Amy Coney Barrett has been attacked because she received an honorarium for delivering a speech to the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal action group advocating for religious liberty and traditional marriage. This puts them on the wrong side of LGBTQ activists, so the execrable Southern Poverty Law Center has listed ADF as a “hate group.”
SPLC is a malicious, fraudulent, self-aggrandizing scam, but that did not stop then Senator Al Franken from citing them in Barrett’s 2017 Court of Appeals confirmation hearing.
Franken used the SPLC lie that ADF has “defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people abroad,” to attack Barrett.
What prompted this post was not one more boringly predictable Leftwing smear on a highly qualified SCOTUS nominee, but the nearly concurrent revelation that Governor Newsom recently signed California Bill AB 2218, establishing the Transgender Wellness and Equity Fund. This fund will provide grants in support of gender transition for all ages, including treatment of minor children with powerful drugs such as Lupron, a hormone stimulant used off-label to suppress normal puberty in children diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Its FDA approved use is to reduce the amount of testosterone in men or estrogen in women to treat advanced prostatic cancer or endometriosis, respectively. These are not diseases of children.
For children the effect is to turn boys into eunuchs and send girls into early-onset menopause.
This is becoming the mainstream medical treatment for sexual confusion in children who may not be able to spell “sexual orientation,” and whose appreciation of the lifetime clinical consequences of such treatment is necessarily limited by their life experience. I don’t claim there is no place for such treatment whatsoever, but “life experience,” as a catch phrase for identity group one-upmanship is intended to imply actual experience.
We might suspect the explosion in the number of children seeking ‘gender’ ‘reassignment’ is mostly due to social media proselytizing. Correlation is not causation, but the timing fits: “[In the UK,] there has been a 4,000 percent increase in girls seeking gender reassignment in the past ten years (from 40 in 2009–10 to 1,806 in 2017–18).”
We might reasonably question whether such a powerful drug should be used off-label as a treatment at a time when the effects on a naive patient’s body are irreversible because of rapid growth and sexual maturation during puberty. Among many other very serious side effects, Lupron can cause irreversible sterilization. At minimum it subverts the normal biological development of the brain, muscle tissue, organs, and bones during puberty. There are no long term studies on children who have had their normal puberty suppressed with such drugs.
For children, sex change surgery and powerful hormone treatment are different than for adults. Puberty is a one time opportunity. If you interrupt it, and to the extent you interrupt it, the results are permanent. Worse, there is evidence that a large number of children who believe they are “trapped in the wrong body” later change their minds.
LGBTQ champions dispute studies claiming the number is as high as eighty percent. Some of these studies are a decade old and many have small sample sizes. Of course, a decade ago the sample sizes would have had to have been small relative to the huge increase in ‘transitioning’ children, and we won’t know the results for a decade hence. When it will be too late for these children to change their minds.
I have assembled some links addressing this question from which you may form your own judgment. I have tried to select publications which Progressives will not automatically reject.
This is a 2008 article from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NIH). Many more, and more recent links, are included if you scroll down a little.
The NY Times in 2015, “gender dysphoria in young children is highly unstable and likely to change”
A 2017 OpEd in the LA Times, “Gender identity is fixed, but only in adults; the same can’t be said for children, whose gender identity is flexible and doesn’t become stable until puberty.”
This is the WaPo from 2018, “It is hard to know exactly what percentage of gender-dysphoric children will end up “desisting.” Some studies suggest that it’s a large majority, but those studies tend to be small, and there is some argument over whether all those kids were truly gender-dysphoric.”
Emphasis mine. Well, yes, isn’t that exactly the question?
A 2020 Quillette piece, by a psychologist who treats detransitioned individuals. If you read just one of these, I’d suggest this. “[D]ata regarding the medical transition of children and adolescents is limited. As Dr. James Cantor wrote in a peer-reviewed journal article published last month, there are few studies examining adult outcomes for children who present as transgender; and those few studies indicate that the majority of pre-pubescent children who present as transgender eventually drop their trans identity and desist to their natal sex.
Finally, here’s a 25 minute YouTube video from 2017, which I think gives a good overview of the science we have at this point.
Here, I can’t resist a small digression to ask Progressives about banning off-label use of hydroxychloroquine to ameliorate the CCP virus. They have denounced it because they say there have been no double-blind, clinical, peer reviewed, long term trials (actually, because Trump mentioned it). Its side effects are minuscule compared to Lupron. It is overwhelmingly a treatment for informed adults (they’re the ones in danger from the CCP virus), in an immediate emergency, and does not have unknown long term effects – having been in use for 40 years.
Then, there are the cases where hormones to interrupt puberty are given to children at the discretion of the state. See here, here, here, here, here, here.
California has decided the science of gender reassignment for minor children, who may or may not be transsexual, is settled. This is “state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people in the US.”
But, I will not hold my breath for the SPLC to declare California a “hate group.”