How trans advocates failed trans kids

Perhaps surprisingly, it was the comments of a transgender woman with which I found myself in agreement after the U.S. Supreme Court released its decision in U.S. v. Skrmetti, a landmark case that upheld the state of Tennessee’s ban on hormones and surgery for gender dysphoria patients under the age of 18. The ruling likely ensures that bans in other states — including Iowa — will continue without legal interference.

“My thanks to the narcissists at the ACLU and specifically [lead counsel] Chase Strangio for pursuing a doomed case that set legal precedent that will allow red states to ban HRT for adults,” wrote Brianna Wu, a well-known video game developer and self-described transsexual woman wrote on social media site X on Wednesday. “ … You are destroying our civil rights with your arrogance in your extreme gender ideology. You’ve expanded what transsexual is to absolutely absurd degrees. You’ve tossed sex perverts the keys to the women’s bathroom, laughed off concerns that parents have about their children being sexualized and have turned my medical condition into a joke.”

Wu and I don’t see eye-to-eye on the merits of banning hormones and surgery for kids dealing with gender dysphoria, which is defined as distress experienced as a result of feeling one’s gender differs from one’s sex. I have generally supported pediatric bans since I first became aware of the treatments’ extreme nature, the shaky science supporting them and activism of so-called “experts” making it doubtful the medical industry will ever set better standards on its own.

Where Wu and I seem to agree is that gender-affirming care for transgender kids should have never had to go before the Supreme Court. It was forced before the court by ideologues too busy wielding their activist swords to examine the flaws in their own argument.

Had gender identity activists ever tried a more prudent approach — say, one that didn’t encourage cutting the healthy breasts off a 15-year-old girl — they likely wouldn’t have faced legislative pushback.

Yet advocates went all-in on powerful hormones and ghastly surgeries, failing the very young people who they claim to be protecting. And if trans kids are going to suffer to the degree they claim, it’s worth asking who has truly failed them — and how.

‘Experts’ skew science

With much of the existing science already struggling to hold up to scrutiny, some “experts” are now effectively bypassing it altogether.

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health is one of the most influential groups for determining standards recommended by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. WPATH has been caught letting its official positions be influenced by some of the same people it is supposed to be advising.

Documents unsealed in a recent federal court case challenging Alabama’s ban on pediatric gender-affirming treatments revealed that prior to the 2022 release of the WPATH updated Standards of Care (SOC-8), the Assistant Secretary for Health in then-President Joe Biden’s HHS Department, Adm. Rachel Levine (a transgender woman) had pressured the organization to remove minimum age recommendations for medical and surgical treatments from the SOC-8 for political reasons. Emails show that Levine was concerned about how age recommendations would affect legislation and WPATH was asked to “remove them.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics, the largest association of pediatricians in the U.S., was even more blunt. Court documents indicate that the AAP “issued an ultimatum to WPATH: Should WPATH not delete the age minimums, AAP would not only withhold endorsement of SOC-8, but would publicly oppose the document.”

Eventually, the age minimums were removed from the WPATH SOC-8.

WPATH has also worked to suppress research that does not confirm its previously stated positions. After two systematic reviews commissioned from Johns Hopkins University produced results that did not support its position, the organization changed its policy to ensure that only reviews favorable to its position could be published.

WPATH’s statement on Skrmetti issued Wednesday says the quiet part out loud: “ … it will make it much more difficult to create an evidence base to support access to health care of this kind.” In other words, WPATH is not interested in science to help the organization determine its positions, it’s interested in science that supports what it has already decided.

‘Affirming’ doctors downplay risks

In October, the New York Times’ Azeen Ghorayshi reported that Dr. Olson-Kennedy, one of the country’s most prominent supporters of gender-affirming care for kids, said she withheld an NIH-funded study showing that puberty blockers did not improve mental health in children with gender dysphoria because she feared it would be used for political reasons. The article cited Dr. Olson-Kennedy as having claimed that there had likely been no marked improvement with puberty blockers because the children studied were already in a mentally well state, although 18% of the study’s subjects had moderately or severely elevated depression at the beginning of the study.

Olson-Kennedy later signed a sworn affidavit claiming that Ghorayshi’s reporting on the study’s delayed release was false. The study, released in preprint in December, showed no improvement in mental health of gender dysphoric children using puberty blockers.

Olson-Kennedy is one of several gender transition doctors who is being sued by a former patient for negligence. Kaya “Clementine” Breen, age 20, has accused Olson-Kennedy of prescribing puberty blockers when Breen was just 12 years old following a single appointment that included no evaluation of Breen’s mental health or history of sexual abuse. She was put on testosterone at 13 and underwent a double-mastectomy at 14, after which she became suicidal. When Breen was 17, Olson-Kennedy recommended a hysterectomy. She has since detransitioned.

Breen’s lawsuit mentions Olson-Kennedy’s use of the line, “would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?” to coerce her parents into consenting to treatment — a popular line used by gender transition doctors which Olson-Kennedy herself has publicly touted.

School, community leaders drop the ball

Providers in jurisdictions where gender-affirming care is banned will now, ironically, be telling their young transgender patients the same thing school boards told upset parents when they passed transgender-affirming bathroom and locker room policies: “There’s nothing we can do. It’s the law.”

And it was the law in our state — from the moment Iowa’s civil rights code was first interpreted as requiring that 12-year-old girls be allowed to use the boys’ bathrooms and locker rooms if they said they felt like a boy (and kept secret from their parents) until gender identity was removed from the Iowa Civil Rights Act in late February.

But while transgender-affirming doctors have been vocal against gender-affirming care bans, did school officials or their affinity groups ever speak up about the problems that would surely arise from lax self-ID policies?

Nope. They bent over backward to accommodate the desires of trans-identifying students, while in stark contrast, making almost no effort to address the concerns of the people who were saying, “You can’t be serious.”

If those officials cared, they failed to show it. Instead they trotted out the platitudes of “being inclusive to all” and “protecting LGBTQ kids” and implied that anyone who opposed the policy was a bigot. No wonder frustrated citizens took their anger to the ballot box. And no wonder the people they elected got right to work on big changes.

ACLU: Activism over aptitude

Finally, if the petitioner in U.S. v Skrmetti truly intended to protect transgender kids, they couldn’t have failed those kids worse than the American Civil Liberties Union did in choosing Chase Strangio to lead their case.

Instead of a more adept litigator, the ACLU tagged Strangio, an alumnus of Grinnell College, to be the first openly transgender person to ever argue before the Supreme Court. Strangio bungled the transgender machine’s sole argument in favor of gender transition — that not transitioning leads to suicide — so badly that at one point Strangio actually conceded to the court that suicide among trans-identifying people is “thankfully and admittedly rare.”

Trans activism turning point?

The Skrmetti decision gave a massive, game-changing win to supporters of evidence-based transgender medicine. But the triumph is muted by the reality that concerned citizens had to turn to the government to protect kids from bad medicine because the people who should have failed to do so.

One can argue that by demanding affirmation in a manner that exceeded reason, the transgender community has spent the last several years failing its own kids.

“There is something very wrong with the direction of trans culture right now. If we don’t change course, and soon, we are going to lose everything we’ve gained,” wrote Wu in a previous social media post on May 20.

There was never a better time for the transgender advocacy machine to step back, survey the damage and adopt goals that aren’t riddled with junk science and bad policy. If it does, it just might show how U.S. v Skrmetti doesn’t have to be the death of transgender rights in the United States. It could be just what forces the trans community to reign in its own demise.

Comments: 319-398-8266; althea.cole@thegazette.com