Gender Affirming Care UNMASKED

Seeking first the spread of Christ’s kingdom of righteousness i.e. restoring creation to wholeness, thus protecting the most vulnerable has been the work of Christ-followers on planet earth throughout history. For instance, in the Roman Empire, it was common for unwanted little ones to be taken into the countryside and abandoned to be eaten by wild animals. But Christians started orphanages and began adopting the children. The early church was so known for helping the poor that Roman Emperor, Julian wrote: “It is disgraceful that when no Christian has to beg because they support both their own poor and ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us.” In 325 the Christian church’s Council of Nicaea, made a world-changing decree that the bishops of the church were to go into every city in Christendom big enough to have its own cathedral and start a hospital there. In India, Christians ended suttee, the grisly practice through which widows were voluntarily or involuntarily burned on their husband’s funeral pyres.

Today, in 2024 there is another vulnerable group being victimized that requires Christians to protect them. They are precious, confused, pubescent children, who, in the name of transgender rights, are being shoved down a path of permanent sterility and irreversible mutilation of their bodies, when they are too young to understand the consequences of the “affirming care” being pushed on them. However, last month, the deceit and dishonesty of gender affirming care was unmasked in a powerful way. Christians now have powerful, exposed facts that delegitimize gender affirming care. The question is, “Will we use these facts to end this horrific mutilation of children as Wilberforce fought to end slavery or will Christians do nothing?” This episode is dedicated to equipping you to speak confidently wherever you have influence to help stop this atrocity being imposed on little girls and boys struggling with puberty.

What some say is the biggest medical scandal of our times was exposed last month when whistle blowers released internal files from the self-appointed, “experts” on transgender health, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) proving that WPATH’s “transgender medicine guidelines” had no basis in actual science and violated the most basic medical guidelines for patient care. The leaked documents make clear that WPATH suppressed universally accepted standards of medical care and ethics to push pubescent children experiencing gender dysphoria towards the most extreme possible hormonal and surgical interventions not for medical reasons but to promote their own radical gender ideology. These leaked internal memos rocked the medical world, since most US professional medical associations, including the US National Institute of Health, the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and The American Academy of Pediatrics, based their recommendation for treating gender dysphoria upon these fraudulent scientific claims and what is now widely recognized as the actual medical malpractice of WPATH. 

The dishonest impression that WPATH had presented to the world was a picture of real professionalism rooted in genuine care for “oppressed” transgender patients and grounded in the best available scientific evidence. It is none of these. To the contrary, experiments cited are not randomized, double-blind, or controlled, as any legitimate research must be. There is no scientific evidence to support radical interventions, i.e. halting puberty through puberty blockers (the most common of which is Lupron used to chemically castrate sex offenders). There are no long-term studies showing the benefit of taking cross gender hormones at the cost of a 99.7% rate of sterility. There are no follow up studies of their patients, which any legitimate medical association would perform. Their often-cited claim that a child who experiences gender dysphoria must receive gender affirming care or the child will commit suicide is a complete fabrication. Legitimate scientific studies have proven the opposite. What the leaked video and documents reveal is an organization driven by ideology at the expense of real science and real medical care for patients. Consider the evidence:

