‘Age Is A Number’: Gender Clinic Offered Puberty Blockers To Kids As Young As 8, Surgery Referrals At 14, Records Show
The Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania (CHOP) Gender and Sexuality Development Program offers medical interventions to children as young as eight as part of the medical transition process, according to documents reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Clinic employees have publicly advocated for certain cross-sex surgeries for minors, along with hormones and puberty blockers, and have downplayed the seriousness of the infertility which is a known consequence of some of these interventions.
“I think it’s really important to remember that age is a number,” clinic co-founder Dr. Linda Hawkins said. “But as an adolescent medicine and developmental specialist, we know that where a child is cognitively and socially is more important than that exact number of their age.”
The Gender and Sexuality Development Program at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) offers drastic medical interventions as part of the gender transition process to children as young as eight, according to statements and documents reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
CHOP’s youth gender clinic, one of the first in the U.S., is a major trans medical provider in Pennsylvania and has strong ties to Rachel Levine, a former trans activist who currently serves as the U.S. assistant secretary for health. The clinic recently came under fire for holding seminars where teachers were instructed to hide students’ trans identities from their parents. Clinic employees also promoted cross-sex procedures for children while downplaying the risks, documents and statements reveal.
The clinic has referred children as young as 14 for “top surgery,” a euphemism for mastectomies or breast construction, though most referrals are for patients aged 16-18, Dowshen told lawmakers at a Pennsylvania House of Representatives Health Committee hearing in 2020.
The clinic’s co-founders, Dr. Linda Hawkins and Dr. Nadia Dowshen, advocated for “top surgery” for minors in a 2021 paper published in Pediatrics, the medical journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
“We observed consensus that chest dysphoria is a major source of distress and can be functionally disabling to transmasculine youth. MCS performed during adolescence, including before age 18, can alleviate suffering and improve functioning,” they wrote in their paper.
The clinic worked to secure surgical referrals for minors and even employed a social worker who served as a “surgery advocate,” collecting letters of support on behalf of gender dysphoric minors in order to persuade insurance companies to cover their surgeries, according to a 2021 report from CHOP. A staffer had previously pushed for such a position to be funded with the help of then-acting secretary of health for the state, Rachel Levine, and argued that the position would yield a high return on investment.
“I think it’s really important to remember that age is a number,” she said at the hearing. “But as an adolescent medicine and developmental specialist, we know that where a child is cognitively and socially is more important than that exact number of their age.”
CHOP professionals laid out the gender clinic’s guidelines for sex change procedures in a webinar on the clinic’s standards of care, which the hospital created in partnership with the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services and the DCNF obtained through a public records request.
The clinic advised “affirmation” of a child’s gender identity and social transition to the opposite sex for kids under the age of eight, who are too young for medical interventions under the clinic’s guidelines.
For medical interventions, patients must experience long-lasting gender nonconformity, which emerged or worsened at the onset of puberty, and have any coexisting medical, social and psychological issues addressed prior to the onset of medical treatment, according to the webinar.
https://dailycaller.com/2023/04/02/gender-clinic-puberty-blockers-chop-pennsylvania/