Say, has the medical establishment finally decided to Follow The Science®? Said science being, y’know, biology?
It certainly looks that way at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA), the region’s hub for pediatric sex-change therapies. The Los Angeles Times reported late yesterday that CHLA feels ‘forced’ to shut down its “Center for Transyouth Health and Development” as the Trump administration threatens to cut off funding for the hospital entirely. CHLA’s activist management has finally realized that Donald Trump meant what he said when promising to shut down the maiming of minors in the name of the Queer Theory movement:
Under mounting pressure from the Trump administration, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles will shutter its longstanding healthcare program for trans children and young adults this summer, according to emails reviewed by The Times.
The Center for Transyouth Health and Development began telling its nearly 3,000 patient families of the closure on Thursday, saying there was “no viable alternative” that would allow the safety-net hospital to continue specialized care.
“Safety net”? That’s an interesting way to describe a program dedicated to a faddish set of therapies and surgeries that have no real medical or scientific basis. In fact, all of the most recent data shows that pediatric sex-change therapies do nothing to alleviate the claimed conditions that drive these therapies, and plenty of data from places like Denmark and the UK show that the outcomes are far worse than neutral in the long run. The most recent HHS report challenges each of the claims usually made to promote these therapies:
Medical and surgical interventions for children and adolescents with gender dysphoria (GD) are widely promoted as essential and even lifesaving, yet the evidence base does not support strong conclusions about their effectiveness in improving mental health or reducing GD. Analysis of the biological plausibility of harms is necessary, and suggests that some short- and long-term harms are likely (in some cases expected) sequelae of treatment…
Some of the plausible harms of PMT are serious. The likelihood of infertility when puberty blockers (PBs) are provided at the early stage of puberty and followed by cross-sex hormones (CSH) does not have to be demonstrated in a clinical trial. This is because the mechanism is well-understood and conducting a trial would amount to an unethical “parachute test.”
If these are unethical to test, it should be pretty easy to conclude that they are unethical to prescribe. John has even more on the most recent data — all bad for Trans Inc — in our next post.
CHLA made it clear that they’re not paying much attention to the science. They do, however, pay close attention to the money:
In the email, executives said that continuing to operate the center would jeopardize the hospital’s ability to care for “hundreds of thousands” of other children, noting that federal agencies including the Department of Justice, Health and Human Services, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had warned of dire consequences for doctors and hospitals providing care opposed by the administration — including threat of prosecutions for doctors.
“These threats are no longer theoretical,” the note said. “Taken together, the Attorney General memo, HHS review, and the recent solicitation of tips from the FBI to report hospitals and providers of GAC strongly signal this Administration’s intent to take swift and decisive action, both criminal and civil, against any entity it views as being in violation of the executive order.”
As Wilford Brimley keenly observed in the film Absence of Malice: “Wonderful thing, subpoenas.”
Make no mistake, either. The retreat by CHLA takes a big bite out of the medical establishment’s disgraceful pediatric sex-change industry, an industry based not on science but on fashion. They have maimed and neutered a generation of children already, as the LA Times goes on to explain — all while mainly on the federal teat:
The hospital’s Transyouth center is among the oldest and largest programs in the country, and among the only facilities that provides puberty blockers, hormones and surgical procedures for trans youth on public insurance.
But the hospital is also significantly more reliant on public funding than any other pediatric medical center in California — a situation that leaves it particularly exposed to the Trump administration. Roughly 40% of pediatric beds in Los Angeles are at Children’s.
Then I suppose CHLA should focus on science-based medicine that heals children rather than radical virtue-signaling alchemy and mutilation that leaves children to be lifelong slaves to places like … well, like CHLA.
This is a real victory for both Trump and the children who now can get real therapy to deal with whatever dysphoria they have, and perhaps whatever Munchausen-by-proxy issues their parents have. It only accelerates what would have happened eventually, as ‘detransitioners’ began stacking up lawsuits so high that facilities like CHLA would never get malpractice coverage for pediatric sex-change therapies. Accelerating this process is vital to protecting as many children as possible from this quackery, not to mention preventing any more taxpayer dollars from subsidizing it.
