(LifeSiteNews) — The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has released a major new report warning about the dangers of so-called “gender-affirming care,” infuriating pro-LGBT groups.
On Wednesday, the agency published its long-awaited peer-reviewed study building on a previous report issued in May that looked at young persons who suffer from gender confusion.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January seeking to restrict “sex-change” surgeries for persons under 19 years old. “The blatant harm done to children by chemical and surgical mutilation cloaks itself in medical necessity,” the order read.
The newly released report is titled “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices.” Among other things, the study finds that 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 notes.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsed the study’s findings while denouncing the medical establishment for “malpractice.”
READ: Trump HHS: ‘Transgender’ Biden official Richard Levine ‘betrayed vulnerable families’
“The American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics peddled the lie that chemical and surgical sex-rejecting procedures could be good for children,” he said in a statement. “They betrayed their oath to first do no harm, and their so-called ‘gender-affirming care’ has inflicted lasting physical and psychological damage on vulnerable young people. That is not medicine – it’s malpractice.”
A growing number of hospitals and medical professionals have been scaling back treatments for children who are confused about their gender. The University of Michigan, Yale Medicine, Kaiser Permanente, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, UChicago Medicine, and Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C are just a few of the medical systems across the U.S. that have either eliminated or have begun limiting puberty blockers and other drugs for minors.
At present there are approximately 2.8 million Americans 13 years of age or older who identify as “transgender.” Generation Z has the highest among all generations of Americans, with roughly 7.6 percent identifying as “LGBTQ+.”
Aside from Kennedy’s report, an already large body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious risk. Studies find that more than 80 percent of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide.
“Gender-affirming” physicians have been caught on video and in email admitting that they pushed the treatments despite knowing they were dangerous. A 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health revealed Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor saying outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”
The HHS noted that it invited the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society to contribute to the report but that both organizations declined to participate.