It's perfectly legal for doctors to set confused ten-year-old children on a track to remove healthy genitals
From "Sex-change therapies on children 'beyond the pale" by Pete Chagnon, on OneNewsNow, 4/23/2008
Children's Hospital Boston, a world-renowned center for pediatric healthcare, is being criticized by a Massachusetts-based pro-family group for offering sex-change therapy to patients as young as ten years old.
The Boston Globe recently published an article on Dr. Norman Spack, who last year started a new clinic at Children's Hospital that, among other treatments, performs sex-change therapy on "transgendered" children. The Gender Management Service Clinic, as it is called, defines that group as "patients with no known anatomic or biochemical disorder who feel like a member of the opposite sex."
In the Globe article, Spack details how he prescribes hormone therapy to halt puberty in children as young as ten years old, and then uses further hormone therapy to change children to the sex of their desire. Spack also lauds how he changed one transgendered child who was "destined to be a 6-foot-4 male" into a 5-foot-10 girl.
. . . Spack was asked by the Globe interviewer to identify the most difficult ethical issue he faces in performing these treatments. His response: Telling a 12-year-old that they will probably be infertile for the rest of their life.
To read all of the above article, CLICK HERE.
Update (5/19/08) from Fox News:
“Treating these children with hormones does considerable harm and it compounds their confusion,” said Dr. Paul McHugh, University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at John Hopkins University. “Trying to delay puberty or change someone’s gender is a rejection of the lawfulness of nature.”
McHugh said gender reassignment for children harkens back to the dark ages, when choir boys were castrated to retain their high-pitched voices. "It’s barbaric,” he said.
Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, a legal charity affiliated with the late Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, says that transgender disorder is a mental disorder, not a medical one, and that it should be treated with behavior modification, not hormones or surgery.
“Just as you don’t give liposuction to an anorexic, you don’t do sexual reassignment surgery on men who think that they are women and vice versa,” Staver said.
“At some point in childhood," McHugh said, "many children role play as the opposite sex, but it is a social, not a medical issue.”
Still, some think transgender medical therapies for children, which have been used for many years in Europe, Asia and Australia, may soon gain more acceptance in the U.S.
“Most medical professionals know very little about transgender treatments for children, so I do grand rounds at hospitals to educate them,” said Stephanie Brill, co-author of “The Transgender Child,” which will be published in June. “The doctors are very receptive, so I believe that we will see transgender medicine become much more prevalent over the next decade.”
