Are gender treatments for minors harmful or not?

The WMS mouths pre-packaged words but does not answer the question.

Medical terminology is highly technical and precise because clarity is a matter of life and death. The careless misuse of terminology can kill a patient just as surely as the sloppy surgeon who nicks an artery. That is why medical societies and health boards exist. They work to hold medical practitioners to the exacting standards that differentiate a surgeon from a thug with a knife.

The Cowboy State is no longer the Wild West where snake-oil salesmen hawk their unsafe and ineffective concoctions for a quick buck. Wyoming law does not allow the practice of medicine without a license. Medical training and licensing boards are supposed to protect people from flim-flam artists who string together impressive-sounding medical terms to obfuscate their empty claims.

The spring issue of Wyoming Medicine, the journal of the Wyoming Medical Society, does just the opposite. It contains an essay titled, “Gender-Affirming Care.” The author, Kelly Etzel Douglas, has a degree in photography and communication, but not in medicine, and it shows.

Her opinion is long on technical jargon, but short on precision of meaning. Particularly, it is filled with passive phrases, like “gender identification” and “assigned at birth,” that play a shell game with the agent behind the action. Sadly, we have grown accustomed to this murky language.

But, thankfully, Etzel passingly mentions the central point in her opening paragraph. By mentioning the north star, she reoriented us all to the guiding principle of medicine: Primum non nocere, “First, do no harm.” She wrote: “Legislators sponsoring the bills (SF 111 and SF 144) sought to control what they worried would harm children.”

A score of lawmakers sponsored legislation that would have prohibited “any procedure, drug, other agent or combination thereof that is administered to intentionally or knowingly change the sex of [any] child [under the age of 18]” (SF 111).

It is fair to say that these legislators worried that the removal of a healthy or non-diseased body part or tissue” by “castration, vasectomy, hysterectomy, oophorectomy, metoidioplasty, orchiectomy, penectomy, phalloplasty and vaginoplasty” from pubescent kids would be harmful (SF 144). They worried that giving kids prescription drugs to stunt their growth deliberately and make them sterile could violate them in irreparable ways.

Once this question is raised, it demands an answer. Do these medical treatments harm kids, or don’t they? You cannot un-ask the question. You can’t even begin to talk about “health care” until you have asked it. But the 1,600-word opinion of the Wyoming Medical Society remains mum about it.

Here are five facts that the society should have addressed.

First, body parts—once severed and incinerated—cannot be rebuilt by any magic or medicine known to man. Chemical treatments can never be “reversed” for the simple reason that you cannot turn back time. Children whose developing organs are denied the proper hormone balance during puberty will never “catch up.”

Second, “There's a 100-percent failure rate for sex-change operations.” Last July, Wyoming’s at-large representative, Harriet Hageman asked Jennifer Bauwens, PhD. to affirm or deny this. The clinical specialist in treating injured children replied, “That’s right, you can’t change your sex.”

Third, since 1980, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) advised that these procedures not be done to minors. Then, in 2012, it suddenly reversed course. This was recently documented by the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit which upheld similar laws in Tennessee and Kentucky in Williams v. Skrmetti (pp. 4-6). Today, many nations are either questioning the WPATH’s 2012 guidance or rejecting it outright.

Fourth, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), at its August 3, 2023 board meeting, “authorize[d] a systematic review of evidence” with regard to these procedures. While the same press release “reaffirms” the WPATH policy that it unquestioningly adopted in 2018, at least it has cracked open the door to science.

Finally, the Wyoming chapter president of AAP, Dr. Andrew Rose, M.D., testified that there are no sex-change surgeries going on in Wyoming. Although he did not say why, and nobody thought to ask him, it was presented as though that were a good thing. It seems fair to conclude that Wyoming’s hospitals and pediatricians disapprove of such “-ectomies” being performed on children.

Perhaps, someday Wyoming’s Pediatricians and Medical Society will answer the central questions:

1.     Is the amputation of healthy tissue from juvenile bodies doing harm, or not?

2.     Is the deliberate disruption of normal endocrine activity in children safe, or unsafe?

It's perfectly reasonable for citizens and lawmakers to call for a moratorium on procedures that have obvious contra-indications. Certainly, all medical practitioners agree to that! If these “-ectomies” and potent drugs are, in fact, harmful to children, people in their right minds should never permit them to be done. And if they don’t harm anyone, no freedom-minded person would suggest laws prohibiting them.

The most pressing question, therefore, is why the WMS and the WAAP are so reluctant to give a plain answer. Stop with the posturing and tell us plainly: Do these procedures harm people, or not?

Photo: Andrew Rose, M.D., President of the Wyoming chapter of AAP