The increasing politicization of care for young people with gender dysphoria is making it much harder, if not impossible, for doctors to provide the kinds of help necessary to ease kids through a particularly difficult period of their already-difficult teen and pre-teen years. Lives could be at stake, given the high incidence of suicide among gender-dysphoric youths. So for Republican politicians in Jefferson City, egged on by Missouri U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, to intervene in gender dysphoria medical care is to suggest that the only lives that matter are those of straight kids who have never questioned their sexuality.
The current controversy surrounds a Washington University youth transgender clinic at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, where a former staffer asserts that puberty blockers and hormone therapies have been prescribed by doctors without a thorough analysis of each child’s actual needs. In some cases, minors have been referred for gender-transition surgery. The whistleblower in this case, former case manager Jamie Reed, is a member of the LGBTQ community married to a transgender man. So it doesn’t appear that there’s a political ax to grind here.
“I left the clinic in November of last year because I could no longer participate in what was happening there,” Reed wrote in The Free Press. Instead of practicing a do-no-harm priority of care for patients, she wrote, “we are permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care.”
Public attention to this issue has been muddled by both sides. People are being asked to alter their vocabularies and grammar to accommodate those who reject standard pronoun usage. There are mental gymnastics required of anyone trying to understand situations like Reed’s: a gender queer person married to a person identified as one gender at birth but now identified as the opposite. Then there’s the likelihood that the statistically sharp increase in young people questioning their gender identities may be explainable in part by youthful experimentation than actual gender dysphoria.
Politicians appear to be exploiting the public confusion to assign blame and suggest nefarious motives. Pre-pubescent teens who are genuinely trying to transition, and who might resort to suicide if denied puberty blockers and hormones, don’t need politicians in Jefferson City telling them what they do or don’t feel and dictating their next medical steps.
At the same time, politicians can play a constructive role by mandating that psychological counseling of gender dysphoric children and their parents be a requisite interim stage before the introduction of life-altering drugs and hormones.
State lawmakers seem anxious to advance bills imposing restrictions as part of more than two dozen bills targeting the LGBTQ community. Given the lives at stake, the politicians would be wise to let an investigation by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey run its course rather than dictating a solution to a problem whose dimensions are still far from clear.
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