1. WPATH violates the fundamental ethical practice of INFORMED CONSENT. It is undeniable that these physicians knew they were not adequately meeting this universally recognized ethical requirement. A major topic of conversation in the leaked conversations was whether children could even give informed consent to these life-altering procedures when they (and often their parents) didn’t understand the full ramifications of their decisions, e.g., infertility. In a panel discussion, one doctor noted that some of these kids “haven’t even had biology in high school yet.” Another said, “It’s out of their developmental range sometimes to understand the extent to which some of these medical interventions are impacting them.” Do these concerns stop WPATH from pushing “transitions” on vulnerable children? No. Children are incapable of giving informed consent to such life-changing decisions—and WPATH knows it.
2. Leaked excerpts prove WPATH physicians know, but ignore, the reality that gender dysphoria is nearly always a symptom of other pre-existing psychological conditions that should be treated BEFORE radical hormonal and surgical interventions. These include depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, borderline personality disorder, autism, dissociative identity disorder, etc. Such mental health issues often predate any distress about their sex. One nurse practitioner discussed struggling with whether to put a patient on hormones who also had PTSD, major depressive disorder, observed dissociations, and schizoid typical traits. Dr. Dan Karasic, the lead author of WPATH’s SOC8 chapter on mental health, responded, “I’m missing why you are perplexed… The mere presence of psychiatric illness should not block a person’s ability to start hormones…” The videos and tapes prove that these physicians knew that thinking they were in the wrong body was very likely caused by prior mental health issues, yet the clinicians’ ideology overruled sound, moral medical practice.
3. Knowing that gender dysphoric adolescents experience high levels of anxiety about going through puberty, WPATH gives them a false solution based on a delusion instead of proven medical science. The idea that a 12-year-old girl entering puberty is actually a boy is a complete delusion. The sciences of genetics, endocrinology, embryology, and anatomy prove otherwise. For selfish, ideological reasons, WPATH clinicians offer bodily mutilation as a solution to a delusion. It would be like a physician offering a ninety-pound, anorexic teen girl who is suffering from the delusion that she is too fat a prescription for diet pills. It is medical malpractice.
4. WPATH’s claim that gender dysphoric children must receive “affirming medical care” or they will commit suicide is a complete fraud. The leaked documents reveal no legitimate scientific studies to indicate that suicide ideation or attempts decrease if gender dysphoric children go down the path of radical intervention—starting on puberty blockers, moving to cross gender hormone treatments and gender altering surgery—which they call “affirming care.” NONE. The fact is that other, legitimate studies reveal a dramatic increase in actual suicides, ten years after gender-altering surgery. The most thorough follow-up of sex-reassigned people—extending over 30 years and conducted in Sweden, where the culture is strongly supportive of the transgendered—nevertheless, documents that ten to fifteen years after surgical reassignment surgery, the suicide rate of those who had undergone sex-reassignment surgery rose to 20 times that of comparable peers.
5. Leaked documents prove WPATH intentionally ignores the mounting evidence of “detransitioners”—those who consent to affirming care who later regret it and seek to return to their biological sex. Any credible surgeon wants his patient to understand all the risks of the potential surgery. Not these surgeons; they are idealogues first, physicians second. The leaked conversations prove that it is well known within WPATH membership that many people who are put through these life-altering procedures later come to regret it, especially given the long-term health consequences like infertility, loss of sexual function, and the lifelong medical treatments that must follow. A lengthy set of revealed chatroom entries discuss the best strategy to “reframe” patients’ serious regret, spinning it as simply “normal” exploration of gender over time. Dr. Marci Bowers, president of WPATH admits, “acknowledgement that de-transition exists even to a minor extent is considered off-limits for many” in the trans community. Ideology first. Patient care second.
6. WPATH is a SCIENTIFICALLY, ETHICALLY, MEDICALLY discredited organization. The issues listed above barely begin to cover the extent of the unethical and pseudoscientific work of WPATH. The organization’s recent standards of care are born of a precommitment to a radical gender ideology which is victimizing American pubescent children for their own selfish, political and financial gain. WPATH has discredited itself, and no medical organization or government can now legitimately use its “standards of care” as a basis for its decisions. Against all sound ethical practice, WPATH supports encouraging a very troubled child to think falsely that her problems are caused by the fantasy that she is trapped in a wrongly gendered body and needs to change her body to correspond to her delusion. These exposed WPATH documents are so alarming that you can be certain that any government agency or American medical association that continues to cite WPATH standards of transgender care or who recommends affirming care is doing so because of its radical gender ideology, not a concern for the health of its patients. If good medicine is the true motivation, American medical policymakers will learn from the example of the United Kingdom. Without a multimillion dollar/yr. drug and gender surgery industry to lobby its health officials, the U.K. has objectively followed treatment for gender dysphoria that puts patient care first.  

LESSONS TO BE LEARNED FROM THE UNITED KINGDOM

The parallel of the exposure of what was really happening at the U.K.’s gender clinic, Tavistock, with this recent exposure of what is really happening at WPATH is hard to miss. A lawsuit by detransitioner, Keira Bell, exposed what was happening at Tavistock. As a result, on July 28, 2022, U.K. health officials shuttered Tavistock, and appointed a review led by Dr. Hilary Cass, the former president of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health. Her subsequent report noted that gender clinic “staff have told us that they feel under pressure to adopt an unquestioning affirmative approach…” in which children’s claims about gender dysphoria are not carefully examined and underlying mental health issues are not properly addressed before prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. The review also expressed concern about the gross over-representation of girls and children on the autism spectrum being recommended for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. They reasoned, that if the rise in prescribing these drugs were simply a matter of children feeling freer to express their true selves, rather than the result of social contagion and recruitment among vulnerable groups, then those treated would better reflect the broader population. But they did not. Instead, Dr. Cass’s report concluded, “It is increasingly clear that we are witnessing a dangerous craze among children with mental health challenges rather than the liberation of the sexually oppressed.”

Along with other European countries, the U.K. had started widespread use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for children identifying as transgender almost a decade before such clinics opened in the U.S. With that extra decade of experience, European health officials have accumulated more objective evidence of the long-term damage being done and have started to reverse course. As a result of the Cass Report, the U.K. permanently closed its sole “gender clinic, insisting that gender dysphoria be treated in a holistic manner by pediatricians not gender idealogues.

As the U.K. has continued to separate pediatric health care for those with gender dysphoria from radical ideologues, the objective realities of science and sound medical are prevailing.  Just three weeks ago, the U.K.’s National Health Service banned the use of puberty blockers for all children under eighteen who were seeking treatment for gender dysphoria, citing too little research to be sure they are safe. The NHS's website said, "Puberty blockers are not available to children and young people for gender incongruence or gender dysphoria because there is not enough evidence of safety and clinical effectiveness.” The Times of London, was a bit more blunt, coming out in favor of a full ban on puberty blockers for children and calling gender affirming care “quack medicine.”

