The Patriot Post® · The Tragic Aftershocks of 'Gender Affirming' Care
What happens when gender-confused children who have been persuaded either by the Internet, their schools, their psychologists, or their physicians that they are transgender discover in their late teens or early 20s that they were lied to? That they cannot change their gender and, in fact, they prefer their biological gender to the facsimile they came up with for themselves?
We are starting to see a litany of these older teens and adults coming forward with their testimonies, and they are going after the medical industry that led them down the veritable garden path. They are called “detransitioners” and they are the “lucky” ones.
“Gender affirmation” treatment and the medications and surgeries that go with it are big business. As The Daily Wire reported last year: “The industry surrounding transgender surgeries is expected to reach $5 billion by the end of the decade. According to a recent report from Grand View Research, the sector saw a $1.9 billion valuation last year and is forecast to expand at a compound annual growth rate of more than 11% through 2030.”
To provide Big Medicine with the cover needed to keep raking in the dough, transgenderism was adopted by the cultural Marxists and progressive feminists (but we repeat ourselves). Transgenderism became part of the intersectional coalition and therefore a protected political class. Soon no one was allowed to question the movement, and medical professionals bolstered by the LGBTQ activists began their experiments on young girls and began to manipulate their parents.
Some of these detransitioned young women who are coming forward with lawsuits were put on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones after their first visit to the mental healthcare provider. One was only 12 when they started messing with her body chemistry.
Chloe Cole, the first of these brave women to come forward and sue her abusers in the medical profession, was convinced to do a double mastectomy at 15 years of age. Since her lawsuit, a dozen more people have come forward to sue the unethical physicians and mental health professionals who took advantage of their fragile state and youthful ignorance, convincing them to harm their bodies.
Hitting Big Medicine right in the pocketbook might prove the key to knocking the whole castle down. The Washington Times, paraphrasing one of the lawyers representing three detransitioners, wrote that “the medical community would one day look back on medicalized gender transitions with the same contrition as lobotomies and the overprescription of opioids.”
LBGTQ activists love to claim that the number of detransitioners is relatively small, though the studies they use to back up these claims only follow “trans”-identifying patients for a year after their treatments have started. Larger studies like those conducted in Europe (no shock there) found that many regret their choices and, even more frightening, their suicidality does not diminish even after all the “affirmation.” Some studies even found that as many as 20% of people who decide they are the opposite gender detransition. That number may become even higher as other women hear about their peers’ disillusionment with transgenderism and that ideology.
The Rainbow Mafia, left-wing media, progressive politicians, and leftists abhor the existence of detransitioners. These brave souls (mostly women at this point) are living proof that gender ideology is a big fat lie. Their abusers are aided and abetted by activists, media, and politicians, and they deserve better than that. As National Review so aptly notes, “Detransitioners now deserve advocates whom they never had during their gender-identity crises.”
Detransitioners deserve justice. Those of us with voices and platforms need to elevate their plight and put an end to the madness that is gender ideology. Because in the interim, young children — many of them girls — are heading down the same horrible path.