WEST LAFAYETTE, Indiana (LifeSiteNews) – Purdue University quietly shuttered a controversial program designed to train gender-confused individuals to convincingly speak as members of the opposite sex.
The College Fix reported that until recently, Purdue’s Department of Speech, Language, & Hearing Sciences maintained a “Gender-Affirming Voice & Communication Training Program,” billed as helping so-called “gender diverse and trans individuals seeking to adapt their voice and communication in a way that is safe and authentic, resulting in communication patterns that are congruent with their gender identity.”
The Fix reported that, in response to inquiries for various details about the program, clinical assistant Professor Lydia Kruse said the program “is no longer active, and we are not accepting clients or conducting services in this area.” Kruse did not elaborate as to why, but the program’s web page now redirects to an error message.
“A person’s sex is a biological fact, not something voice training, hormones, or surgery can alter,” responded Corrine Youngs of the Indiana Family Institute. “Communication disorders following stroke, traumatic brain injury, childhood speech delays, infant feeding and swallowing issues, and swallowing disorders in the elderly are core, universally recognized needs that Hoosiers depend on speech-language pathologists for, (which) should come before a specialized program built around helping someone present in a way that differs from their biological sex.”
“Keeping public universities from promoting gender ideology and sex-rejecting procedures requires Indiana leaders to be vigilant about oversight,” added Nathanael Blake of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “Rules and regulations are unlikely to be enough if state leaders are not dedicated to ensuring that they are followed.”
A large 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.
In 2024, National Health Service (NHS) England’s landmark Cass Review found that “gender medicine” is “built on shaky foundations” and that “(w)hile a considerable amount of research has been published in this field, systematic evidence reviews demonstrated the poor quality of the published studies, meaning there is not a reliable evidence base upon which to make clinical decisions, or for children and their families to make informed choices.”
In April, a study of “all under-23-year-old gender-referred individuals between 1996 and 2019” in Finland (2,083 people) found that those who had gone through “gender transitions” had “markedly higher psychiatric morbidity (other mental health issues) than controls before and after referral, with treatment needs often persisting and even intensifying after medical interventions.”
Many oft-ignored “detransitioners,” individuals who suffered under “transitioning” before embracing their sex, 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.”
“Gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with a 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”