Protecting troubled children from experimental treatments

MARY REICHARD: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: Banning transgender surgeries for minors. Eight states currently have laws prohibiting either cross-sex hormone injections or transgender surgeries for minors. That includes Arkansas, Arizona, Alabama, Utah, Nebraska, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Florida. Nebraska is on the verge of joining that list.

MYRNA BROWN: In January, State Senator Kathleen Kauth introduced a bill that would prohibit transgender medical treatments in Nebraska. Some other states criminalize parents and doctors who arrange transgender surgeries for children. But this bill would hold medical providers accountable and could suspend their practice licenses if they violate the law. Here’s Kauth explaining the bill’s rationale at a hearing back in February…

KAUTH: The intent behind Let Them Grow is to give children the time they need to work through the gender dysphoria and any other complicating issues they may be experiencing before they engage in radical irreversible and damaging interventions to alter their appearance.

REICHARD: The bill is scheduled for a vote this week, but a state senator from Omaha started a filibuster on Monday that continued through yesterday. Here’s Machaela Cavanaugh last Friday when she announced her intent to filibuster. You’ll hear her call the bill LB547. 

MACHAELA CAVANAUGH: You can decide, you can talk to the Speaker, you can say, listen, LB547 is the priority of this legislature, or it’s not. But if this legislature collectively decides that legislating hate against children is our priority, then I am going to make it painful—painful—for everyone.

BROWN: Activists are condemning the Nebraska bill and similar legislation in other states as unscientific and harmful, but a growing number of people who have detransitioned…meaning, they went back to living as their biological sex…are speaking out about the dangers of the transgender industry.

REICHARD: One of those young people is Luka Hein, a biological woman who received transgender surgery at age 16. Hein says that at the time, it seemed like the only option. But now at age 21, she realizes that her parents were pressured into making a devastating decision.

LUKA HEIN: Like my parents’ biggest. Like biggest crime in all this was the fact that they wanted to help their child and they trusted a medical industry that only gave them one path forward. Yeah. Like they they trusted what they thought were going to be like caring professionals.

BROWN: WORLD’s Lauren Canterbury recently wrote a story about state laws like the one in Nebraska, and she says that Hein’s case is not unusual.

LAUREN CANTERBERRY: For a lot of these parents, they believe their physician when they say that their child is at risk of taking their own life if they don't get these treatments. But in reality, that is really dangerous. And it really pushes parents to approve and consent to treatments without themselves fully understanding what it means. And that's really hard for a lot of kids to deal with, knowing that their parents also were not given all of the information they should have, and then condone them doing these things as minors that they can't possibly consent to themselves. So I think that's really important, not to vilify the parents, because they are also just wanting to do the best thing for their child and why wouldn't they trust a medical professional who's supposed to take care of them?

REICHARD: But now that more people like Luka Hein are speaking out about their experience of gender transition, lawmakers are seeing a more compelling case for banning transgender treatment for minors.

LAUREN CANTERBERRY: It's not just parents, or political figures on the right, drawing attention to the dangers of these practices anymore. Now we have A. Detransitioners, who experienced this, and B. Medical providers who previously supported a lot of these practices and treatments are now coming out and saying, there is not enough evidence to support what we're doing and when we prescribe it. That has really shaped the conversation in a lot of these state’s hearings is the medical side of things. They're not just hearing from the people who claim this is life-saving interventions anymore, they're hearing from people who have done it and have been practicing it and say: We don't know that for sure. It's not clear if this is benefiting or harming kids.

BROWN: For Senator Kauth, the sponsor of the bill in Nebraska, the evidence is clear.

KAUTH: The facts are that these novel and irreversible procedures lack sufficient long-term research yet our country and our state are witnessing a push to encourage youths with gender dysphoria into these interventions.

BROWN: While lawmakers in Nebraska wait to vote on Kauth’s bill, over a dozen other states have similar bills going through the legislative process. And Lauren believes that this legislation will protect children from Luka Hein’s experience of making an irreversible medical decision.

LAUREN CANTERBERRY: I think bills like this will serve to step between the social rhetoric and actual practice and really make it easier for kids to get access to helpful mental health treatment, rather than being pushed down this medical pathway.

REICHARD: Lauren Canterberry is a reporter for WORLD…if you’d like to read her story, we’ve included a link in today’s transcript.

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