Ele Ludemann: First do no harm

If children had eating disorders it wouldn’t be ethical to help them starve.

If children were cutting themselves it wouldn’t be ethical to give them knives.

Any caring adult would do their best to get them the mental health help they need and any ehtical health professional would ensure they got it.

Why isn’t this done for children with gender dysphoria? Why are they treated with drugs and sometimes surgery without properly informed consent?

Leaked files from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) show how wrong this is:

. . . In the WPATH Files, members demonstrate a lack of consideration for long-term patient outcomes despite being aware of the debilitating and potentially fatal side effects of cross-sex hormones and other treatments. Messages in the files show that patients with severe mental health issues, such as schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder, and other vulnerabilities such as homelessness, are being allowed to consent to hormonal and surgical interventions. Members dismiss concerns about these patients and characterize efforts to protect them as unnecessary “gatekeeping.”

The files provide clear evidence that doctors and therapists are aware they are offering minors life-changing treatments they cannot fully understand. WPATH members know that puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries will cause infertility and other complications, including cancer and pelvic floor dysfunction. Yet they consider life-altering medical interventions for young patients, including vaginoplasty for a 14-year-old and hormones for a developmentally delayed 13-year-old.

The WPATH Files also show how far medical experiments in gender medicine have gone, with discussions about surgeons performing “nullification” and other extreme body modification procedures to create body types that do not exist in nature.

A growing number of medical and psychiatric professionals say the promotion of pseudoscientific surgical and hormonal experiments is a global medical scandal that compares to major incidents of medical malpractice in history, such as lobotomies and ovariotomies.

“Activist members of WPATH know that the so-called ‘gender-affirming care’ they provide can result in life-long complications and sterility and that their patients do not understand the implications, such as loss of sexual function and the ability to experience orgasm,” Shellenberger said. “These leaked files show overwhelming evidence that the professionals within WPATH know that they are not getting consent from children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults, or their caregivers.” . .

One of the most important guiding principles of medicine is first do no harm.

Why does this too often not apply when treating children who are upset and confused about their gender?

The United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) has banned puberty blockers for children.

Children who want to change gender will no longer be prescribed puberty blockers on the NHS.

Landmark guidelines issued on Tuesday said there is not enough evidence that the drugs are safe and from now on they should only be given as part of clinical trials.

Puberty blockers suppress the release of sex hormones that cause physical changes such as breast development or the growth of facial hair. They have been prescribed to hundreds of under-16s on the NHS since 2011 at the gender identity clinic run by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in north London.

A review of the Tavistock clinic in 2022 by Dr Hilary Cass warned that puberty blockers may “permanently disrupt” brain development and “lock in” children to an irreversible, life-altering path of cross-sex hormone treatment.

The new NHS clinical guidelines, issued following a public consultation, said: “We have concluded that there is not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of puberty-suppressing hormones to make the treatment routinely available at this time.” . .

Body identity disorder (BID) is considered a brain disorder:

Medical ethicists discuss the controversy about elective amputations of healthy limbs: on the one hand the principle of autonomy is used to deduce the right for body modifications; on the other hand the autonomy of BIID patients is doubted. Neurological results suggest that BIID is a brain disorder producing a disruption of the body image, for which parallels for stroke patients are known. If BIID were a neuropsychological disturbance, which includes missing insight into the illness and a specific lack of autonomy, then amputations would be contraindicated and must be evaluated as bodily injuries of mentally disordered patients. Instead of only curing the symptom, a causal therapy should be developed to integrate the alien limb into the body image.

What’s the difference between wanting a healthy limb amputated and wanting drugs to stop the normal development from child to adult and surgery to remove health body parts?

Encouraging and enabling children to undergo such treatment instead of giving them the mental health support they so obviously need ought to be considered malpractice, as it would be for anyone encouraging eating disorders or any other self-harm behaviour.

Sex is binary. No medical or surgical intervention can change that and any children who have gender dysphoria need mental health treatment not drugs or surgery.

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Ele Ludemann is a North Otago farmer and journalist, who blogs HERE - where this article was sourced.