The American College of Pediatricians (ACP) has issued a statement
urging educators and legislators to reject all policies that encourage
chemical or surgical gender reassignment for children. The ACP is a
socially conservative, national medical association of pediatricians and
health care providers not affiliated with the larger American Academy
of Pediatrics.
The ACP has been inundated with emails from professionals supporting
its stance, said the group’s president, Michelle Cretella. But liberal,
LGBT-supporting publications such as Think Progress, have accused the
ACP of being a hate group attacking transgender youth.
“We are not encouraging hate,” Cretella insists. The ACP statement
reflects its members’ concern that parents and schools are inflicting
harm on gender-confused children by encouraging them to seek medical
interventions that often place them on life-long, risky hormone
treatment and starts them on a path that eventually leads to mutilating
their otherwise healthy bodies to re-assign gender.
Instead, Cretella believes, gender-confused children should be treated
for the underlying problem of gender dysphoria, a diagnosable condition
listed in the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of the American Psychiatric Association.
“These children are coming to health care providers for help and we
should be looking at the underlying foundational matter, not reinforcing
their disconnect from reality. To ignore that is, in a sense,
criminal,” Cretella said.
Paul McHugh, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University, believes it is
never appropriate to put young people through sex-change surgery.
“We can help them if we begin to explore with them and their families
what they’re fearing about development, what they’re fearing about being
a young boy, a young adolescent appropriate to themselves,” he told Fox
News.
According the the ACP statement, gender re-assignment for children
involves the use of puberty-blocking hormones that inhibit growth and
fertility, essentially inducing disease.
But puberty is not a disease, Cretella explained. It is a critical time
period of physical development, bone growth, and brain maturation. If
doctors arrest puberty hormones for any amount of time, it robs the
child’s brain of normal hormonal exposure during a critical period.
Scientists have no idea what the long-term implications of that could
be, she said. And children who eventually go through gender reassignment
will require life-long use of cross-sex hormones, either testosterone
or estrogen.
It’s too early for longitudinal studies to speak to the long-term
safety of these medications, but the risks, such as high blood pressure,
blood clots, stroke, and cancer, are well-documented in their use
treating other conditions.
“We have no idea what the risks are in giving these hormones to
children for the rest of their lives. We are using these children as an
experiment,” Cretella said.
According to a well-known 2011 Swedish study, not only are adults who
use cross-sex hormones and undergo sex reassignment surgery at
significantly greater risk for cardiovascular disease, and possibly
cancer, but the rates of suicide are 20 times greater for these
individuals than their heterosexual peers. LGBT groups attribute the
increased suicide risk to society’s negative attitude toward them, but
Cretella doesn’t believe that’s a factor because the study was conducted
in Sweden, one of the most LGBT-affirming countries in the world.
And often, no treatment is necessary. According to the ACP, gender
confusion in childhood usually rectifies itself. As many as 98 percent
of gender-confused boys, and 88 percent of gender-confused girls, will
accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty, the
pediatricians wrote.
“Conditioning children into believing a lifetime of chemical and
surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful is
child abuse,” the statement said.
Courtesy: WORLD News Service
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