Pills, Surgeries for ‘Trans Kids’ Are Dangerous—and Permanent

By AFP Staff

So-called “gender affirming care,” the medical standard today for gender dysphoria, pushes confused children toward drugs and surgeries. Studies have shown, however, that these treatments are dangerous and damage the body, and can even worsen mental illnesses, such as depression, anxiety, mania, and suicidal thoughts.

The truth is, no one really knows just how many kids in the United States are transitioning and have been pushed by medical authorities onto medications such as cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers or into surgeries including mastectomies for girls and castration for boys as young as 13, though estimates place it in the thousands.

While the U.S. for-profit healthcare system still advances dangerous medications and surgeries for troubled children, European countries such as Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and the UK have mostly banned these procedures, noting in multiple studies that there is no evidence that puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries help kids suffering from mental illness.

Thanks to the major scientific reviews conducted in Europe, experts do know just how dangerous these hormones and surgeries can be and refute the lies put forth by leftists that once a child stops taking drugs, their bodies revert back to normal.

Far-left activists in league with greedy doctors have repeatedly lied about a type of medication that gender clinicians prescribe to arrest puberty, claiming that drugs like Lupron simply “pause puberty” for children while they figure out their gender. In reality, critics of puberty blockers argue correctly that there is no data to support these claims. In fact, it now looks like puberty blockers permanently stunt kids, leaving them physically, mentally, and sexually underdeveloped. In other words, the normal, natural processes children’s bodies go through to mature into adulthood are stopped permanently and, even if a child goes off the medications, key milestones are lost as the hormones that develop the body and brain are never produced.

Other known side effects of puberty blockers include loss of bone density, brain swelling, liver damage, and vison loss. There have even been cases of people in their 20s today suffering from osteoporosis as a result of taking puberty blockers in their teens.

Cross-sex hormones are just as hard on growing bodies. According to experts, girls who take testosterone can suffer uterine and ovarian atrophy, ovarian cysts that require surgery, heart damage, incontinence, male pattern baldness, increased aggression, and unsightly hair growth on faces and other parts of their bodies that never goes away. Boys who take estrogen suffer gynecomastia, depression, increased suicidal thoughts, mood swings, bodily disfunction, joint pain, swelling of hands and feet, and chronic rashes.

The surgeries being pushed by activists are no less dangerous.

A mastectomy is a major surgery that can have all sorts of side effects, including terrible scarring, infection, and even death. Genital surgeries are worse, with men, women and children who undergo them reporting multiple types of horrendous outcomes such as infections, incontinence, and other side-effects that cannot be adequately described in a family newspaper.

Leftists working with unscrupulous doctors are lying to families that these treatments are safe and temporary. States are correct to follow Europe’s lead and ban them until more studies can be done to evaluate whether, even in the most extreme cases, the risks are worth it in the end.