Detrimental Effects of Gender-Affirming Care: Why Some European Countries Have Decided to Halt it for Minors

Yet, the U.S. continues as usual, despite devastating reports from the leaked WPATH files, the unassailably thorough Cass Review, and detransitioners themselves.

While some European countries are ending or severely limiting "gender-affirming care" (puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and sex-reassignment surgery) on minors based on research findings and minors’ traumatic experiences, the U.S. appears to have no such qualms.

Jillian Michaels, on her podcast, “Keeping It Real” hosts one of my favorite investigative journalists, Michael Shellenberger. They discuss the complexities (economics, deception) and potential dangers of gender-affirming care. (They also discuss corruption in the media in the first half of the interview—something near and dear to me as I have written about it here, here, here, here and here.)

Shellenberger discusses his publishing of the WPATH files¹, a controversial 241-page report (link posted at end of article) that “refers to a collection of leaked documents and messages from the internal chatboard of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), an organization that provides guidance on treating gender dysphoria. The files…have sparked controversy and debate within the medical and transgender communities.”—Brave browser’s AI, Leo

(I included a 35-page WPATH Highlight section at the end of this article.)²

What makes the WPATH files so controversial is that the leaked documents and videos clearly show that the “authorities” know that they are creating patients for life with these minors and acknowledge that they are not truly providing “informed consent”; the parents and children are not told explicitly what the harmful results can be if the child partakes in “gender-affirming therapy”.

At a time when some European countries are pausing or ceasing the prescribing of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and sex-reassignment surgeries for minors, the U.S. unfortunately, continues to double down.

The exploration of this topic with Jillian and Michael is both engaging and disturbing; I have included Jillian’s Apple podcast and YouTube episodes. The excerpts I include are from the podcast’s transcript; other than deleting extraneous words and repetitive phrases and adding bold text, the excerpts are verbatim. (The asterisks (*****) between paragraphs denote a deletion of at least one paragraph.)

YouTube video is 1:23:47; gender-affirming care segment starts at 42:28.

Podcast is 1:27:37 (includes ads); gender-affirming care segment starts at 44:45.

If you would like a taste of the discussion, below is a 7-minute clip:

EXCERPTS FROM THE FULL DISCUSSION:

Jillian (J): So WPATH is about gender-affirming care. I don't believe this conversation has anything to do, correct me if I'm wrong, with adults that decide they want to transition. The focus here is on children that are being given off-label cancer drugs to block puberty, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries to change their body.

**********

Michael (M): I think people are perfect the way they're born and we should affirm that. I think that we see a lot of young people with anxiety disorders, a lot of kids on the autism spectrum and a lot of kids that are gay who are persuaded that they would feel better if they changed their gender and that they can do that through drugs and surgeries. I think there's a couple of problems there.

The first is that there's really no evidence suggesting that they will feel better over the long term if they do the drugs and surgeries. We also know that we don't allow…permanent physical changes. We don't think that's possible to give your informed consent.

So everybody knows the Hippocratic Oath, which is do no harm. But there's another really important one, which is that you have to consent to medical procedures or your parents have to, and it has to be informed. Minors are not capable, children and adolescents are not capable of deciding that they don't want to have kids, that they're not capable of deciding that they wish to be sterilized for life or potentially lose significant sexual function.

So there's just a lot about the so-called gender-affirming care that isn't what people said it was. And I think the WPATH files, which were the internal discussion board files of this main gender medicine organization, they revealed that the people doing the, [giving] the drugs, doing the surgeries, that they knew and know that the kids and the parents don't understand that there's this consequence of lifelong sterility or loss of sexual function.

We ended up doing a full report, it took us almost a year, that had the files, but then also had a 70-page introduction that went through the Best Available Science. That report has now been really validated by the British government, which had a pediatrician come out with a report and the Cass Review³ and they've now banned puberty blockers nationwide, and the conservative government did that, but the new Labour Party government, which is their left-wing government, they came in and affirmed that they were going to maintain the complete ban on puberty blockers.

