The Department of Health and Human Services has published a 410-page report regarding the efficacy and ethical implications of “gender-affirming care” — i.e., gender mutilation — on kids. It’s the peer-reviewed iteration of a report that President Donald Trump asked the HHS to produce earlier this year.
The findings strongly demonstrate that gender-affirming care has incredibly weak scientific justification. In fact, here’s what the review found:
First, there was a rapid expansion and implementation of a clinical protocol that lacked sufficient scientific and ethical justification. Second, when confronted with compelling evidence that this protocol did not deliver the health benefits it promised, and that other countries were changing their policies appropriately, U.S. medical professionals and associations failed to reconsider the “gender-affirming” approach. Third, conflicting evidence — evidence that challenged the foundational assumptions of the protocol and the professional standing of its advocates — was mischaracterized or insufficiently acknowledged. Finally, dissenting perspectives were marginalized, and those who voiced them were disparaged.
All of these conclusions are nothing new to those of us who have been paying attention. What makes the report even more damning is that the nine authors who compiled it and subjected it to rigorous peer review were independent of HHS and not U.S. government employees. Most were also Democrats.
The HHS especially asked organizations that have been great promoters of gender-affirming care — namely, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the Endocrine Society, and the American Psychiatric Association (APA) — to review the report. Only one, the APA, deigned to review it; the AAP and the Endocrine Society refused to weigh in.
The APA’s corrections were all minor, and its biggest objection concerned methodology. According to The Daily Signal, “The APA faulted the review’s methodology, but the HHS reviewers noted that APA’s concerns had been addressed in Appendix 4 of the review, which laid out the methodology in great detail. Two non-HHS academics who specialize in methodology also found the HHS review’s practices sound and rigorous. The reviewers note that APA’s ‘unfounded criticism may have resulted from a failure to read core parts of the review.’”
In fact, HHS sought and received 10 reviews by experts and research groups, none of which found any major problems.
University of Iowa professor of pediatrics and neuroscience Dr. Lane Strathearn called this report “a valuable and much-needed contribution to this important field of practice.”
Predictably, the gender deniers are calling it an “attack” and/or purely political. No amount of science or witness testimony or political distancing will convince them otherwise.
“The American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics peddled the lie that chemical and surgical sex-rejecting procedures could be good for children,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stated. “They betrayed their oath to first do no harm, and their so-called ‘gender-affirming care’ has inflicted lasting physical and psychological damage on vulnerable young people. That is not medicine — it’s malpractice.”
Pushing gender pathology on children and then sending them off on a path whose consequences they have no mental capability to understand is, in essence, experimenting on vulnerable test subjects. And to what end? To prove that males and females are the “same”? Or to prove that you can be your own god and change what our Creator has already put in place?
There is no good justification for this method of mistreatment, and medical professionals need to get off their activist bandwagons and open their eyes to actual science and common sense.
This HHS report doesn’t change policy, but it’s an important step in the right direction.
