Letter to the American Academy of Pediatrics

I am a mom and I’ve been in this transgender nightmare with my daughter for nine years.  It started in 2015 when she was 13 years old and just beginning the eighth grade.

In May of this year, I took part in a letter writing campaign to the American Academy of Pediatrics, organized by January Littlejohn. The goal was to flood the AAP with enough letters that they would be forced to at least acknowledge the Cass Review. To no one’s surprise, the AAP did not acknowledge any of our letters. I personally wrote to all members of the AAP board. Not one wrote me back.  I took a great deal of time drafting these letters and revealed a lot of personal information, hoping it would make a difference but, sadly, it did not.

Apparently, AAP board members don’t care about the harm their policies are doing to children and their families.  The AAP has an agenda and I’m afraid that they will not stop until forced to via lawsuits and new legislation.

My letter below…..

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Dear AAP,

I am writing to you in regard to the Cass Review. The Final Report from the Cass Review was published on April 10, 2024. I am attaching it to this letter. I implore you to please acknowledge this important, independent, peer-reviewed, scientific report and its recommendations. Consequently, England’s National Health Service has closed their only youth gender clinic.

This issue affects me and my family personally. I am the parent of a child who had sudden-onset gender dysphoria at age 13. This out-of-the-blue gender/body dysphoria and self-diagnosis happened to her as a result of so many things including the following: middle-school angst, puberty, bullying, anxiety, depression, ADHD, self-harm, sexual assault, sensory processing disorder and an internet/social media addiction.

It was in 7th grade that she started using social media, namely Instagram, and spending more and more time online where she was introduced to many things including gender identity/transgenderism. In 8th grade she decided to start the year off as a new gender, “agender”, new name and new pronouns. She told her school, but did not tell me and her school kept it a secret while they socially transitioned her and used the new, fake name and pronoun. The school kept me in the dark because they assumed I was “unsafe”; that is how they describe a parent who they or the child thinks will not affirm this sudden, new identity. When I found out what was happening, I did not know what to do. I tried to find help for her, but the only help I could find was affirmation from the professionals (doctors, therapists, etc); affirmation of her self-diagnosis that she was born wrong or the doctor made a mistake assigning her gender.

Sadly, that is what is happening—these children are self-diagnosing due to a social contagion that is being spread online and in friend groups. In 8th grade, my daughter was in a friend group with three other girls, and all four of them changed their name, pronoun and gender. They also used the boy’s restroom and slept with boys on an overnight field trip. My daughter was being groomed online via transgender activists on social media platforms as to what to do and started demanding breast binders and testosterone.

The activists sent her free breast binders. I would not give in to anything that would permanently harm her. I decided to get an appointment with a mental health professional at the children’s hospital behavioral health department. Surely, they would do a neuropsych evaluation so that my daughter’s real issues (anxiety, depression, ADHD, self-harm, sexual assault, sensory processing disorder, school refusal and internet addiction) could be addressed. When we went to the appointment, we were seen by a nurse practitioner and she immediately affirmed my daughter as a boy and would not listen to me. This nurse practitioner prescribed Prozac for my daughter’s depression and told me that she wanted to recommend puberty blockers for my daughter, but that it was probably too late for that as my daughter was now 15. Then she wanted to refer her to the endocrinology department so that my daughter could be put on testosterone. I told her that my daughter was too young for us to make decisions that will affect the rest of her life. So then, the nurse practitioner said that if I did not go along with my child being transgender and being put on testosterone that she would likely commit suicide. I was so shocked that she actually said that in front of my daughter! I was speechless! Things got much worse for my daughter and our family after that appointment. I was constantly in fear of my daughter killing herself; subsequently, there were a few emergency room visits and an attempted suicidal overdose.

This current AAP protocol regarding gender dysphoric children is tearing families apart—it is pitting the child against the parent. I feel that although many medical professionals mean well, they are causing more harm than they realize when it comes to this transgender issue because it does not personally affect them, so they go along with what they think the “experts” say; however, this is experimental and there has been no followup on these patients nor has there been a published study of patient outcomes in the United States. You learn a lot about an issue when it affects you or your family. My husband and I love our daughter more than anyone. She is our only child. We ended up spending a fortune trying to keep our daughter safe from self-harm, suicide and off of testosterone. To do that we had to send her to private, expensive, in-patient programs because we could no longer trust most medical professionals we had been going to for help.

Despite my husband and my best efforts, our daughter, at age 18, went to Planned Parenthood and got testosterone on her first visit. (That is what happens when the child is socially transitioned—it almost always leads to medical transition.) Planned parenthood prescribed a high dose of injectable testosterone with a 6-month follow up. During that 6-month period she had a lot of health and mental health problems and ended up being taken to the emergency room. It was because of this medical emergency that bloodwork was done. It was discovered that she was in menopause at only 18 years of age! Her doctor said that the amount of testosterone in her system was more than a young, male body builder would have.

The way the medical establishment is responding to these gender confused young people like my daughter is not right to say the least. However, you and your colleagues at the AAP have an opportunity to make a change to help future gender dysphoric children who will be drawn into this just like my daughter was. All of us parents have very similar stories. I just wrote a brief synopsis, but it has been a long and painful journey for my family. My daughter is still depressed and is having more health issues due to the testosterone and being in menopause. It’s hard to watch her deteriorate, be in pain and be so unhappy and not be able to do anything about it. After all, many think that since the doctors are on board, it must be safe and life saving. When it comes to social and medical transitioning of children, we need for the AAP to please do the right thing.

Please reverse course and revisit this pediatric transgender issue and change the protocols on how these gender confused children are being affirmed as a different gender and then put on the path of medicalization with puberty blockers, wrong-sex hormones and surgeries. These children are too young to be self-diagnosing and too young to give informed consent to experimental treatments that are irreversibly harming and sterilizing them. How can a child or even a young adult consent to being sterilized? I hope the medical profession goes back to basics of their own Hyppocratic Oath. There needs to be better guidelines, evaluations and protocols to follow that are more thoughtful and careful because this is way too important and affects a generation of our children.

Sincerely,

Concerned Mom in Kentucky