A victory for children

We are entering a new era, and it might be one in which the Orwellian language of “gender-affirming care” is no longer be accepted as a substitute for truth.

At a landmark event in December celebrating the passage of the Do No Harm in Medicaid Act, HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr. declared that “medical professionals or entities providing sex-rejecting procedures to children are out of compliance with … standards of healthcare.”

“Sex-rejecting” is a more accurate term for how hormone blockers, cross-sex hormones, and unnecessary surgeries effect the individuals who undergo them. While no individual should be subjected to such interventions without clear medical necessity, the government has a heightened obligation to protect minors from life-altering decisions they are not equipped to understand or consent to.

The Act would bar hospitals from performing this kind of treatment through Medicare and Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).

When children take these drugs or undergo these procedures, they risk permanent harm. In the absence of long-term, high-quality studies, the medical community cannot state with confidence what the full lifelong consequences will be.

What we do know is deeply concerning. Available data show increased rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidality among some patients, as well as significant loss of bone density, impaired sexual function, and permanent infertility—especially in cases involving surgeries such as hysterectomies. 

We also know that approximately 25 percent of those who identify as transgender are between the ages of 13 and 17, a demographic shift that occurred so rapidly it defies any plausible medical explanation. Pediatric “gender-affirming care” did not exist prior to the late 1990s, and even then was exceedingly rare. Yet diagnoses of pediatric gender dysphoria tripled between 2017 and 2021 alone.

The first pediatric gender clinic opened in 2007. By the late 2010s, more than 50 such clinics were operating across the United States. With limited evidence and unresolved ethical questions, much of the American medical establishment began promoting gender transition as a default response, often framing dissent as intolerance rather than prudence.

Today, this approach continues to be endorsed by major medical associations and widely practiced at children’s hospitals nationwide. Do No Harm, an organization dedicated to stopping pediatric gender transition practices in medicine, has documented where it continues to be a problem. 

By 2015, questioning the ideology of gender transition had become culturally taboo. Claims of chosen gender identity were treated as unquestionable truth, while biological reality was increasingly dismissed as irrelevant or even harmful.

Popular media accelerated this normalization through television programs such as I Am Jazz and Growing Up Coy, alongside sympathetic news coverage of families socially transitioning children as young as seven. These portrayals bypassed unresolved medical questions and presented experimental pathways as compassionate necessities.

The result has been predictable and tragic. A growing number of young adults are now detransitioning and speaking out, describing a culture that rushed affirmation without digging into co-morbidity issues related to their mental health. 

"As soon as gender was in the picture, none of my doctors or psychologists asked the real questions that they should have,” said detransitioner Chloe Cole in her testimony at the HHS event. "The entire focus was on my feelings and what I wanted rather than what I really needed in that moment."

Those who resisted gender transition for their children often did so at great personal cost, with some parents even losing custody. In other cases, families were prevented from fostering children if they did not sign a policy that supported child gender transition. 

Parents, clinicians, and researchers who raised concerns faced professional retaliation, public shaming, and coordinated pressure from activist groups determined to suppress debate.

A society that loses its commitment to truth also loses its ability to protect the vulnerable. Without a grounding in biological reality, identity becomes untethered from the body, and medicine becomes an instrument of ideology rather than healing.

To permit permanent medical interventions based on the transient distress of adolescents is not compassion. It is abdication. It relinquishes adult responsibility, violates medical ethics, and abandons the government’s duty to safeguard children when they are least able to protect themselves.

Children are created male or female from the moment of conception. The belief that this reality can be overridden by mindset, hormones, or surgery ultimately denies the “very good” work God declared complete in creation.

We affirm this truth by calling out “sex-rejecting” treatment for what it is.