4 times media, gov't promoted claims that puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones are safe for kids

By Brandon Showalter, Opinion writer and social commentator Thursday, March 04, 2021

4. 'Observational' NIH study, 8-year-olds approved for cross-sex hormones

In 2015, the National Institutes of Health awarded a five-year grant of $5.7 million in federal funds to several gender clinics across the U.S.

As The Christian Post previously reported, concerned parents who objected to these experimental practices being performed on their children petitioned the government to review the grant.

In 2017, doctors with concerns discovered through a FOIA request a progress report for a project titled "The Impact of Early Medical Treatment in Transgender Youth," in which the age for cross-sex hormones for youth participating in the study was significantly lowered to include pre-teens.

The document states under section F.2 that in order to capture the impact on youth being treated with GnRh agonists that recruitment "will be expanded to include those youth in Tanner 4 of development" and that the minimum age for the cross-sex hormone cohort inclusion criteria was decreased from 13 years old to 8 years old. The age decrease was to ensure that a potential participant who could be eligible for a cross-sex hormone based on Tanner Staging would not be excluded due to age alone.

Tanner staging refers to the various stages in human development in the endocrine system.

Mentioning the controversial grant in a March 2019 Heritage Foundation panel on the subject, Dr. Michael Laidlaw, an endocrinologist from Rocklin, California, noted that no blood test, genetic marker, or brain imaging scans can locate a "gender identity."

"There is no objective test to diagnose this, yet we are giving very harmful therapies on the basis of no objective diagnosis," he said.

Laidlaw wrote to the NIH outlining his concerns and received a letter of reply — obtained by CP — which asserted that the research being conducted was "observational." The reply-letter accepted as indisputably true that every participant in the youth cohort in the study is indeed transgender.

When asked to respond to the NICHD director's claim that the research grant was merely observational, the endocrinologist told CP it was "a distinction without a difference."

"It is the very same clinics providing the wrong sex hormones and blocking normal puberty who are also administering the surveys and conducting blood sampling. This would be akin to Nazi soldiers taking body temperatures of prisoners while dunking them in freezing waters for hours, and then SS doctors publishing the data on body temperature, but claiming they had no part in the experiment," he told CP in an earlier interview.

Scott Newgent, founder of Trans Educational Voices, a group that is contending against gender medicalization of children, emphasized the role that money plays in this issue.

“In sales, we talk a lot about sweet spots; the place successful salespeople must get to regularly achieve high sales numbers. Finding the right customers, having the right product, and creating the right selling environment or the ‘in’ product are essential. Currently, our society is in the sweet spot to sell the radical transgender agenda, and unfortunately, our children are paying the high cost,” Newgent said in an email to CP.

“A perfect storm has taken place, heightened by subservience to the almighty dollar ... hormone blockers are rendered eight times more profitable for pharmaceutical companies when they are prescribed to children rather than adults.”

Newgent, who lived as a lesbian for 25 years and has identified as trans for six and underwent several trans surgeries, hears from two to three trans-identifying people a day who want to help get the message out that medical gender-transition “is no place for children.”

“How do they know that? Because they’ve done it and know the true costs and consequences,” Newgent said.