But the healthcare profession could be doing much more to address the problem, a family values advocate said on Washington Watch Friday.
When it comes to the issue of gender dysphoria, previously known as gender identity disorder, some medical professionals and organizations have long pushed medications and surgeries as the answer.
Now the Trump administration says otherwise in an HHS report backed by nine independent healthcare professionals.
"The report was of course dealing with the transgender or rather with gender dysphoria and adolescence in children," said Admiral Brian Christine, MD, assistant secretary of health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, on Washington Watch last week.
"We wrote this original report, and then we reached out to a group of nine scientists, physicians, researchers, to give their opinion on this report," Christine continued. "What they overwhelmingly agree with is that treating these vulnerable children, children with gender dysphoria, treating them with hormones, injections, surgeries that remove body parts and even mutilate these children, this all does not have sound science backing it up."
The report was originally published in May. Earlier this month, HHS released the names of the nine healthcare professionals who reviewed the report.
They include: Evgenia Abbruzzese, Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine; Alex Byrne, PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Farr Curlin, MD, Duke University; Moti Gorin, PhD, MBE, Colorado State University; Kristopher Kaliebe, MD, DFAACAP, University of South Florida; Michael K. Laidlaw, MD, Michael K. Laidlaw MD, Inc.; Kathleen McDeavitt, MD, Baylor College of Medicine; Leor Sapir, PhD, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research; Yuan Zhang, PhD, Evidence Bridge.
Some noted groups like the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) declined invitations to review the report.
AAP previously stated it was “deeply alarmed” by the report’s findings.
“For such an analysis to carry credibility, it must consider the totality of available data and the full spectrum of clinical outcomes rather than relying on select perspectives and a narrow set of data. This report misrepresents the current medical consensus and fails to reflect the realities of pediatric care,” the group said.
Young people may be led to a transgender lifestyle for a number of reasons ranging from psychiatric to environmental, Dr. Jennifer Bauwens, a senior fellow with Family Research Council, told show host Jody Hice.
Now, too many medical associations are hurting young people by not addressing the root causes of gender dysphoria.
“Some of these medical organizations have really put a clamp down on any kind of ingenuity that would take place on actually addressing the real issues that children have with this kind of identity distress is what we could frame it as.”
Bauwens praised HHS for giving professionals on both sides of the issue a chance to respond.
“That’s actually how science works, right? Good science says let's debate this, let's look at the evidence and see where it leads us, and if it's a good intervention, then we should be applauding the evidence and we should look to replicate it. It doesn't mean that that's the end of the scientific inquiry.”
The absence from the HHS report of many of these groups is telling.
“If you have an intervention that's so great, you should want to go out there and defend it.” Instead, “you see them walking away, taking that opportunity and scrapping it,” Bauwens said.
