Research Finds Parents Should Question Their Kids’ Gender Dysphoria Before It’s Too Late

June 27, 2017 | Published first in The Federalist

It is one thing to compassionately treat those with gender dysphoria. It is another thing entirely to cause gender dysphoria.

On the heels of the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which declared a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, liberal activists quickly turned their gaze towards the “T” in LGBT. In just two short years, the transgender movement has morphed from a concern over discrimination and violence against those suffering from gender dysphoria to the normalizing and mainstreaming of the trans lifestyle.

From the cover of National Geographic and the pixels of “I Am Jazz” to the classrooms of our most tender youth, activists have pushed an agenda of affirmation: proclaiming that girls who identify as boys are boys, and vice-versa. At the same time, the Left has sought to squelch opposing viewpoints by branding skeptics hateful transphobes.

But Tuesday’s New Atlantis piece, “Growing Pains: Problems with Puberty Suppression in Treating Gender Dysphoria,” hopes to change the discourse—or lack thereof. In “Growing Pains,” co-authors Dr. Paul Hruz, Dr. Lawrence Mayer, and Dr. Paul R. McHugh provide the most comprehensive critique to date of the gender-affirming model of treatment for children suffering from gender dysphoria and expound on the many physical and psychological concerns that approach portends.

In her NRO article, “Puberty Suppression and FMG,” Mona Charen provides a veritable Cliff’s Notes of the physical and psychological dangers the authors detail at length in “Growing Pains.” “Doctors are prescribing powerful drugs to interfere with something – puberty – that is not a disease,” she writes, concluding: “Before resorting to dire and irreversible ‘treatments’ on otherwise healthy children, we ought to remove our own cultural blinders.”

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