Sterilizing Children

Dr. Jeremi Carswell, the director of the Gender Multispeciality Service at Boston’s Children’s Hospital, gave a presentation entitled “Puberty Blockers and Hormone Therapy for Gender Diverse Youth and Adolescents” at the Advancing Excellence in Transgender Health (AETH) conference in 2020.  A video of her talk is available as a webinar from the National LGBTQIA+ Health Education Center.

Remember when you read what follows that this is coming not from a conservative critic of transgenderism but from a leading practitioner of gender transition treatments, addressing her peers in the industry.

Dr. Carswell begins by describing how the number of patients has “skyrocketed” in recent years.  While puberty blockers alone may be  “reversible therapy,” when they are followed by cross-sex hormones, as is done in the vast majority of cases, there are “risks/consequences” that need to be talked about with the patient.  She specifies:,

Fertility. Another huge topic, right? Because if you are giving something that actually shuts down estrogen or shuts down testosterone entirely, you’re going to stop, either if you had already been kind or producing sperm or eggs, then, um, you’re going to stop doing that. And if you never started, you’re not going to advance the gonads to be able to do that.

So, for my population, when we have, um, say, like a 12 or a 13-year-old testicle-bearing person, who hasn’t really had too much puberty and we’re talking about, okay, we’re going to put in a [puberty] blocker. Then you’re going to start on estrogen, guess what. You don’t have any sperm, and you’re not going to get them because we reverse everything. That’s a big deal. And that is something you must have the conversation about.

Note the language:  “a 12 or a 13-year-old testicle-bearing person.”  That is to say, a boy.  Who will never be able to grow up to be a father.  Nor, of course, a mother, despite being called a woman.  Conversely, an ovary-bearing person.  That is to say, a girl.  Will never be able to grow up to be a mother.  Nor, of course, a father, despite being called a man.

A girl goes through puberty at a younger age, as early as 8.  These drugs are given at the very onset of puberty, so, according to an article in favor of these treatments, they can begin at that age, though it quotes another doctor who says that most of the patients he puts on puberty blockers are between 10 and 12.

Yes, we hear of “men” being mothers and “women” being fathers, but these are adults now and would not have had the puberty blocking drugs as children or the surgery that often but not always follows, mutilative surgery of the reproductive organs not being considered necessary to a person’s gender identification.

But why not take that next step?  As another specialist in this field–Dr. Tandy Ave, the director of Stanford’s Pediatric and Adolescent Gender Clinic–says, after making the same point as Dr. Carswell, referring to his male patient as “she,”

However, if as soon as pubertal blockers were added and the estrogen was added to her therapy, Avery’s testes never developed. In fact, she does not make any sperm. And her reproductive capability to be a biological parent has been eliminated.

Her testes are non-functional. And in medicine, don’t we often recommend the removal of non-functional organs like an appendix? Does it make sense for Avery to wait until she’s 18, or should older adolescents be allowed to have surgery before the age of 18?

And not being able to have children is not the only consequence.  During the Q&A after her talk, Dr. Carswell said, “I think, you know, like I said, there’s a lot of people using blockers, and that’s great because it can be really helpful, but I think, um, I worry that they’re being given out a lot like candy, which is great in some ways, but it’s also like ok well, you know, you need to have the conversation about fertility.”  From another report:

Carswell was unable to answer crucial health information about the risks of puberty blockers despite providing them to children. One attendee asks Carswell if the use of puberty blockers can result in an inability to orgasm later in life. Carswell responds, “I don’t know, um, I don’t think so.” She adds, “I don’t believe so, but I can’t answer that fully,” before swiftly moving on to a new topic.

Before puberty, children do not recognize themselves as sexual beings!  They will have an idea about gender–how boys and girls look and do things differently–but not about sexual feelings and what it would be someday to have children of their own.

A little boy might like to play with dolls and wish he were a girl, and a little girl might prefer playing with trucks instead of dolls and wish she were a boy.  Feminists told us that it was all right for a boy to play with dolls and for a girl to play with trucks, that these are just personal preferences and social expectations.  But now we are told that such childish interests and superficial traits determine who the child “really is” and justify the child’s sterilization.

But, according to gender affirming apologists, this is what the child wants!  By law, these children are below the age of consent.  That is to say, they are considered incapable of consenting to having sex.  And yet they are capable of consenting to not ever having sex to conceive children–or even, likely, to not ever having sexual pleasure–in the future?

The practice of sterilizing Blacks, criminals, the disabled, and poor people is a major scandal of American history.  So why is it acceptable to sterilize 8-year-old girls and 12-year-old boys?

Why is this not medical malpractice?  Why is this not child abuse?

Illustration:  Sad Transgender Boy in Dress by MissLunaRose12, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons