Q. Is it wise to treat a pre-pubescent child with puberty-blocking hormones, or a teenager with cross-sex hormones? What about sex reassignment surgery?
Fact: “Gender confusion is often temporary. (Dr. Ken Zucker) Only a minority of children under the age of about 12 who cross-identify will continue to see themselves as transgender after puberty. (Francine Russo, “Transgender Kids, “Scientific American Mind Jan/Feb 2016, p. 29)
Fact: No one is tracking the evidence on puberty-blocking intervention. “We are doing major interventions and we have shockingly little idea what the outcomes are. You get the sense that what we have is not so much a rational approach to a psychosocial issue as a radical ideological experiment.” (Alice Dreger)
Concerns:
• “These treatments are neither simple nor benign. They may, among other things, retard maturation, suppress your growth or render you sterile. All else being equal, it’s better to avoid long-term hormone therapy and major surgery that removes a lot of tissue.” (Dreger)
• Can an adolescent even begin to understand the implications of a treatment that means he or she can never have their own biological children?
• A child’s gender issue may be a symptom of family problems (Dreger) or a reaction to peer influences (Psychologist Laura Edwards-Leeper, Pacific University).
• Some doctors who want to advocate for children with gender dysphoria can lose sight of the bigger picture.
Q. Is it possible for a biological male to be surgically transformed into a female, and vice versa?
Fact: “Sex is an objective biological fact that is determined genetically at conception by the allocation of X and Y chromosomes to one’s genome, immutable throughout one’s lifetime, and not a social construct arbitrarily assigned at birth or changed at will.” Christian Medical and Dental Associations
