Are Pediatricians Choosing Politics Over Parents?

It was recently reported that the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) began working with transgender activist groups, such as the Human Rights Campaign and the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH), to push child sex changes nationwide, choosing politics over parents.

Emails obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation show that AAP and the transgender groups discussed ways that doctors might “circumvent” state bans on “gender reassignment” procedures and hormone therapies for children.

Half the states in the country have laws banning or restricting pediatric sex change. These sex change bans exist for several common sense reasons including that changing one’s sex is chromosomally impossible, the procedures are experimental and subjecting children to what amounts to little more than medical mutilation is child abuse in the name of medicine.

“Internal AAP communications from July 2023 show members strategizing ways to provide sex change interventions to children living in states that have banned the procedures, including using telehealth to access hormones from out of state providers,” the Daily Caller reported.

The AAP is the largest pediatrician professional organization in the country, representing 67,000 doctors. The communications were with the AAP’s Section on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Health and Wellness (SOLGBTHW).

This group, which requires an additional fee to join, is a group within the AAP that provides the organization with expertise and education on LGBT issues. The group also allows health professionals who are not pediatricians, such as registered nurses, psychologists, and social workers, to join as an affiliate member.

In one email thread a doctor asks the group how to circumvent state bans: “I would love a breakdown of what states still allow Telehealth into their states, and if that could circumvent the [Tennessee] ban.”

The AAP has already filed an amicus brief against the Tennessee child sex change ban with the U.S. Supreme Court for an upcoming case.

Another email talked about how Planned Parenthood Illinois offers transgender hormone therapy via telehealth. It is available to anyone 16 and older regardless of their zip code.

One email from the AAP section chair, Dr, Christopher Harris, even raised concerns that the discussions of trying to circumvent laws might be risky, although he noted, “I love this activism from Section members.”

What the AAP doing is not medicine. It is providing a forum for sick doctors to victimize children as subjects for social experimentation.

The Cass Review looked at the evidence supporting pediatric sex change and found that even the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) Standards of Care, which are used as the basis for much of the guidelines in transgender medicine fell short.

“[WPATH] has been highly influential in directing international practice, although its guidelines were found by the University of York appraisal process to lack developmental rigour,” the Review found. “Early versions of two international guidelines … influenced nearly all the other guidelines.”

Europe pioneered transgender care, but some of the countries have since started backing away from child sex changes because of the Cass Review and evidence that shows that nearly all children who pursue a change in gender regret it. But the damage done from surgeries and hormones cannot be fully undone.

We give doctors a great responsibility in guiding medical care. Many doctors take their medical ethics seriously and are worthy of our trust.

However, the organizations that are representing doctors have allowed themselves to be politicized, making decisions for the good of a political agenda, not for the good of medicine and certainly not for the good of the patient.