(LifeSiteNews) — In the first installment in an investigative series exposing the multi-billion dollar transgender industry, Project Veritas revealed that gender clinics are working with patients as young as eight years old to start them on a path of sterilizing drugs and mutilating surgeries.
In the video posted to social media on Thursday, undercover reporters with the investigative outlet spoke to gender clinic employees in New York and Texas to find out whether they would begin transition processes for gender-confused children as young as eight or 10 years old.
The report is the first in a three-part series of investigative videos in which Project Veritas journalists spoke with professionals at 50 gender clinics across the nation. It’s also one of the group’s biggest reports since its widely publicized split with founder James O’Keefe.
Cross-gender hormones…with permanent effects…pushed on minors…by doctors supposedly looking out for their health…
Let that sink in @elonmusk pic.twitter.com/0IJaTBmTSp
— Project Veritas (@Project_Veritas) April 20, 2023
In one interaction, a woman identified in the video as Nora Scott, a licensed social worker at Dell Children’s Medical Center in Austin, Texas, told an undercover reporter that the center does “have patients who are starting” transgender interventions “as young as eight, nine.”
Describing young gender-confused children as “folks on the younger side,” Scott said the center has “a list of gender-affirming therapists that we can provide.”
“In regards to prescribing, that’s up to the prescribers’ discretion,” she continued. “They might just require a couple of appointments just to see; it might be appropriate after one.”
Scott said the prescription of puberty-blocking drugs is “not something that we want to gatekeep and require someone to come see us 10 times before it’s prescribed.”
In another recording, New York City Mount Sinai Adolescent Health Center’s Dr. John Steever, an adolescent medicine doctor, told a Project Veritas reporter that the center would prescribe puberty-blocking drugs to a gender-confused 10-year-old.
“I follow the WPATH guidelines, the World Professional Association of Transgender Health guidelines, and really what they would say is, the way to go at this age, age 10, would be something like a puberty blocker,” Steever said. “And that really stops puberty pretty quickly so that no further development of the secondary sexual characteristics happen. So, things like, there’s no real chest development. There’s no menstruation. Things like that.”
According to WPATH’s Standards of Care, “[a]dolescents may be eligible for puberty suppressing hormones as soon as pubertal changes have begun.” The association notes that “[s]ome children may arrive at this stage at very young ages (e.g., nine years of age).”
Observing that hormone drugs can have “permanent effects,” Dr. Steever said he would hold off on giving cross-sex hormones to a child until they reach early teenage-hood, at which point he said they’re able to “make a relatively informed decision,” despite the fact that 14-year-olds may not legally purchase alcohol or cigarettes, drive a car, vote, get a tattoo, or get married (in all but two states).
“When you then get to age 14, that’s when I’ll consider some, you know, cross-gender hormones,” Steever said. “Fourteen is a reasonable age. Most kids are mature enough to make a relatively informed decision.”
Project Veritas also spoke with Dr. Quentin van Meter, a board-certified pediatric endocrinologist and president of the American College of Pediatricians. Van Meter slammed gender interventions for young children, pointing out that the long-term effects are still unknown and that natural biological processes like puberty are good and necessary.
In the video, van Meter said that puberty blockers “are very cleverly designed to interrupt the pituitary gland signaling to the gonad, that would be the ovary or the testicle, to get them started.” He said the interruption of the natural progress of puberty takes “away something that is necessary and truly physiologic to that child. We don’t know if that can be recovered if it’s blocked in the middle of adolescence. There are no studies to show that is safe.”
“Puberty is not a disease, it’s not something you want to get rid of,” van Meter said.
Meanwhile, in a Zoom video obtained by Project Veritas and included in the investigative report, a pediatric endocrinologist at British Columbia Children’s Hospital expressed concern that children who opt to undergo gender transitions often don’t grasp the sterilizing impacts of their decision.
“We try to talk about it, but most of the kids are nowhere in any kind of a brain space to really talk about it in a serious way. That always bothers me, but you know, we still want the kids to be happy,” he said. “Happy in the moment, right?”
LifeSiteNews has extensively reported that transgender surgeries and drugs, in addition to asserting a false reality that one’s sex can be changed, are linked to serious permanent physical and psychological damage, including cardiovascular diseases, osteoporosis, cancer, stroke, infertility, and drastically increased instances of suicidality.
Despite this, in recent years rising rates of transgender identification have been met with celebration and adulation in mainstream culture, and rates of surgical mutilation for minors have spiked. In many public-school classrooms, young children are actively being encouraged to deny their biology and live as the opposite sex.
RELATED: ‘We were wrong’: Transgender clinic founder regrets her role in the mutilation of children
Meanwhile, Project Veritas’ Thursday video is among the nonprofit’s first investigative reports since its much-publicized split with O’Keefe.
As LifeSiteNews previously reported, O’Keefe last month announced the launch of a new journalistic venture, O’Keefe Media Group, after parting ways with the nonprofit he helped found. O’Keefe says he was forced out of Project Veritas by its board of directors, but the company has insisted it didn’t fire him and wants to see him return.