**********

J: And I end up watching it [Tucker Carlson’s show], and it's with this gentleman, this guy, Chris Moritz, I believe, who starts talking about Trans Inc, and all of the money Big Pharma is making on these drugs.

https://x.com/tuckercarlson/status/1709689853661913465?s=46&t=igvgk7hInoQaJZLA2rA7vg

And it's almost a trillion dollar business, I think, across the board. And I'm like, okay, wait, what is happening here? This is insane, is this really going on?

The fact that these children, they have lasting health effects of this. Of course they do, their teeth are cracking, their bones are snapping, their brain's not developing properly. You're interrupting puberty.

Their brain…this is the most alarming. If you wanna get older, and you wanna make these transitions to your body, by all means, it's your body. But when the brain is developing, and they're telling us that it's, oh, it's reversible.

Oh, no, don't worry, this is nothing. This is totally reversible. Cut to…all these countries pull back, as you mentioned.

The UK pulls back, Finland pulls back, Sweden pulls back, right? All these countries are like, uh-oh. The evidence seems to be overwhelming that maybe we should chill out on this for a while with kids and really take a look at the data.

But in the US, we doubled f***ing down. And the way we did it was the WPATH.

**********

M: So it stands for the World Professional Association of Transgender Health, but it's not a true medical or health organization in the sense that it's not run by people that are really qualified or scientists. It's really run by activists. And so that comes out in the files.

And so what's so shocking about the files, because it's the internal discussions that somebody leaked to us or some bodies leaked to us, it just shows them sort of making this up as they go along. The story, the official story that WPATH tells is they say we're science-based and evidence-based, and we're making... Yeah, we're the authority.

One of the things, for example, is that someone would get somebody who they're in their 20s or 30s and they start to want to have kids and they go back to their doctors and the doctor's like, you can't have kids because you did the drugs and surgeries. And it's devastating because they didn't know when they were adolescents that they would want to have kids. I mean, to be fair, a lot of people, a lot of us didn't know that we wanted to have kids when we were adolescents.

[Y]ou would start to see one of the dynamics internally in the [WPATH] discussions is that somebody would come and they'd say, you know, I've got this patient, they also have autism or they also seem to be psychotic sometimes. And then you would see these more activist types in the conversations being like, why are you gatekeeping? Why are you putting obstacles in the way of giving them drugs and surgery?

**********

J: But what is alarming to me is twofold. So the first question is why is this growing at an exponential pace? Like what's the narrative? What's the rhetoric? Who's putting the propaganda out in the world?

The Human Rights Campaign which is another activist group for LGBTQ plus rights… And now they've got this health equality index score where they go around and they give these scores to institutions based on how they treat the gender-affirming care issue. And if you push back on gender-affirming care, you get a low HEI score and that's very bad.

And if you look at the very bottom of who supports this, it's Pfizer.

M: Yeah, and Gilead and other big drug companies.

J: Exactly. Then you've got this guy Chris Moritz outlining this monster industry and it has a compound annual growth rate of 10%. It is literally billions upon billions.

It's like just one drug I think was almost a billion dollars, AbbVie's Lupron, was almost a billion dollars.

M: The puberty blocker.

J: Yes. And these kids are patients for life as Callie Means will talk about. It's very lucrative.

You're on these drugs for the rest of your life. These surgeries go on forever…

**********

M: They're [detransitioners] dealing with all these problems right away. These are the people that decided that they thought they were trans and then they detransition and they're coming back and they're just psychologically wrecked and they're going to their doctors and they're being like…what have I done and then the doctors are just struck with this incredible cognitive dissonance and this culpability and they can't cope either because they've done this terrible thing.

So they start to invent this whole language. The key word that they invent is they go, it's a gender journey…

So we say it's lifelong medicalization. They say it's a gender journey.

Maybe you're something different and maybe you change your mind. And well, but it doesn't go back. One of the things when you meet the young women that thought that they were men or boys and then they take the testosterone, their voices are still there.

They're deeper, more gravelly male voices. Many of them have removed their breasts. You know, you can do breast implants, but your breasts are gone.

You're not going to breastfeed children.

Below, a 9-minute video of detransitioner Chloe Cole’s journey.

More videos of detransitioners et al: https://www.youtube.com/@IndependentWomensForum

**********

M: I was explaining this to somebody about the surgeries. And they were just like, Mike, that hardly ever happens.

J: Well, it was hardly because there have been tens of thousands of children just since “Irreversible Damage” [Abigail Shrier’s book: subtitle “The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters”] came out in 2020 that were transitioned. In America. Tens of thousands.

M: When you think of the Tuskegee experiments, which is where they deprived the treatment of syphilis to black men, it's one of the greatest medical scandals. Nobody says, well, it wasn't that many people.

If it's a medical or the lobotomies, you don't kind of go, but it wasn't that many people. You go, that's wrong. You shouldn't do medical experiments like that.

So the idea that it didn't affect many people, it's a way to not have to deal with it because it's so distressing. I mean, it's so dark.

J: You called it a modern day lobotomy.

M: It's worse. It's worse because it's so many more people.

**********

M: And there's these clinics, as you know, where you go into the clinic and they don't do a proper evaluation…and then everybody gets puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. And so…they're not turning people away…

[I]t's just like a pill mill, as they used to say.

J: That's one of the exact problems that the Cass Review [an independent review commissioned by NHS England to examine the delivery of gender identity services for children and young people in England; see footnote] pointed out, is that there could be autism, or there could be this, or there could be trauma in the background. And you're just after two sessions in some cases, oh, here we go, let’s make these life-altering changes.

M: There was this idea that to convert men into women, that it's just very simple, and you just convert the male genitals into female genitals, doesn't work like that at all. It's an open wound. And so to maintain the pseudo-vagina, as it's known, you have to insert something to keep it open.

Otherwise, the body will naturally treat it like a wound and seal it up. And so this was so shocking, the role of the media, because the media is complicit in this. It enabled it.

**********

J: And when I tell you your kid's going to commit suicide.

M/J: Well, that's just the narrative.

J: Doesn't the data not support that? I was under the impression of course, the opposite, that there's more suicide in kids that have in fact been transitioned.

M: My understanding is that if you really look at the data, it's not enough data to make a generalization either way. But there's definitely higher rates of suicidal ideation among kids that also identify as trans. But the idea that you take the drugs and surgeries and then somehow your risk of suicide goes down, that's definitely false.

And that's been debunked. But it's also blackmail. It's obviously psychological blackmail.

**********

M: You know…just think about the problems that could occur when you're messing around down there, what they call bottom surgeries euphemistically, lots of problems, lots of infections. You know…it's just very hard. I mean, I'm in touch with a lot of detransitioners and it's very, very hard.

At first I thought we need the detransitioners to really lead the reform movement, but a lot of them, they just aren't comfortable being public and you can understand why. They're really struggling psychologically. So I would say there's physical problems, but the worst stuff I think is just really psychological and really the regret.

**********

M: Most things are not medical problems for most of human history. We didn't have these elaborate pharmacopias to treat these things. So the enabling, the coddling, the sense in which everyone should be the entitlement, that I shouldn't have to have negative emotions or I shouldn't have to have pain.

It's, I think, at the root of both the opioid epidemic and at the heart of this gender medical mistreatment scandal.

J: I think it then gets exploited though by Big Pharma…co-opt the narrative…buy off the doctors, buy off the institutions of trust. And it is this perfect storm.

**********

M: I can't believe that we're at the point where we're even having to talk about protecting puberty…

Indeed.

FoxyHeterodoxy (Debra C) is a former high school teacher and counselor presently taking time to explore next steps until an epiphany occurs. With this Substack, she is committed to curating and correcting the misinformation pablum spouted by corporate media on topics such as COVID, the border crisis, "safe & secure" elections, vaccines, transgenderism, climate "crisis", Trump, homelessness, government caring about us, et al, ad nauseam, ad infinitum. She is a wife, mother of three grown children, and dog mom to Cocoa, 14. You can find her on X, Rumble, Instagram and Gettr—though she needs to post more on the latter two.

1. WPATH Report and Files

2. 35-Page WPATH Highlights (some disturbing images on last pages)

3. Cass Review: Final Report