Three Things To Know: Detrans Awareness Day (March 12)
By: Dan Bartkowiak
Is this the medical scandal of the century?
March 12 is Detrans Awareness Day – so this is a prime time to discuss the cracks beginning to show in the “gender affirmation care” industry.
The detrans community includes voices of those who went through “sex-change” services and surgeries only to regret the decision and detransition back to their true biological sex. Today’s awareness effort is an opportunity to highlight their stories and the many problems with the current healthcare community’s approval and promotion of body-altering hormones and surgeries, particularly for children and young adults.
Here are three important notes to understand in marking Detrans Awareness Day:
1. The detransition community is growing.
As a young girl at just age 13, Chloe Cole was put on puberty blockers because she thought she would be happier as a boy. At the advice of her doctors and therapists, she had her breasts removed at age 15. She has since detransitioned. In an interview with PA Family, she described her experience. “It destroyed me. It destroyed parts of my body. It destroyed my health.”
Evidence shows a rise in sex-change drugs and procedures nationwide. One 2023 study found “a climbing prevalence of gender dysphoria.” A 2021 study found there has been a twenty-fold increase over the last decade in the number of people being referred for sex-change services, with teenagers immensely over-represented.
There are stories like Chloe’s from detransitioners right here in Pennsylvania. Kasey Emerick, from central PA, was recommended the path of changing her sex by an LGBTQ clinic after just two short counseling sessions. Her medical professionals recommended testosterone, which she started, and at just age 17, Kasey had a double mastectomy.
Five years later, she realized her mental health symptoms were getting worse. As the New York Times wrote in a story about Kasey last month,
“In the fall of 2022, she came out as a detransitioner on Twitter and was immediately attacked. Transgender influencers told her she was bald and ugly. She received multiple threats.
‘I thought my life was over,’ she said. ‘I realized that I had lived a lie for over five years.'”
2. Taxpayers have funded these harmful procedures to thousands of children in Pennsylvania, costing taxpayers millions of dollars every year.
According to Right-To-Know-Law requests filed by the Pennsylvania Family Institute, since 2015, there have been 5,000 children and young adults (18 and under) in PA experimented on with “sex reassignment and transition-related drugs and services” – including surgeries – that have been paid for by taxpayers amounting to over $20 million.
The number of children impacted by these “services” – which are financially covered through Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) in PA – has grown from 100 in 2015 to over 2,000 in 2023. Child recipients have been as young as five years old.
“This is state-sponsored child mutilation that taxpayers are being forced to fund,” Michael Geer, president of Pennsylvania Family Institute, stated in a story by The Daily Wire.
In 2015, Rachel Levine was appointed as Pennsylvania’s new Physician General and made sex-change procedures, drugs, and funding a top priority. In 2017, in an email to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Gender Clinic Co-Founder Nadia Dowshen, Dr. Levine asked for supportive literature on sex-change surgeries on minors. “I’m not aware of existing literature but it is certainly happening,” replied Dowshen.
This should frighten us all.
3. So-called experts are being exposed. “Gender medicine” is neither science nor medicine.
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) – touted as an authority in its field – is responsible for many of the guidelines used by Pennsylvania hospitals to justify sex-change surgeries and procedures, particularly for minors.
However, WPATH is an open-membership organization filled primarily with activists, and recently-released videos and documents – labeled the WPATH Files – show their lack of evidence-based science. The WPATH Files reveal doctors admitting to making up data as they go along, suggesting that there is a link to cancer with these sex-change chemical and surgical procedures, and even recognizing that children are not old enough to be able to give informed consent to these procedures.
Media outlets are now beginning to take notice. Headlines about the WPATH Files have linked this to being the medical scandal of the century, with coverage ranging from conservative outlets like the National Review to an opinion piece in the progressive-run Guardian: “WPATH is no model in the search for evidence-based care…”
Michael Shellenberger, President of Environmental Progress – the organization that released the WPATH Files, calls out. “The WPATH Files show that what is called ‘gender medicine’ is neither science nor medicine. The experiments are not randomized, double-blind, or controlled. It’s not medicine since the first rule is to do no harm. And that requires informed consent.”
Breaking news out of the UK is the National Health Service in England announced today that children will no longer be prescribed puberty blockers. SkyNews: The government said it welcomed the “landmark decision”, adding it would help ensure care is based on evidence and is in the “best interests of the child”.
These experiments – what amounts to taxpayer-funded devastation on children – have to stop. As Breakpoint’s John Stonestreet concluded about the release of the WPATH Files, “Hopefully, exposing these atrocities is the first step in bringing an end to this nightmare.”
To add your name to the petition calling for an end to funding “sex-change” procedures on children in Pennsylvania, click here or visit tinyurl.com/StopFundingHarm.
Dan Bartkowiak is the Director of Communications for Pennsylvania Family Institute.
