The People Carving Up ‘Trans’ Kids Have ‘Blood On Their Hands’

One of the most insidious assertions of the pro-trans left is that those who oppose puberty blockers, wrong-sex hormones, and other pseudo-scientific medical interventions for trans-identifying youth have “blood on their hands.” This is because, such ideologues claim, children deprived of this purported “medical care” are more likely to kill themselves.

The fallaciousness of such declarations, however, is becoming more evident in light of acknowledgments from some unlikely sources in the media and medical establishment.

The Inflammatory Ideological Charge Regarding Trans Youth…

The “blood on the hands” slander of the pro-trans left has become predictably commonplace in recent years. NBC earlier this month covered pro-trans activists protesting outside the Supreme Court who alleged our nation’s highest court would have “blood on its hands” if it didn’t determine a Tennessee law limiting access to such interventions was discriminatory. A Missouri LGBT public policy and advocacy organization in November accused Circuit Judge Craig Carter of having “blood on his hands” for upholding a law that restricted transgender medical interventions on kids.

In one of the most inflammatory examples of this rhetoric, transgender-identifying Montana state legislator Zooey Zephyr in April 2023 described state restrictions on such experiments as “tantamount to torture.” Zephyr provocatively warned: “I hope the next time there’s an invocation, when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands.”

These charges were always based on flawed reasoning, even absent any reference to data related to youth suicide incidence rates. How would restricting medical professionals from giving irreversible drugs and surgeries to an otherwise healthy kid be responsible for the latter’s suicide, especially given that as recently as a couple of decades ago, these pharmaceutical interventions were unheard of? And why would large numbers of gender dysphoric youths, supposedly hiding in the shadows until the last decade, suddenly feel the need to kill themselves rather than simply wait until they are old enough to make medical decisions for themselves?

Obviously there must be a social component to the dramatic rise in children identifying as trans and an attendant social explanation for why they would think suicide is an appropriate antidote to their anxiety.

… Collides with the Reality of Terrible Harms Performed on Kids

Then again, it’s also nice when the scientific establishment exhibits proficiency in professionalism and common sense. On Dec. 11, the British government, heeding the cautions of medical experts across its country, extended its ban on the prescription of puberty blockers for children under 18, citing an “unacceptable safety risk.” This decision followed the April release of the Cass Review, in which pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass determined that chemical interventions for children were based on “remarkably weak evidence” and that puberty blockers are “powerful drugs with unproven benefits and significant risks.”

The Brits are not alone in exercising caution in such “medical care” given both the lack of credible research on the long-term effects of puberty blockers and the demonstrable medical negligence in failing to pursue less invasive and less permanent treatment for gender dysphoria, such as counseling.

After a 1,500 percent increase in the number of female teenagers identifying as transgender in a 10-year-period, the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare assessed that the risks of puberty blockers and so-called gender-affirming treatment were likely to outweigh the expected benefits. Denmark, seeing an 8,700 percent increase in the number of documented pediatric cases requesting transgender surgery in less than a decade, also decided to sharply reduce transitions. Norway and Finland have also implemented measures to limit access to interventions for gender dysphoric youth.

Perhaps most amazingly, even The Washington Post’s editorial board on Dec. 15 censured “scientists’ failure to study these treatments slowly and systematically as they developed them.” The state of Tennessee, the Post admitted, had a “colorable claim” before the nation’s highest court in United States v. Skrmetti, a case involving the state’s attempts to limit youth access to these highly suspect interventions. The editors even noted, “In the absence of clear data — and with the possibility of significant publication bias or researchers massaging their results — parents might not have adequate information.”

But Who’s Really to Blame Here?

As much as it’s nice to see some legacy media and members of the medical and scientific establishment expressing concern with the radical transformation of protocols for psychologically unstable youth over the last decade, it’s worth remembering who promoted this revolution. For years, The Washington Post has been championing medical interventions for “gender”-confused youth and simultaneously castigating state-level attempts to restrict such treatments. So has MSNBC, CNN, NPR, and the rest of Democrat legacy media.

The same goes for ideologically driven scientists and medical professionals. Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, director of America’s largest child “gender clinic” at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, in October told The New York Times that she was withholding the results of her taxpayer-funded National Institutes of Health study because she didn’t want its outcomes to be “weaponized” to argue puberty blockers are a bad way of treating transgender-identifying children. Court documents from a youth “gender medicine” case in Alabama also revealed the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) had attempted to interfere with a systematic review commissioned from Johns Hopkins University.

What Americans are discovering, and what unfairly maligned journalist Abigail Shrier warned about years ago, is that an alliance of media, scientists, medical professionals, and pharmaceutical companies pushed a pro-trans narrative on a generation of American youth. Some were driven by ideology. Others had a profit motive (the trans “medical” industry is worth more than $4.4 billion). All of them demonstrated condemnable irresponsibility regarding the health and well-being of children.

Then in an incredible act of hypocrisy, they sought to emotionally blackmail the nation with their “blood on your hands” rhetoric. But in the wake of a national epidemic of physically mutilated and psychologically distraught youth that should have been addressed with counseling and social media prohibitions, it’s obvious whose hands are dirty.

Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at The Federalist and an editor and columnist at The New Oxford Review. He has a bachelor’s in history and master’s in teaching from the University of Virginia and a master’s in theology from Christendom College. He is the author of The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands.