Gender transition concerns must transcend the political divide

My mentally ill son has fallen prey to an epidemic-please stop looking the other way

I’m ready to speak up.

I'm mom to a 18 year old who suddenly proclaimed himself to be female. This conviction took hold during the Fall of 2020, when he was a new student at university during the COVID pandemic. There was no hint of gender confusion prior in his life. He was always very masculine and indeed, he still is—even though he has started to take female hormones. There are significant psychological comorbidities in my son's case. Rather than treat the mental illnesses effectively, my son's medical providers have instead encouraged medically harmful cross-sex hormones. Mandated affirmative care has driven him directly into experimental treatments with known dire consequences: sexual dysfunction, infertility, increased risk of heart disease, and more. His very real psychological illness is meanwhile ignored and will likely worsen under the influence of the hormones. This is unethical medical care.

I want to say that this epidemic of gender confusion needs to rise above the national political divide. This is not a Democratic nor a Republican issue. This is an issue of science, of ethics, and of fundamental humanity.

Since when is it ethical for surgeons to amputate perfectly healthy organs from young people? Since when is it ethical to sterilize our youth? To render them eunuchs? To destroy sexuality in children, some of them too young to even understand what sex is and who have never had an orgasm? How can individuals with significant mental illness give "informed consent"—which consists of signing on the dotted line?

This is not good medicine, it is techno-barbarism in the guise of mental health treatment. Others have already said: it is like the popularity of lobotomies in the 1940s. This is a medical-scientific scandal on par with the on-going Opioid Epidemic. Or like the 1980s satanic abuse/MPD epidemic that ruined so many lives.

Democrats do a grave disservice to American youth and their families by pretending this is just a political football: promoters of identity diversity on one side, haters of diversity on the other. Democrats, along with professional associations, like the American Psychological Association, Endocrine Association and others need to wake up and realize that our young people should not be subject to life-long medical experimentation. WPATH guidance is out of date and based on extremely limited research—their guidance is shoddy and inapplicable to the current crop of teens who have been inducted into Gender Dysphoria via peer pressure and the internet. Mandated "affirmative care" inflicts experimental medicine on all gender dysphoric youth. 

Anyone who believes that teens are always right and always know what they want in life has clearly lost touch with what it is like to be a teenager. I suggest looking back at your teen-age years and considering how different  life looks from a truly adult perspective.

Anyone who believes that gender is more real than sex needs a lesson in biology. And also needs to reconcile that gender expression varies in individuals throughout their lives, whereas sex is in your chromosomes and cannot be changed.

My adult-teen is mentally ill. Currently, to my great distress, he is hiding out in a city funded homeless shelter. The city authorities refuse to allow me access to my ill adult-child. Meanwhile, unethical medical practitioners are eager to "help" by providing hormones and surgery. This is a nightmare. If you are one of those medical providers, please consider that you are harming the life of a young man with a lot of promise but with mental health challenges. If you are a surgeon, please do not cut off my son's testicles. He needs treatment for complex trauma sequelae, not to have his testicles cut off. You can’t ignore the root cause of his distress. The current path is certainly violating the precept of “first do no harm” in the case of my son.