THOUGH SOME CRITICS lambasted the study, Littman isn’t alone in her findings.
Lisa Marchiano, a secular therapist in Pennsylvania, wrote a blog post in 2016 cautioning parents about plunging into medical interventions with children and teens claiming to be transgender. Afterward, she began taking phone consultations with parents of teens experiencing ROGD. A year later, she wrote, “I am overwhelmed by the sheer volume of parents who call me.”
Some parents plead with Marchiano to allow them to fly their children into town for therapy or to help them find a therapist who won’t push their teens to transition with cross-sex hormones.
“At times I am able to offer advice that helps a family steer clear of drastic medical intervention of dubious benefits or necessity,” she wrote. “But sometimes all I can do is stand helpless and watch the wreckage.”
Marchiano described working with a family whose daughter declared transgenderism at age 18. The young woman had experienced other mental health problems but hadn’t expressed a conflict with her sex until high school. The parents had taken her to a clinician, and after a 30-minute consult, a physician’s assistant made an appointment for the teen to begin testosterone injections the following week.
Her parents convinced her to wait, but by the end of her freshman year of college the teenager had begun taking cross-sex hormones and had undergone a mastectomy—paid for by student health insurance. (Eighty-six colleges nationwide have student health plans that include cross-sex hormones and cross-sex surgery.)
Marchiano says the parents reported the radical physical steps didn’t decrease their daughter’s mental anxiety. She had dropped out of college and remained mostly isolated in her home.
Some teenagers report feeling relief after taking hormones or pursuing surgery, and some transgender activists claim social acceptance is a key to transgender adolescents becoming happy. But given that many parents who worry about their teenagers’ decline after experiencing ROGD also expressed left-leaning views of sexuality, social conditions alone don’t account for the distress some adolescents and young adults still feel.
And short-term relief doesn’t negate the long-term consequences of a person rejecting his or her sex and beginning lifelong medical interventions. For example, cross-sex hormones can cause sterility, leaving teenagers to decide whether to forgo having biological children later in life.
Other experts say cross-sex hormones increase risk of stroke and that puberty blockers could decrease bone density in adolescents. And since the practice of giving cross-sex hormones to children is only about a decade old, even pro-transgender physicians admit they don’t know the long-term outcomes.
More studies make sense, including research into the dangers of pursuing such paths. But while studies like Littman’s are under fire, the federally funded National Institutes of Health has given more than $5 million in grants to a group of doctors and psychologists tasked in part with studying transgender children over a period of decades.
The views of at least some of the researchers seem clear from the outset: Norman Spack is a Boston physician who opened the nation’s first gender clinic for children. Johanna Olson-Kennedy is a pro-transgender pediatrician who sees hundreds of children at the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
Late last year, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) for the first time officially recommended that parents accept and encourage the preferred gender expression of their children.
That cuts across decades of therapists who argued parents should encourage their children to embrace their birth sex, knowing that some studies show as many as 80 percent of children who express gender dysphoria will outgrow those feelings by adulthood.
Comments
Steve Shive
Posted: Fri, 02/01/2019 07:28 amThis is heart breaking and gut wrenching.
TK Wallace
Posted: Fri, 02/01/2019 08:00 amThere is a war on our children, especially our male children.
charles jandecka
Posted: Fri, 02/01/2019 11:55 amThe dual mandate to Adam & Eve was to produce children and subdue the earth. Lucifer has sought to shut off the former with a suggestion of sexual incompleteness. That this lie is gaining traction in our society is the proof in the pudding of the levels of dark cowardness & stupidity to which humans have stooped, parents included. The Sprit's call to put on the "armour of Christ" is for times like these is, oh, so obvious. Failure on the part of the community and parents to savagely engage the Devil, and his human minions, is infuriating to a Holy God!
news2me
Posted: Fri, 02/01/2019 12:18 pmThe homosexual community said they would come after our children. They are mutilating our children by the droves and laughing about it.
Homeschool. If you have little children, keep them off internet phones and computers. You will have to give up your addiction to texting as well. Little children see their parents using their phones and want some. I've seen little ones on youtube using phones before they can even verbally communicate. Also, play board games with them, not give them a computer game. We got thru the gameboy craze, even though other homeschoolers tempted our only daughter. (Choose your homeschool friends carefully, they are not all of the same mind. Just because someone is perceived as a Christian, they might be staunch liberal abortion voters. Even if they go to your evangelical church and teach your child in Sunday School. Speaking from experience.)
Xion
Posted: Sat, 02/02/2019 04:18 pmExcellent article! It shows how science and academia are corrupted by politics. Language is the first to go. A proper term like gender dysphoria is deemed hate speech, primarily because it is true.
My niece is majoring in the "Psychology of Diversity" at Washington State. I haven't had the heart or courage to point out that nothing could be less diverse than 'homo', which means 'the same'. Homosexuals are the opposite of diverse. If you want diversity, then what could be moreso than marriage between a man and a woman?
VolunteerBB
Posted: Sun, 02/03/2019 05:48 pmWhy is a disorder of the brain and emotions being treated medically with medications and cutting off healthy organs or cross dressing or whatever?
Most will grow out of it, and it doesn't prevent suicide. Too many will go on to commit suicide because changing their body with surgery and pharmaceuticals does not change their brain and they are still confused and dissatisfied. I've read how in Sweden, where many went to get their so-called "sex-change" operation, the suicide rate is still high among those who surgically transformed. They try to blame that society still didn't accept them. The problem is, they still can't accept themselves.
Louis
Posted: Fri, 02/15/2019 12:48 pmMy teen peer pressure in the 60s and early 70s was long hair, under age drinking and smoking (teen sex) -- and the masculine behavior criticized today (see War against Boys). It is very sad -- what will our Churches do ? I pray for AWANA! Louis Zezza, Delray Beach, FL