Dan Bartkowiak: Reports on children experiencing gender dysphoria are just the tip of the iceberg
Is it abuse to experiment on children experiencing gender dysphoria with biologically altering, irreversible surgeries and drugs?
Globally, the curtain surrounding so-called “gender-affirming care” is being pulled back. Multiple countries now ban the procedures on children, with the UK banning puberty blockers earlier this year, citing “not enough evidence.” Here in the US, a group of 20 state Attorneys General is shedding light on this lack of evidence, calling it “abusive to treat a child with biologically altering drugs that have an unknown physiological trajectory and end point.” Former President Donald Trump is campaigning on the issue, outlining a plan to end the “chemical, physical, and emotional mutilation of our youth.”
A growing community of detransitioners – many of whom experienced “gender-affirming care” early in life only to regret those medical decisions – are speaking up. The Changed Movement points to thousands who have “experienced dramatic restoration” of their sexuality. Children like Chloe Cole, who at age thirteen was prescribed puberty blockers and at just fifteen years old had both of her breasts surgically removed, have had the medical community fail them and their families.
This evidence is why more exposure is necessary in a medical industry that is promoting and profiting off of these harmful procedures — including surgeries, cross-sex hormones, and puberty blockers — on vulnerable children.
The newly released Stop The Harm Database from the organization Do No Harm has cataloged so-called “sex-change” services at children’s hospitals and medical facilities in the United States between 2019 and 2023. They found nearly 14,000 children were given “sex-change” treatments, over 5,700 children had surgeries and $120 million was billed for these procedures on minors.
It’s clear that the experience of children like Chloe Cole is not an outlier. “The stats in this database represent thousands of kids who are being treated like guinea pigs for unproven, and sometimes dangerous, medical experiments,” says Cole about this first-of-its-kind database.
It should be clear that any medical professional who continues to experiment on a child with gender dysphoria or any hospital that allows these experiments is knowingly endangering the welfare of that child and violating their duty to protect the child’s well-being.
The sad reality is Pennsylvania’s medical community is one of the worst offenders of these harmful interventions on children., Two of the top twelve worst offending hospitals in Do No Harm’s database are from Pennsylvania: Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (#1) and UPMC Pittsburgh (#11).
What’s worse is that these numbers “are just scratching the surface of how widespread these practices truly are,” stated Do No Harm upon the database release.
In Right-To-Know requests filed by PA Family Institute with the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services, it is revealed that in 2015 there were a total of 107 children aged eighteen and under that received taxpayer-funded “sex reassignment and transition-related services and drugs” through Medicaid. In 2022, the number climbed to over 2,000 children. In 2015, children ages six to twelve made up just seventeen of those children. In 2021, the total was nearly 200. (Mind you, these totals are just through taxpayer-funded insurance plans like Medicaid.)
Children as young as four are starting this process of “sex reassignment and transition-related services and drugs” (terminology used by PA Department of Human Services). There are medical professionals in Pennsylvania like Dr. Nadia Dowshen, co-director of CHOP’s Gender program, who claims that “age is just a number” and has argued that there should be no lower limit for “top surgery,” admitting girls as young as fourteen have had their healthy breasts removed. Dr. Dowshen also lobbies for school districts to “develop and incorporate LGBT-inclusive curriculum.”
This is not health care. This is child mutilation. While we should find ways to show compassion to students in grade school that face challenges like gender dysphoria, treating any student as a guinea pig with experiments like puberty-blocking drugs and removing healthy body parts is not in any child’s best interests.
Thankfully, many states across the nation have taken action to protect children from being experimented on with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and irreversible surgeries. Disturbingly, Pennsylvania is not one of them. Beyond state laws, school curricula on sex education should be examined for any endorsement of these types of experimental procedures on children.
In Pennsylvania statute, child abuse is defined as intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly doing any of a list of infractions, which includes causing bodily injury, sexual abuse, and exploitation.
We are intentionally, knowingly, and recklessly experimenting on children with irreversible sexual cosmetic procedures, with taxpayers footing some of the bill. Adults must be held to account.
Dan Bartkowiak serves as Director of Communications for Pennsylvania Family Institute, a statewide nonprofit organization based in Harrisburg.
There would be rioting in the streets if this were practiced on chimpanzees. How dare we maul and deform our own children with this desperately wicked practice? Our current administration has no respect for our children; we see them trafficked, drugged, mocked for moral standards, aborted, taught complete lies in school. They are our future, and we’re killing them off in great bloody batches.