OPINION:
A brief foray into fantasy can sometimes be therapeutic.
There’s nothing wrong with, say, the current rash of female friends getting dolled up to resemble “Barbie” for a showing of the smash film. In a TikTok challenge, even some guys are doing it.
Unlike the passing Barbie dress-up fad, though, the decision to undergo surgical and hormonal treatments is permanent and life-altering. That’s why such medical professionals should be barred from performing such procedures on minors.
A House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing last week illuminated the real-life consequences of the wholesale rush to convert youthful fantasy into fact. Contrary to New York Democrat Jerrold Nadler’s assertion that Republicans are “singling out transgender kids and their parents by labeling their very existence a social problem,” the hearing gave voice to the very real perils that adolescents face when subjected to so-called “gender-affirming care.”
“I used to believe that I was born in the wrong body,” Chloe Cole, a 19-year-old woman who began transitioning to male at age 13, told lawmakers. “And the adults in my life, whom I trusted, affirmed my belief, and this caused me lifelong, irreversible harm.”
As a transgender male, she became suicidal, she said. This was the very fate that medical specialists had assured her parents she had to undergo hormone treatment and surgery to avoid.
Fortunately, Republicans Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio have introduced the Protect Children’s Innocence Act, which would make it a felony for a doctor to perform gender reassignment procedures on a minor anywhere in the United States. Nineteen states have enacted some form of restriction on transgender treatment.
No doubt fueled by ceaseless promotion by educators, the media and Hollywood, gender dysphoria, or the persistent feeling of dissonance between one’s sex and perceived gender identity, is on the rise.
A study published by Virginia Tech researcher Ching-Fang Sun in the journal General Psychiatry in June reported that among 42 million individuals aged 4 to 65 whose medical records were examined between 2017 and 2021, a “significantly increased” number claimed to be transgender.
Moreover, the trend is gripping younger cohorts, with the average age of diagnosis falling more than five years to slightly over age 26.
Equally clear is that so-called gender-affirming solutions are ineffective: “There is not a single long-term study to demonstrate the safety or efficacy of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries for transgender-believing youth,” the American College of Pediatricians states. “This means that youth transition is experimental, and therefore, parents cannot provide informed consent, nor can minors provide assent for these interventions. Moreover, the best long-term evidence we have among adults shows that medical intervention fails to reduce suicide.”
Among others, Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. blames the disturbing trend on “endocrine disruptors” — chemicals that play havoc with human hormones.
But the cause may be simpler: modern society’s rejection of faith in the inimitable value of each human being as the work of a creator in favor of an edgy self-selected identity meant to elicit both admiration and sympathy from peers.
Congress ought to step in and end this fad gone bad once and for all.
* Article From: The Washington Times
