Pediatric endocrinologists whose voices are being stifled are sounding the alarm about a “diabolical” push to put children confused about their bodies on puberty suppressants and hormone blockers like Lupron to change their physical sex.
According to Drs. Paul Hruz, Michael Laidlaw and Quentin Van Meter, all of whom spoke recently with The Christian Post, Lupron — a hormonal agent that’s employed to fight prostate cancer in men and is sometimes used to treat sex offenders — is now being injected into children who suffer from gender dysphoria.
The drug has never been green-lighted by the FDA for that purpose, nor has there been any peer-reviewed studies done on the drug’s long-term physical and psychological side effects on children.
Lupron and synthetic hormones are ravaging their developing bodies, altering their psyches, and putting them on a pathway to permanent sterilization, these doctors say. Many of the long-term repercussions will not be felt for years. At present, endocrinologists who refuse to back these experimental treatments struggle to be published, and many in the medical field remain unaware of what is going on in dozens of transgender clinics at children’s hospitals across the nation.
Pushing ‘pause’ on puberty?
To many people, the sheer fact that gender has been medicalized with high-powered drugs is nothing short of horrifying, and wonder how this can be legal or allowed to happen.
“It’s not unusual, actually, in pediatrics to prescribe a drug off label. However, whenever a physician does that they are taking on significant risk because if something goes wrong without the evidence they are liable,” Hruz, who is an associate professor of pediatrics and endocrinology at Washington University of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, told CP, when asked how it was possible that a high-powered drug like Lupron could even be given to a dysphoric child given the lack of governmental approval for that purpose.
“There’s just a lot we don’t know about this form of intervention. It’s often claimed that medical blockade of puberty allows a child more time to sort out issues of their gender identity, that it alleviates dysphoria in affected children, and that it makes it easier if and when they choose to go on and get other treatments, namely [sex change] surgery. It’s also claimed that it’s completely safe and reversible.”
But among the many problems with that approach is that a normal developmental process is interrupted. Even if the hormone treatment is stopped after administering it for a few years and the normal signals for puberty resume, it’s impossible to go back in time, he explained.
As a class of medications, hormone blockers like Lupron are indeed approved for and are used in children to treat precocious puberty — where kids go through puberty at an abnormally early age. It’s given to children to delay the pubertal signals so that they, among other reasons, are not socially pressured into acting their pubertal age or subjected to hormonal drives that they are not prepared to handle.
But when used to suppress the normally-timed pubertal processes the drug actually causes a pathological condition.
“So on its face value, what [transgender activists] are saying is really contradictory from what we know about normal development,” Hruz said.
Clear evidence exists that the drug influences bone density, he continued. During adolescence and teenage years, youth accumulate bone mass, which is important for the rest of life.
“And there is conflicting information about how much of that bone density can be gained back” after going off the drug.
Strong ideological influences driving this entire paradigm cannot be ignored, he said, when asked how this is happening, especially given that most people expect doctors to govern their practices based solely on medical science.
The first ideological error many make is trying to redefine what “sex” actually is, Hruz said.
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SOURCE: Christian Post, Brandon Showalter
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