THE EXPOSURE OF WPATH MATTERS

All any believer needs to do is to read some of the stories of “detransitioners” to be captured by the horror of this abuse of American children. Though transitioning as an adult, herself, one detransitioner, who is passionately committed to protecting children from gender affirming care reports, “I am a forty-eight-year-old transgender man who transitioned at age forty-two, and I am a parent to three teenagers. Before my transition, I was known to the world as Kellie King, a dynamic, powerful business sales executive, consistently leading the sales charts while acquiring countless honors, awards, and accolades. At age 42, I made a decision that turned my world upside down. Everything that was once gold turned to coal, almost instantly. That decision was to transition from a lesbian to a trans man, to become Scott Newgent.” Her botched sex-change surgery eventually caused her to have six more surgeries, become so prone to bacterial infection that her life will likely be shortened because she is building up an immunity to every anti-biotic, and cost her and her insurance company $900,000. Such sex transition surgeries are legally deemed “experimental,” which makes it impossible to sue for malpractice because there is no established baseline of proper medical care.

Newgent believes that affirming medical care pushes kids who would otherwise have no psychological issue with embracing their biological sex to embrace an identity that is out of sync with their sex—a disconnect that everyone agrees comes with mental anguish, requiring our compassion. But transitioning is the wrong solution. She points out the power of peer contagion. “You know if we told middle-schoolers right now at a time they’re not fitting in, that you can absolutely fit in. All you have to do is cut your left leg off and you will fit in, the rest of your life. Do you know how many ambulances we would have at middle-schools.”

HOW CAN WE USE THIS UNMASKING OF AFFIRMING CARE TO PROTECT TEENS?

1.First, we must invest some time to be equipped. You don’t have to be a transgender expert. But unless you are confident that you have a bit more knowledge about what is happening to kids through gender affirming care than those around you, you won’t speak up about it. In the past I have mentioned two resources I have written, Anchoring Your Child to God’s Truth in a Gender Confused Culture and Our Daughters and the Transgender Craze. (Links in the show notes.) But now we have posted four free video tutorials at youtube.com/@gyagelspeaks. Of course, you can listen to these videos just like you would a podcast on your phone or watch them. Here is a description of each video:

Video # 1 Understanding Gender Theory

• Opens parents’ eyes to the explosion of gender theory influence on kids.
• Equips parents to recognize the tentacles of gender theory creeping into their kids’ thinking.
• Prepares parents to show their kids that gender theory was disproved by science years ago.
• Prepares parents to explain to their kids from Scripture why a scientifically disproved theory is nevertheless being widely promoted by social media.

Video # 2 Understanding Today’s Transgender Craze

• Identifies the characteristics of teens, especially girls, who are most susceptible to being drawn into the transgender world.
• Identifies the two primary paths that lead teen girls into the transgender life.
• Gives a strategy to preempt our children from rejecting their gender design.
• Explains why the LGBTQ+ movement’s highest values, authenticity and unconditional acceptance so powerfully draw pubescent teens into it—and what to do about it.

Video # 3 Countering Radical Gender Theory

• Empowers parents to instill in their kids confidence that gender theory is no threat to their faith, since it contradicts the proven laws of science and logic.
• Equips believers to winsomely refute the 7 most common claims of gender theory showing them to be based on flawed logic or disproved research.
• Refutes an argument that is driving many of the rising generation to reject the faith—that the Bible teaches oppressive patriarchy.

Video # 4 (For Teens and Youth Leaders) Biblical Worldview of Sexuality

• Helps teens see the way the LGBTQ+ view of gender and sexuality (promoted in the Gender Unicorn graphic) fractures personhood.
• Helps teens see the glory of the Biblical view of gender as a unified, healthy, holistic view of sexual personhood that corresponds to reality.
• Helps teens embrace the awesomeness of sex when it is kept in the context of married love.

2. The second step for seizin this opportunity to help put a stop to gender affirming medical care is to pray for and seize opportunities in your spheres of influence to let others know that gender affirming care, which originated with WPATH has been thoroughly debunked and exposed to be radical gender ideology masquerading as safe, medical care, WHICH IT IS NOT. 

For Further Prayerful Thought:

1. As you think back over just six of the ways credibility of WPATH has been destroyed, which stand out the most to you?
2. What do you think is the strongest evidence that WPATH’s recommended transgender treatment policies are based on radical gender ideology at the cost of universally agreed upon standards for patient care?
3. When could you find time in your schedule to get better equipped by repeating this podcast or listening to the YouTube videos mentioned?
4. In what sphere of your life might you have the opportunity to raise questions about the legitimacy of gender affirming medical care?