The battle of transgender rights seem to accelerate every day. One day we’re talking about letting people use what ever bathroom they want, the next we’re debating over whether 14-year-old boys should be allowed to take puberty-blocking implants and estrogen supplements.
In a column in Sunday’s New York Times, Jack Turban, a research fellow at Yale School of Medicine, talks about the case of “Hannah” a “14-year-old girl, clad in leggings and an oversize T-shirt, with long brown hair that she curls around a finger. She was also born a boy.”
Rather than treat Hannah like any other confused 14-year-old, doctors decided to medicate the child with the full transgender cocktail. Even Turban admits that “ten years ago most doctors would have called this malpractice.”
Citing new data that shows such treatments let children “thrive,” Turban makes Hannah a model child for Generation Fluidity. Instead of going through puberty normally and making any big decisions at 18, doctors inserted “a hard rod just beneath [Hannah’s] skin [that] releases a drug that turns off the brain cells that would otherwise kick off puberty.”
If that doesn’t sound dystopian enough for you, Turban wants doctors to go even farther: Begin full cross-sex hormones at 14. Only then, Turban posits, will transgender kids stop “suffering the stigma of starting puberty years after their classmates.” Right, because turning 14-year-olds the opposite gender is totally a way to make high school easier.
Turban acknowledges “flawed studies” that find “roughly 80 percent of prepubescent children ultimately change their minds about being transgender.” Never mind that, would you really want to risk forcing a kid to live as his biological gender (as most parents do) and possibly “put her at risk for depression and perhaps suicide?”
If such scare tactics don’t nauseate you enough, there’s now a “gender clinic” at Yale “that provides puberty blockers and hormones.” Learning about these treatments is now mandatory at most medical schools and you can be sure that merely questioning the wisdom of these brand new treatments will earn you the label of an anti-science bigot.
The Times’ latest column continues its tradition of normalizing the enabling of parents turning their kids the opposite gender. Earlier this month, the paper profiled Isabel Rose, a local real estate heiress who recently came public with the fact that her 8-year-old son is transitioning to a woman.
Social progress never felt so wrong.
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