A medical doctor is poking holes in claims and research touted by the Department of Defense (DOD) to argue that children as young as seven years old can consent to sex change medical treatments, according to a statement sent to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
DOD researchers wrote in this month’s issue of the American Journal of Public Health that the department should publicly affirm support for sex change procedures for children of military families. The researchers said that young children can be involved in making their own medical decisions, but Stanley Goldfarb, chairman of medical watchdog Do No Harm and a board-certified kidney specialist, said that the rationale behind the argument is flawed.
“The idea that children have the capacity for truly informed consent over treatment with life altering therapies like puberty blockers, sex characteristic altering hormones, or surgeries flies in the face of parents’ and other adults’ life experiences with children,” he said in a statement provided to the DCNF. “Just because a child states that they understand the implications of gender transitioning does not mean that they can conceive of their future regrets.”
Levine praising ‘gender-affirming care’ for minors and claiming it will be fully embraced is wrong and must be countered.
There can be irrevocable harm being done to children by those pushing for these radical, ideologically driven treatments.https://t.co/SW8HHYQZ59
— Do No Harm (@donoharm) March 20, 2023
The researchers’ arguments is based on a British Columbia study that interviewed 21 participants between the ages of 14 and 18 that identified as transgender, Goldfarb said. He alleged that the interviewers were “fully invested in support of the concept of ‘gender affirming care’” and that it, therefore, was “no random study of the attitudes of children with gender dysphoria” but instead “propaganda.”
The researchers argued on behalf of expanding gender-affirming care for military-affiliated children in response to a slew of state legislation that aims to restrict sex change procedures for minors and limit athletic team participation and bathroom facility use by sex. They listed several reforms the department could take to increase treatment accessibility including using special funds to travel to states with more lax restrictions.
“Prior research has found that children can begin participating in their medical decision-making as early as age seven years with gradual increases in decision-making capacity, and adolescents prefer shared decision-making,” the researchers argued. “Furthermore, military-affiliated adolescents who initiate gender-affirming hormones continue their medication at rates similar to or higher than those of adults, reflecting a similar understanding and tolerance of the effects of hormonal therapy.”
This claim is “laughable,” according to Goldfarb. He pointed to a growing pool of “detransitioners,” people who reversed back to their biological sex after receiving sex change treatment, as a reason to not trust “the soundness of childhood decisions.”
“These physicians should examine the literature and face the reality that the reason that Finland, Norway, Denmark, and the U.K. have opted to severely restrict the use of puberty blockers and sex-characteristic altering hormones is that we have little if any evidence that we are not hurting more children that we are helping,” Goldfarb said.
The DOD did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
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