Healing the harm

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Next up: Doubletake is back with a new episode.

There have been some striking developments in the battle over transgenderism in recent months. As we reported on Legal Docket just a few weeks ago, the Supreme Court ruled that states do have the right to limit women’s sports to, well, women.

And earlier this summer federal and state prosecutors forced two major hospitals to agree to stop performing transition procedures on minors and pay substantial fines. The Cleveland Clinic in Ohio and Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston.

BROWN: Texas Children’s also agreed to set up a free de-transition clinic and run it for five years. It’s a stunning development, and the hospital might not have had to make that deal without a nurse whistleblower named Vanessa Sivadge.

Doubletake host Les Sillars will bring us her story in tomorrow’s episode. But he’s here today.

Hi, Les.

SILLARS: Hey, thanks Myrna.

Vanessa has an amazing story. In 2022 she was working at Texas Children’s and suddenly found herself involved in a gender transition clinic. Here she is when she realized what was happening.

VANESSA SIVADGE: It's a huge weight on my conscience. But how do you, how do you fight back? It's literally in my job description, I have to do it.

BROWN: It must have been awful.

SILLARS: She was worried about her job, but there was also just this incredible cultural pressure. Here’s a clip that illustrates what it was like for kids and for parents. To set this up: one day Vanessa was in the adolescent gynecology clinic and a young Hispanic girl comes in with her mother.

SIDVADGE: I’ll never forget her.

She was dressed like a boy. Very baggy clothes. She told the gynecologist …

SIVADGE: That she'd really hated her period and she didn't want to have it anymore, and it was just she, you know, wanted to get rid of all of this. And the gynecologist looks at her and says, Oh, we can just stop your period altogether if you want. You don't ever have to have a period again.

He offered to prescribe a pill. It’d be easy, he said.

SIVADGE: Thank God I had a mask on …

It was the COVID era.

… because my face under that mask, I couldn't believe it.

The mother’s English wasn’t great, but she knew what the doctor was suggesting. She asked, is it safe? Are there any side effects?

SIVADGE: And the doctor was like, no, no, no, it's, we don't, we can do whatever your daughter wants. We will do whatever she wants. And the mom just kind of sat back, and she just kind of took it.

And so the girl started hormone treatments. Vanessa says she might actually have liked the results. At first.

SIVADGE: You know, they do seem like they're getting better, because it's a new experience that is drastically changing their bodies and their puberty.

The girls stop their periods. Boys’ voices change, become more feminine.

SIVADGE: And at first, it's a very exciting thing. And then, you know, the girls start to develop hair on their legs, and their voice begins to deepen …

Gender doctors rarely emphasize to young patients that the effects of pumping them full of cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers are often irreversible. They don’t call it chemical castration, but people can end up sterilized. Detransitioners also describe altered bone development. Stunted growth. Hormonal imbalances. If they have genital surgery or breast removal, they certainly can’t get their actual body parts back.

SIVADGE: I think what I observed was that they started to really understand what they had, what they had signed up for, and it wasn't so appealing and shiny and new after a couple of months.

But the kids and their parents can’t stop. They’ve bought into the lie.

SIVADGE: They just kept going, and they learned to deal with the multitude of side effects that came with weekly doses of testosterone or estrogen, wrecking havoc on all of their bodies.

Vanessa says this is the biggest lie the medical establishment has ever sold to confused children and vulnerable parents.

SIVADGE: I mean, the parents were also very entrenched in this too. They were convinced, they were manipulated by the doctors, that if they did not do this for their kids, that they would harm themselves, they would commit suicide.

BROWN: Thanks Les. That sounds great.

SILLARS: You’re welcome.

BROWN: That’s the upcoming episode of Doubletake. It’s out tomorrow. Right here on The WORLD and Everything In It.

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