(LifeSiteNews) — A longtime cardiologist and professor of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Michigan warns that mounting scientific evidence, legal concerns, and public opinion should lead healthcare providers to cease providing so-called “gender-affirming care” for kids.
In a commentary penned for the Independent Women’s Forum’s IWFeatures, Dr. Venk Murthy argues that a recent decision by the University of Michigan Faculty Senate to resume cross-sex hormones, surgeries, and puberty blockers for patients under 19 years old “places our institution at odds not only with emerging international scientific consensus but also with broader public sentiment — and, crucially, with the precautionary approach now adopted by health authorities in several European nations, as well as our own.”
“Michigan Medicine’s pause on ‘gender-affirming care’ for minors was prudent, not only scientifically but legally,” wrote Dr. Murthy. A DOJ probe “reflects growing scrutiny of practices once promoted as unequivocally beneficial. While major U.S. medical organizations continue to endorse ‘gender-affirming care’ for minors, including puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, the evidence base for these interventions in children and adolescents is increasingly recognized as weak.”
Murthy noted the landmark 2024 Cass Review which found that “most studies backing ‘gender-affirming care’ to be of low quality, with insufficient long-term data on outcomes like mental health improvement, rates of detransition, or risks such as bone density loss, infertility, and potential cancer links.”
The Michigan cardiologist also referred to a comprehensive U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) report, “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices,” which found there are “significant, long term, and too often ignored or inadequately tracked” harm that is done by “puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical operations.”
“These interventions carry risk of significant harms including infertility/sterility, sexual dysfunction, impaired bone density accrual, adverse cognitive impacts, cardiovascular disease and metabolic disorders, psychiatric disorders, surgical complications, and regret,” the report also noted.
Contrary to the practices of Big Pharma and Big Medicine, which earn huge profits from the families of gender-confused or gender-distressed kids, the report, Murthy said, “emphasize[d] therapy as the most supported approach and aligns with international findings that most gender-distressed youth resolve their dysphoria naturally post-puberty when underlying issues are addressed therapeutically.”
READ: Wisconsin hospitals will stop mutilating gender-confused children due to Trump directives
Murthy explained:
As a cardiologist, I am particularly alarmed by the cardiovascular risks these interventions pose to developing young hearts. Cross-sex hormones, such as estrogen in biological males or testosterone in biological females, are known to alter lipid profiles, increase blood clotting, and elevate the risk of thromboembolic events, stroke, myocardial infarction (heart attack), and hypertension.
Multiple studies and reviews have documented these dangers: estrogen therapy may raise the likelihood of venous thromboembolism and ischemic events, while testosterone can worsen blood cholesterol and promote abnormal thickening of the heart muscle (cardiac hypertrophy). In adolescents, whose cardiovascular systems are still maturing, these effects could compound over a lifetime, potentially leading to premature heart disease—the leading cause of death worldwide.
“At a taxpayer-funded public university like ours, especially one in a purple state, faculty governance should reflect not just internal ideologies but responsibility to scientific evidence and the communities we serve,” said Murthy. “Michigan voters and families deserve assurance that the doctors who serve them at their public medical center do no harm and respect their views.”
Murthy concluded with a brutally honest truth about the current state of the healthcare industry.
“There’s another hard truth that the Faculty Senate members — many of whom are not doctors and are unaffiliated with the medical school — presumably did not consider: people no longer automatically trust doctors or academic medicine the way they once did,” declared Murthy. “Years of overreach, mixed messaging, and insistence on contested practices have left deep scars. When elite institutions charge ahead on weak evidence — especially on something as irreversible as medicalizing children’s gender distress — it confirms every suspicion that we’re more captured by ideology than we are committed to science.”
“Only humility will allow us to rebuild that shattered trust,” he suggested. “Anything less, and we’ll keep hemorrhaging the one thing medicine can’t function without: the public’s confidence.”
