Students discuss the controversy over surgery and hormone treatment.
Editor’s note: In this Future View, students discuss gender dysphoria and “gender transition” procedures for children under 18.
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Not the Only Solution
We’ve all heard children say things like “Look at me, I’m a robot” or “When I grow up, I’m going to be Captain America.” We smile when children say these things, because we know that children live in a world of imagination unhindered by reality. Why then does the medical community and culture at large think it is acceptable for children to make irreversible health decisions?
“Gender-affirming” healthcare is the only area of medicine where patients make their own diagnosis and prescribe their own remedy. Meanwhile, physicians frighten parents with warnings of their child’s suicide while convincing parents that there are no long-term effects to puberty blockers and hormone treatments. The tragic fact is that puberty blockers and gender procedures effectively sterilize children and cannot be reversed. Not only are the medical principles of informed consent and parental involvement for minor patients often ignored, but gender transition for children rejects alternate causes and remedies. Since most cases of juvenile gender dysphoria are resolved by the time of puberty, physicians should stop pushing gender transition on minor patients as the only solution.
—Evalyn Homoelle, Hillsdale College, politics
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We’re Normalizing Confusion
Enabling children to undergo such surgery is a terrible form of child abuse. In old editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, “gender identity disorder” was listed instead of “gender dysphoria.” That was before activists made gender and identity political. Proponents of these surgeries argue that gender is separate from biological sex, and thus, in order to feel more like themselves, underage patients should be allowed to undergo surgeries and hormone injections that alter their natural biological development.
Allowing society to normalize this confusion is destructive. We let kids play make-believe, and we encourage them to dream and be imaginative. It is our job as adults, however, to teach them as they grow older what is real and what is not. We must ensure we don’t let the young lose touch with reality. We must stop treating gender as a social construct and treat people who suffer from dysphoria properly.
—Ely Bloch, Yeshiva University, law
Approved – Obey
