Top Pediatrician: Transgender Ideology Is Child Abuse

You are not signed in as a Premium user; you are viewing the free version of this program. Premium users have access to full-length programs with limited commercials and receive a 10% discount in the store! Sign up for only one day for the low cost of $1.99. Click the button below.

See All Plans

DETROIT (ChurchMilitant.com) - Doctors and mental health professionals are speaking out against the promotion of sex changes as a legitimate therapy for children confused about their gender identity, while states are making it illegal for them to seek help with a talk therapist.

Church Militant spoke with Dr. Michelle Cretella, president of the American College of Pediatricians (ACP), who has seen the effects of transgender ideology firsthand. Cretella says "the transition-affirming protocol is child abuse."

She says it is "devastating" to learn that increasing numbers of young women are already detransitioning from a sex change they had in their teens, and they only now realize that each of them "is a woman with a scarred chest who is most likely sterile and facing a host of unknown physical and psychological risks from taking almost 10 years of daily testosterone."

The ACP published "Gender Ideology Harms Children," urging a rejection of "all policies that condition children to accept as normal a life of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex."

"Facts — not ideology — determine reality," it asserts.

Cretella says, "Although Boston Children's Hospital began coaching children into transgenderism in 2007 under the direction of Dr. Norman Spack, I did not become aware of this protocol until 2011, when a lesbian couple was featured widely in the news as choosing to rear their son as a girl."

In a press release titled "Chemical Castration — Not the Best for Children," Cretella explains why she was "horrified" to learn children were being subjected to this experimentation:

Physicians and therapists who embrace hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery for children promote a political agenda not scientific advance. This is obvious once the euphemisms are shed: Chemical castration and the surgical mutilation of children is not 'therapy.' It is cold, calculated, institutionalized child abuse at the hands of those charged with healing.

In her commentary published in The Daily Signal, Cretella summarizes the years of research that proves "gender identity is malleable, especially in young children." She says the American Psychological Association's (APA) Handbook admits that prior to acceptance and promotion of transition-affirming protocols, 75–95 percent of prepubertal children outgrew their gender distress "after passing naturally through puberty."

Tragically, when puberty blocking drugs are followed by cross-sex hormones in young children, they become sterile and unable to ever have a biological child. Cretella explains that children under 21 are also not as able to assess risks as adults, so allowing permanently life-altering protocols on a minor raises "serious ethical problem(s)." This is without noting that the use of cross-sex hormones in children increases the risks of significant and life-threatening medical conditions, including mental impairment and cancer.

Additionally, she notes that most children on blockers also go on to take cross-sex hormones. She says this "suggests that the transition protocol itself may lead children to identify as transgender."

Reparative Therapy for children distressed by their same-sex attractions has often been demonized by gays, speaking out against the process. They claim they were shamed by therapists or subjected to electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) or electric shock therapy in a process they call "torture." But doctors are objecting that such claims are false.

Church Militant spoke with Dr. Laura Haynes, a licensed Christian marriage and family counselor, who explained that ECT must be administered by a physician and is "only and rarely used" to treat severe depression.

"I know of no therapists in our national organization (ATCSI) who are behaviorists or use electric shock or aversive methods," she clarified.

The gay lobby is actively working to ban reparative therapy, which helps rid people of unwanted same-sex desires, and has already done so in five states and numerous cities. Ex-homosexual David Kyle Foster of Pure Passion Media says the horror stories reported "are often concocted and/or exaggerated by liberal activists and the media and almost always date back many decades before much of anything was known about how to help the homosexual."

Cretella argues that studies of identical twins prove there is a "minimal biological predisposition" for transgenderism. She says "innate gender identity — the idea that "feminized" or "masculinized" brains can be trapped in the wrong body from before birth — is a myth that has no basis in science."

Cretella told Church Militant, "We must urge the silent majority of parents, grandparents and health professionals to speak out. We must urge our leaders to question the authority of the so-called experts and to demand an end to this massive dangerous social experiment that is already having devastating effects upon our young people."

Have a news tip? Submit news to our tip line.

We rely on you to support our news reporting. Please donate today.