Top Pediatrician Says Pushing Transgender Ideology on Kids Is 'Child Abuse'
A top American Pediatrician says transgender ideology has "infiltrated" her field, and is responsible for "large scale child abuse" for what it's teaching children and parents.
"Just a few short years ago, not many could have imagined a high-profile showdown over transgender men and women's access to single-sex bathrooms in North Carolina," Michelle Cretella, M.D., president of the American College of Pediatricians, wrote in a commentary for The Daily Signal on Monday.
"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," she added.
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Cretella referred to her 2016 peer reviewed article, "Gender Dysphoria in Children and Suppression of Debate," which warned that professionals who speak out against gender transition therapy for children find themselves "maligned and out of a job."
The American College of Pediatricians president said that doctors once treated gender identity issues as a mental illness, but now many in the medical community promote transgenderism as "normal."
She criticized the transition-affirming view that holds children who "consistently and persistently insist" that they are not the gender they were born with are innately transgender.
Cretella said that such a view leads parents to put their children on puberty blockers, to give them cross-sex hormones, eventually leading to genital reassignment surgeries.
The pediatrician warned that despite the acceptance of this movement in the media, plenty of institutions and professionals in the field disagree with what she described as a "deeply flawed narrative."
Cretella then listed what she said were eight different factual statements that counter the transition-affirming view, which can be read in full in the The Daily Signal article.
Among them, she notes studies that prove that no one is born "trapped in the body of the wrong sex," and that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones carry dangerous health risks.
"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," Cretella stressed.
"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," she added, insisting that all this creates "institutionalized child abuse."
Earlier in June a sepearate report written by three well-respected medical experts and scholars also questioned decisions that place children under "radical" and "experimental" puberty-blocking hormone therapy.
"Psychologists do not understand what causes gender dysphoria in children and adolescents, or how to distinguish reliably between children who will only temporarily express feelings of being the opposite sex from children whose gender dysphoria will be more persistent," states the report, titled Growing Pains: Problems With Puberty Suppression in Treating Gender Dysphoria, published by quarterly journal The New Atlantis.
"Until much more is known about gender dysphoria, and until controlled clinical trials of puberty suppression are carried out, this intervention should be considered experimental," it adds.
The experts further warned that regardless of good intentions by physicians and parents, "to expose young people to such treatments is to endanger them."
