Sanity returns as feds condemn transgender treatments for kids

The United States has finally acknowledged the truth: Sex-change treatments endanger children.

On Thursday, the federal Department of Health and Human Services issued the world’s most comprehensive report on the topic to date — a definitive 400-page evidentiary and ethical takedown.

Transgender activists have long relied on the support of the US government — or at least its silence — to protect their claimed medical and moral legitimacy and continue treatment on children as young as age 8.

Now they have nowhere to turn but the fringe, which is where their ideology arose and ought to return.

The most remarkable thing about this report is that it took so long.

Other nations, especially in Europe, have conducted their own reviews of the evidence in recent years.

They have broadly concluded that treatments like puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and sex-change surgeries have more documented risks than potential benefits for children.

Last summer, for example, Great Britain all but banned the use of puberty blockers — the first and foundational treatment in child sex-change procedures — after the publication of a National Health Service report by Dr. Hilary Cass.

Yet the US government has refused to grapple with the evidence, much less admit it, until now.

In the meantime, at least 14,000 American children have been subjected to these interventions, as our organization has documented.

The HHS report notes from the start that medical practitioners have a “professional and ethical obligation to protect and promote their patients’ health.”

That obligation strongly counsels against hormones and surgeries for children, since, as the report notes, there’s little evidence of benefits of sex-change treatments — but plenty of proof of their harm.

The evidence shows that sex changes for children can lead to infertility, sterility, cognitive problems, cardiovascular disease, metabolic disorders, mental-health disorders and more.

And, as the report also notes, additional suffering may soon come to light — because existing studies fail “to systematically track and report harms.”

We already know, as the report makes clear, that child sex changes are happening amid a broader mental-health crisis among kids.

Psychotherapy, not experimental drugs and invasive surgeries, is necessary to treat underlying mental issues like anxiety and depression.

Activists have mischaracterized psychotherapy as “conversion therapy,” the HHS report notes — yet Britain and the Scandinavian countries now recommend these non-invasive treatments as the primary intervention.

The unnamed authors don’t mince words about what medical professionals should — and shouldn’t — do in cases of gender distress.

“When medical interventions pose unnecessary, disproportionate risks of harm, health care providers should refuse to offer them,” they instruct, “even when they are preferred, requested, or demanded by patients.”

Failing to heed this guidance, they write, threatens the foundations of medicine itself.

Honest medical practitioners and experts have known from the beginning that child transgender treatments are risky and largely experimental.

Yet honesty was never the goal for many activists, as the HHS report also shows.

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which publishes the most widely used child treatment guidelines, “suppressed systematic reviews its leaders believed would undermine its favored treatment approach.”

WPATH’s guideline developers also “eliminated nearly all recommended age minimums for medical and surgical interventions in response to political pressures.”

This is the definition of putting ideology ahead of evidence.

Now the HHS report must shape government action.

It provides the necessary scientific support to implement President Trump’s January order to “take all appropriate actions to end” treatments that endanger children.

That could include ending Medicare and Medicaid coverage of such treatments — and perhaps private health-insurance coverage as well.

The Office of Management and Budget has sought to block federal research and education grants to institutions that perform child sex-change treatments, and the report adds weight to that effort.

The findings should also spur National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to release the results of its decade-long study on the effects of puberty-blocking drugs on children.

That study’s author, prominent transgender activist Johanna Olson-Kennedy, has refused to release the data — while admitting they didn’t show promised mental-health improvements.

NIH should now fund new, non-biased studies to analyze the effects of sex-change treatments on those who received them as children, including the rates of regret and the prevalence of de-transitioning.

Thursday’s report proves that our federal government is finally willing to put medical science ahead of gender activism.

Washington has sided with ideologues for too long, giving cover to the notion that sex changes for children are consequence-free and medically necessary.

In fact, the proven harms outweigh unproven benefits.

By finally speaking truth to the activists’ power, the United States has taken the most important global step yet in protecting children from transgender ideology.

Dr. Stanley Goldfarb is chairman of Do No Harm, where Dr. Roy Eappen is senior fellow.