Dear Doctors: You've Got One More Chance

Or we're breaking up with you

Doctors: Are you going to change your ways, or do we need to break up with you? Our relationship was good while it lasted but unless things change — and change quickly — it’s time to call it quits. 

We are the parents of gender dysphoric children and we feel betrayed and abandoned by you. We thought we were in a partnership with you to raise our kids as healthy children but we were so wrong. There’s been so many battles that we have fought together. When they were sick, you treated them while we held their hand at your office. When our kids were tempted to eat junk food all day, you supported us in telling them to eat healthy.  When we were teaching them about safe and unsafe touches you came alongside with us. You gave them the same messages we gave them about saying NO to drugs and unsafe sexual practices. You supported our children with disabilities and wrote referrals so that our kids with ASD, ADHD, LDs and other mental health conditions would have the best chance for success in school. Through all of this, you trusted us, as parents, to know our children best and to use our parental responsibilities and privileges to do what was right for them. Going to the pediatrician felt like a safe space for parents because we knew we had an ally in you. 

Sadly, this is no more. The battle lines have been drawn and you have chosen to stand with ideologues and powerful international pharmaceutical conglomerates with big agendas instead of with parents. You can say and try to pretend that you are for our children, but you know deep down that this is not true. You have chosen the dark side and have aligned yourself with people for whom our kids are pawns in a political game. You have signed up for the most disturbing of all social and medical experiments of this century.  

By ignoring science and everything you learned in medical school about biology you have betrayed your Hippocratic oath to do no harm.

You have become the willing instruments that will carry out the systematic destruction of our children. You know that medicalizing the dysphoric feelings of children and teenagers sets them up for physical damage and a lifetime of dangerous, poorly understood medication. 

You know these drugs are off-label with the FDA, and that the evidence behind their use is of “very low quality", according to a comprehensive UK government review.  You know that practitioners do not even agree on the treatments, due to lack of understanding of long-term effects.  

These treatments are for a lifetime.  You know that one of the *best* studies, in fact, shows a terrifying increased risk of suicide. You are choosing to ignore the increasingly loud cries of those already subjected to your “treatment” who’ve been damaged by puberty blockers and cross sex hormone treatments that were given to them as children and teens. 

I know some of you don’t *really* believe in gender affirming treatment of children and teenagers.  Under your facade of affirmation, you know that this policy is not based in facts, that young people with ASD (including Asperger’s), OCD, trauma, anorexia, and other mental challenges sometimes develop gender dysphoria from these conditions. And you’ve probably even seen for yourself instances where ethical supportive psychotherapy can help kids, rather than affirmation of the “diagnosis” that they found online from Doctor Google or from virtual friends on the internet. 

If you’ve done one iota of reading on the subject (and I assume you must have done so to feel qualified to talk to children about this topic), you know that the standard study everyone quotes to justify treatment applies specifically to those who had strong gender dysphoria since early childhood, not those developing it in adolescence and young adulthood.  

But, despite all this, to your everlasting shame and discredit, you are staying silent. 

You know many of the younger kids grow out of dysphoria if there are no medical interventions taken (and isn’t that the clearest indicator that your industry is doing more harm than good?!). You know, also, that no one knows what will happen with the older kids, because this hasn’t been studied. So, logically, you know that there must be a good chance that that these kids will just mature their way out of dysphoria like their younger cohort.

You know that good medical care is not the same as handing over a distressed and vulnerable young person to the drug companies to make them a lifelong patient, a slave to big pharma, and to the surgeons, who are making a fantastic profit.  Your profession just saw a similar medical catastrophe with opioids. 

Maybe you don’t care because it hasn’t touched your own family or maybe you are too afraid of the backlash and the swift punishment that would come your way if you dare to speak up. However, if you believe that children who are gender non-conforming or confused about their gender should not be given drugs which will hinder them for the rest of their lives, you need to speak up. Or, we are done with you.

This medical experiment is already failing but the ideologues and those who have much at stake financially will not give up so easily. Keira Bell in the UK is but the first one of many of the future lawsuits and court cases that will come from detransitioners who have been permanently and irrevocably harmed by gender affirming therapy that medicalized them as children.  

You are not a safe place for us or our children anymore. Do not be surprised if, from this point forward, a number of parents stop taking their kids to the pediatrician because they don’t trust you and your intentions. The AAP refuses to follow the science and has shut down all discussion related to the treatment of gender confused children. The only treatment they accept is the affirming treatment, which is a pathway to destroying our children’s bodies and minds and making them into patients for life. The AAP has drawn a clear line in the sand and told us that PARENTS are the enemy and that we don’t know what is good for our children.

Hell no to that insane position. We are not the enemy.

Nobody knows and loves our kids the way that we do. When many of our children, who were never transgender to begin with, wake up and realize what has been done to them, we will be there to pick up the pieces and help them to rebuild their broken lives. There is no love like the love of a parent for his or her child. It is the strongest force in the world.

So, are you going to get back into the game and save the soul of your profession before even more kids are harmed. The ball's in your exam room.

Sincerely,

Angry Parents