend in,” he said. “If you go through female puberty and you have breasts, if you go through male puberty and you have an Adam’s apple and a facial male structure, a deepened voice, all of these things are very difficult to change.”
Another member of the team, Dr. Norman Spack, a pediatric endocrinologist affiliated with Boston Children’s Hospital, said in a 2014 “Ted” talk that the risks of not doing anything for children and adolescents who are gender dysphoric “not only puts all of them at risk of losing their lives to suicide, but it also says something about whether we are a truly inclusive society.”
The study has not even been completed yet and it is already being criticized within the medical community for its flawed methodology, namely, the lack of a control group. A control group would be a group of children with the same gender confusion who are given other types of mental health treatment to resolve their problems, thus determining whether children given hormone treatments are actually better off than those who are not treated chemically.
Dr. Quentin Van Meter, an Atlanta pediatric endocrinologist who trained at Johns Hopkins University when “transsexualism” was first studied, told Breitbart the study was designed “specifically to show how well they’re doing.”
“There’s no control group – which is a must if you’re going to be following ethical research guidelines, Van Meter said. “And the researchers excuse themselves from having one by saying, ‘What are we supposed to do, let these kids kill themselves with no therapy?’ And the answer is the control group should be kids in intensive counseling, because the majority of them have undercurrent problems.”
Concerned members of the medical community are pointing to a recent study by Dr. Lisa Littman, an assistant professor of behavioral and social sciences at Brown University, which found that according to parents, 87 percent of teens have “come out” as transgender after increased time spent on social media and the Internet and after “cluster outbreaks” of gender dysphoria among their groups of friends. This suggests that social factors and school “inclusiveness” programs aimed at educating youth about transgenderism may actually be causing gender confusion in youth.
Authorities in the UK are looking into this link after the country saw an alarming 4400% increase in the number of children who claim to be having gender issues
The Littman study also found that teens who claimed to be transgender were also fond to be suffering from at least one mental health disorder.
“Since this has all started, every single transgender patient who has come to me has come from a totally dysfunctional family,” Van Meter said. “There’s nothing normal about the environment where these children are brought up. There are emotional traumas left and right. It is so obvious that what we’re doing is painting over the trauma.”
Equally troubling is the impact early treatment may have on children’s health.
Dr. Michael Laidlaw, an endocrinologist in Rocklin, California, who has testified before his state’s Senate Judiciary Committee, told Breitbart that he was “floored” by physicians who were buying into the notion that administering dangerous hormones to young gender dysphoric children who are just coming into puberty is safe.
“This can be as early as age nine or ten, based on current statistics,” Laidlaw said, adding that this means “you’re going to start blocking puberty with these powerful hormones at a very early age.”
A significant number of children and adolescents are going to be treated incorrectly by this, he explained, because the diagnostic ability to detect “true trans” children is very poor.
The long-term consequences of the hormone treatments can be disastrous for current-day children who are cognitively unable to comprehend them.
“There are even more dangers to these puberty blockers, such as infertility and restricting bone growth – which puts these kids at risk for future osteoporosis,” he said. “Most of the children – in one study 100 percent of kids administered biological puberty blockers – went on to have cross-sex hormones [testosterone and estrogen) – which means you will remain sterile.”
Even more troubling is the fact that children’s mental and physical health may be risked for naught because “63 to 98 percent of children who have gender dysphoria or gender identity disorder, by the time they reach adulthood will have grown out of it,” Laidlaw said.
Members of the pro-life community are crying foul over this study.
“The NIH affirmation therapy study is just the latest abuse of taxpayer dollars, on the heels of the FDA’s grisly excursion into baby body parts experimentation,” said Tony Perkins, President of the Family Research Council.
“NIH also continues to fund roughly $95 million on basic research using organs from aborted babies. With both of these agencies housed under the Department of Health and Human Services, it is time for HHS to fund alternatives as soon as possible, and stop the unethical use of taxpayer dollars.”
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