Pres. American College of Pediatricians: How Transgender Ideology Infiltrated My Field, Produced Large-Scale Child Abuse

Michelle Cretella, M.D.

Transition affirmation is the positive societal or group response to a person who is contemplating sex-reassignment surgery, or is merely displaying doubt in their gender as being their authentic one.  Basically, if 7-year-old Robert was to approach his parents and say, “Mommy, Daddy…I think I’m a girl,” transition affirmation dictates that the parents of that child immediately take little Robert to a clinic (one of more than 40 across the nation) where he will be treated to a host of “specialists in gender identity” who will proceed to advise the little boy that he is absolutely correct and that he is whatever he feels like he is, regardless of what his anatomy indicates.

Next, the specialists will guide Robert and his parents through a series of steps that will help little Robert to eventually attain the female gender he insists he is and make the final journey to the other side to the fanfare and full support of the transgender community.  These steps include controversial methods like prescribing puberty blockers, cross-sex hormone therapy, and finally sex-reassignment surgery.

Now what if I told you that there is proof that nearly 100% of children who insist that they are the opposite sex pre-puberty, end up accepting and living out the rest of their lives normal and healthy and embracing their actual birth gender?  What I’m saying is that there is a push right now in many of the prestigious medical societies throughout the world to forego allowing the child to naturally develop his or her own sense of self through puberty and adolescence which rights itself nearly 100% of the time, in order to instead steer them and their parents into a program and mindset that embraces medicines, therapies, and surgeries that often times leads to the culmination of depression and suicide.

Don’t believe it?  Michelle Cretella, a former pediatrician, and a long list of credits, has written a critique of the newest Regressive push to create a defenseless victim mentality throughout the population by targeting infinitesimally tiny minority portions of the community who suffer from gender dysphoria (a mental disorder, according to the AMA, that affects less than .03% of the population) and enabling those who cannot possibly make adult decisions to alter their lives in such a way as to be irreversible and ultimately deadly.

I speak as someone intimately familiar with the pediatric and behavioral health communities and their practices. I am a mother of four who served 17 years as a board certified general pediatrician with a focus in child behavioral health prior to leaving clinical practice in 2012.

For the last 12 years, I have been a board member and researcher for the American College of Pediatricians, and for the last three years I have served as its president.

I also sat on the board of directors for the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity from 2010 to 2015. This organization of physicians and mental health professionals defends the right of patients to receive psychotherapy for sexual identity conflicts that is in line with their deeply held values based upon science and medical ethics.

I have witnessed an upending of the medical consensus on the nature of gender identity. What doctors once treated as a mental illness, the medical community now largely affirms and even promotes as normal.

But transgender ideology is not just infecting our laws. It is intruding into the lives of the most innocent among us—children—and with the apparent growing support of the professional medical community.

As you can see, Dr. Cretella is qualified to give a measured opinion, and what she is insisting is that, just as in politics where Leftism has claimed a solid foothold through entitlement and victim ideology, they have also made great strides in influencing the medical community to the point where transition affirmation is gaining popularity.

Set aside the obvious point that this newest phenomenon concocted by the Left has created an industry that will blossom into a huge boon for the medical industry. Between the pharmaceuticals and therapy sessions, not to mention the surgical aspects of this (implants, drugs, sutures, equipment, insurance industry tag-alongs) as well as the initiation of dozens of new highly-specialized positions and technical jobs, this has the hallmarks of another juggernaut like dieting groups, health club memberships, and veganism.

Pediatric “gender clinics” are considered elite centers for affirming children who are distressed by their biological sex. This distressful condition, once dubbed gender identity disorder, was renamed “gender dysphoria” in 2013.

In 2014, there were 24 of these gender clinics, clustered chiefly along the east coast and in California. One year later, there were 40 across the nation.

With 215 pediatric residency programs now training future pediatricians in a transition-affirming protocol and treating gender-dysphoric children accordingly, gender clinics are bound to proliferate further.

Dr. Cretella insists that the clinics are pushing an ideology that embraces a mentality that is both unproven and dangerous.  It is this fact that is driving her and many of her colleagues to speak out in defense of children.  To continue to advocate for this ideology without evidence is why there is such a pushback from the medical professionals on these procedures and on transition affirmation itself.

Cited in the studies that show that gender dysphoria is a real and not perceived mental disorder, Dr. Cretella points to the “Twins Studies” that delve into the DNA research of identical twins.  Within the wondrous world of identical twins is a treasure trove of start-up information that helps set the baseline for any studies dealing with psychology and human behavior.  Because sets of identical twins receive identical genetic material from both the mother and the father, their sex, their hair color, eye color, etc. is always 100% identical.  In broad studies of transgenderism in identical twins, it was found that an astounding 72% of identical twins resolved their gender to be anatomically correct from birth, while 28% had a situation where one identified as the actual birth gender and the other did not, proving that the gender dysphoria is, in fact, a mental disorder.

Another point of fact was the study about gender dysphoria and puberty.  As noted above, if children are allowed to go through puberty, even identifying as the opposite sex, they will after puberty come around to the truth naturally, without therapies, without drugs.  However, this new transition affirmation approach is muddying up the waters and causing a significant dramatic increase in the number of children who are remaining focused on this dysphoria well after puberty.

Even the American Psychological Association’s Handbook of Sexuality and Psychology admits that prior to the widespread promotion of transition affirmation, 75 to 95 percent of pre-pubertal children who were distressed by their biological sex eventually outgrew that distress. The vast majority came to accept their biological sex by late adolescence after passing naturally through puberty.

