(LifeSiteNews) — The far-left Washington Post supports a Trump-ordered review’s conclusion that research does not support “transgender” interventions for youth.
The opinion piece, jointly issued by the seven members of WaPo’s editorial board, contrasts with the stance of a recent WaPo piece that said the Health and Human Services (HHS) review was “described as poor-quality research.”
Instead, WaPo’s Sunday opinion piece argues that the HHS review commissioned by President Donald Trump “makes a legitimate case for caution that policymakers need to wrestle with.”
“The HHS document concurs with other systematic reviews, including Britain’s Cass Review report, that the existing research is inadequate to validate medical interventions for gender dysphoric youth,” the WaPo editors wrote.
They pointed to problems with current research highlighted by the HHS report, including interference with study results by pro-transgender groups. For example, the HHS found that the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) “effectively blocked … completed research — including critical evidence appraisals — from being developed into publishable manuscripts.”
In another similar instance, the director of the gender clinic at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles told The New York Times that “she had delayed publishing the results of an NIH-funded study she conducted in part because she feared that its results would be ‘weaponized.’”
The WaPo editors also acknowledge that there are “ethical quandaries involved” in altering the sexual development of minors,” and that minors “might not be mature enough to give fully informed consent,” a huge understatement regarding harmful procedures that cause drastic and permanently life-altering changes affecting marriage and reproduction.
However, the newspaper’s editorial board does not go so far as to condemn transgender procedures outright but concludes by calling for better research, as if the HHS report is inconclusive.
The executive summary of the HHS report is not so ambiguous but points out that “trans” interventions carry the risk of “significant harms,” noting that “health authorities in a number of countries have imposed restrictions,” including the U.K.:
… the “gender-affirming” model of care includes irreversible endocrine and surgical interventions on minors with no physical pathology. 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. Meanwhile, systematic reviews of the evidence have revealed deep uncertainty about the purported benefits of these interventions.
A significant body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80 percent of children suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that “transition” procedures fail to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Many oft-ignored detransitioners attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion in favor of “transitioning.”
