Friday May 18, 2007
Boston Children’s Hospital Opens “Transgender” Children’s Clinic
Will reportedly offer the treatments to children as young as seven years old
By Gudrun Schultz
BOSTON, Massachusetts, May 19, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A new clinic at Children’s Hospital Boston is offering hormone treatment to young children identified as “transgender” to facilitate eventual surgery for a gender switch, according to a report by MassResistance May 17.
Led by endocrinologist Dr. Norman Spack, the Gender Management Service Clinic is the first U.S. clinic to initiate medical intervention for healthy children on the basis of a “transgender” identification. A 12-year-old German boy who began receiving puberty-blocking hormone treatments last winter in preparation for sex-change “transition” surgery was believed to be the youngest child to receive the treatment at the time.
The Boston clinic will reportedly offer the treatments to children as young as seven years old, according to researcher Ari Taube for MassResistance.
Hormone treatment of pre-pubescent children is intended to prevent normal development of gender characterization in order to ease eventual surgical procedures to complete a change of gender, which can take place once the child is about 16.
On a MassResistance radio report, Taube emphasized that transgender procedures can only achieve the outward appearance of the opposite gender.
“It’s important to point out that simply because one undergoes mutilating surgery and decides to administer to themselves the hormone of the opposite gender, doesn’t actually make you that gender. It is surgery but it doesn’t actually turn a girl into a boy. The chromosomal differences remain.”
Dr. Spack has acknowledged in the past that only about 20 percent of children who express gender confusion continue to express that confusion throughout adulthood, Taube pointed out.
“You’re giving authority to a seven, eight or nine year old to determine what gender they want to display.”
The treatments are an experimental procedure using hormones that can cause an alarming list of adverse effects, including spasms and bloody mucus from the nose, Taube stated. Estrogen treatments increase the risk for later development of breast cancer, and taking hormones of the opposite sex render transgender teens infertile. As well as suppressing normal sexual development, the hormones act to retard male growth process to ensure a more “female” body type.
“It’s ghastly, it’s really scary,” Taube said.
Dr. Spack’s interest in transgender issues has included association with bondage and sadomasochistic groups—he presented a workshop at the Transcending Boundaries conference in Worcester last November, organized by PFLAG and co-sponsored by the New England Leather Alliance.
See the MassResistance Radio report:
http://www.massresistance.org/media/audio/tran_doc_051007.m3u
Read Children’s Hospital Boston statement on Gender Management Clinic:
http://www.childrenshospital.org/views/april07/new_clinic_addresses_intersex_and_gender_issues.html
To contact Children’s Hospital Boston:
300 Longwood Avenue
Boston, MA 02115 USA
Phone:
617-355-6000
617-355-0443 (TTY)
See related LifeSiteNews coverage:
Boy, 12, Given Questionable Sex-Change Therapy after “Diagnosed” as Transsexual
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2007/jan/07012902.html
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