But with transition affirmation now increasing in Western society, the number of children claiming distress over their gender—and their persistence over time—has dramatically increased. For example, the Gender Identity Development Service in the United Kingdom alone has seen a 2,000 percent increase in referrals since 2009.

The puberty blockers, for all intents and purposes, are the transition-affirming clinics safeguard against children “coming around to the truth of their gender” and naturally gravitating toward their birth gender.  These drugs will disallow a child to see the truth and continue to dysphorically identify with the opposite sex because their puberty is being sublimated.  Puberty is God’s way of bringing a child from innocence and folly into the world of realization and self-awareness.  These puberty blockers that the transition-affirming clinics insist on are the equivalent of telling an amputee that the phantom limb is still there.  It’s horribly cruel and fantastically immoral, yet here’s our medical community getting on board because the potential gold to be made is immeasurable.

But more than that, there is the terrible risks that accompany the use of this drug:

The authors note that there is some evidence for decreased bone mineralization, meaning an increased risk of bone fractures as young adults, potential increased risk of obesity and testicular cancer in boys, and an unknown impact upon psychological and cognitive development.

With regard to the latter, while we currently don’t have any extensive, long-term studies of children placed on blockers for gender dysphoria, studies conducted on adults from the past decade give cause for concern.

For example, in 2006 and 2007, the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology reported brain abnormalities in the area of memory and executive functioning among adult women who received blockers for gynecologic reasons. Similarly, many studies of men treated for prostate cancer with blockers also suggest the possibility of significant cognitive decline.

These puberty blockers are then the “gateway drug” to cross-sex hormones and that is an interesting and telling statistic.  Are you ready for this?

100% OF THOSE CHILDREN WHO ARE GIVEN PUBERTY-BLOCKERS TO ENABLE THE GENDER DYSPHORIA INTO POST-PUBERTY STAGE ARE THEN MOVED ON TO CROSS-SEX HORMONES!

What this means is that because puberty-blockers disenable the child from differentiating between pre-pubescent gender dysphoria (or sex confusion) and post-pubescent gender realization (coming to accept and embrace actual birth gender), they are naturally pushed forward to step two that involves the administration of cross-sex hormone therapy where boys are given estrogen and girls are given testosterone.

This practice is so foul and immoral as to be bordering on criminal.  Set aside the morality of this practice by the medical community for a moment and let’s look at the physical toll this takes on children.

From studies of adults we know that the risks of cross-sex hormones include, but are not limited to, cardiac disease, high blood pressure, blood clots, strokes, diabetes, and cancers.

Then, of course, we must include a debate, a conversation about how these small children, who are even able to vote or drive a car, are being put in the cockpit of an F-22 Fighter jet and told to make a decision to bomb a small settlement, in essence, make a decision on your life, little Robert, that will forevermore alter the entire aspect of your existence.

Scientific data show that people under the age of 21 have less capacity to assess risks. There is a serious ethical problem in allowing irreversible, life-changing procedures to be performed on minors who are too young themselves to give valid consent.

As for Lady Gaga and her little tirade about transgenders and their penchant for committing suicide, she wasn’t far off the mark.  She was absolutely right when she said that 45% of these individuals are prone to taking their own lives.  As Dr. Cretella points out, this is indicative of a mental disorder, rather than the result of bullying or discrimination, as studies have found.

In addition, contrary to the claim of activists, there is no evidence that harassment and discrimination, let alone lack of affirmation, are the primary cause of suicide among any minority group. In fact, at least one study from 2008 found perceived discrimination by LGBT-identified individuals not to be causative.

Over 90 percent of people who commit suicide have a diagnosed mental disorder, and there is no evidence that gender-dysphoric children who commit suicide are any different. Many gender dysphoric children simply need therapy to get to the root of their depression, which very well may be the same problem triggering the gender dysphoria.

Adults who undergo sex reassignment—even in Sweden, which is among the most LGBT-affirming countries—have a suicide rate nearly 20 times greater than that of the general population. Clearly, sex reassignment is not the solution to gender dysphoria.

And here is Dr. Cretella’s wonderful closing argument:

The crux of the matter is that while the transition-affirming movement purports to help children, it is inflicting a grave injustice on them and their nondysphoric peers.

These professionals are using the myth that people are born transgender to justify engaging in massive, uncontrolled, and unconsented experimentation on children who have a psychological condition that would otherwise resolve after puberty in the vast majority of cases.

Today’s institutions that promote transition affirmation are pushing children to impersonate the opposite sex, sending many of them down the path of puberty blockers, sterilization, the removal of healthy body parts, and untold psychological damage.

These harms constitute nothing less than institutionalized child abuse. Sound ethics demand an immediate end to the use of pubertal suppression, cross-sex hormones, and sex reassignment surgeries in children and adolescents, as well as an end to promoting gender ideology via school curricula and legislative policies.

It is time for our nation’s leaders and the silent majority of health professionals to learn exactly what is happening to our children, and unite to take action.

We are in a truly historic time in the United States, when truth and imperative, which have been masked and blocked through political correctness for so many decades, are finally emerging as the frontrunners in news and media.  The internet has been an incredible way for information to be shared and for arguments to be made.  But the one thing that the internet has insured is that we who may not agree with Leftist ideology, now have a platform and a voice to air our concerns and offer our opinions.

Dr. Michelle Cretella is one of a growing number of professionals who is setting about the task of stating truth above all and taking action through her commentary.  She requires help.  We need to share this article and we need to give a voice to the majority in this country who don’t hold the Fake News Industrial Complex (FNIC) in the palm of their hands.

Source:  The Daily Signal