As the more radical claims of transgender activists have become increasingly accepted by the progressive left, growing numbers of children have been diagnosed with the psychological condition known as gender dysphoria. In most cases, these children receive psychotherapy, or their parents simply wait to see if the children will outgrow the symptoms, as often happens. Some physicians, however, have suggested a more radical treatment, as Madeleine Kearns writes:
In this option, clinical activists recommend a drastic response when a child expresses confusion about his or her sex. First, parents should tell the child, however young, that he truly is the sex he identifies with. Second, parents should consider delaying his puberty through off-label uses of drugs that can have serious (and largely unstudied) side effects. Third, parents should consider giving their child the puberty experience of the opposite sex through cross-sex hormonal injections and gels, which result in sterility. Finally, parents should consider greenlighting the surgical removal of their child’s reproductive organs.
Since there are no objective tests to confirm a transgender diagnosis, all of this is arbitrary and dependent on a child’s changeable feelings. To make aggressive treatment more acceptable, its advocates have come up with a media-friendly euphemism, “gender affirmation.” If it’s affirming, activists say, it’s also kindness, love, acceptance, and support. The opposite, trying to help a child feel more comfortable with his body, is a rejection: abuse, hatred, “transphobia,” or “conversion therapy” likely to lead to child suicide.
This is a lie—a lie designed to obscure a critical truth: that neither a child, nor his parents on his behalf, can truly consent to experimental, life-altering, and irreversible treatments for which there is no evidentiary support.
On the gender-affirmation model, clinicians have put children as young as twelve on sterilizing cross-sex hormones, removed the healthy breasts of girls as young as thirteen, and peeled and inverted the penises of boys as young as fifteen.
Evidence is scarce, but Kearns concludes there are at least 40 clinics in the U.S. that offer services for transsexual youths, some as young as four.
Read more on National Review: https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/12/09/the-tragedy-of-the-trans-child/