Doctors Call for Immediate “Stop” to Gender Ideology on Children

WASHINGTON D.C. – Last week, a group of more than 100 health care professionals issued a declaration calling on America’s major medical associations to “immediately stop” promoting the “social affirmation” of gender ideology and denounced the use of “harmful” puberty blockers, hormones treatments and medically mutilating surgeries for children. 

The declaration, issued by Doctors Protecting Children in association with the American College of Pediatricians, presented a bulk of scientific evidence that gender procedures “harm healthy bodies” and strongly urged the medical industry to “respect biological reality.” The declaration, signed by physicians, therapists, medical researchers, medical ethics advocates, and more from around the nation, called on the medical community to shift its focus from “harmful interventions” to treating the “underlying mental health issues” often associated with gender confusion. The declaration noted that psychotherapy for underlying conditions such as depression, anxiety, autism, emotional trauma, and abuse should be “the first line of treatment” for “vulnerable children” rather than “irreversible” interventions. 

In the declaration, the doctors affirm scientific reality that biological sex is “dimorphic” (exists in just two forms) while a person’s genetic makeup “is not altered by drugs or surgical interventions.” They further declared the agenda of gender ideology seeks to affirm thoughts, feelings and beliefs through removing healthy body parts, which is wholly “inadequate” as it “does not accommodate the reality” of “innate sexual differences.” 

The declaration is aimed at countering the proliferation of gender ideology in the mainstream medical industry – an industry expected to grow to $5 billion by 2030. Doctors Protecting Children specifically called on the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, the Pediatric Endocrine Society, American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry to stop the proliferation of the false idea that “children can be born in the wrong body.” However, these organizations have all recently reaffirmed their belief that people can change their gender and expressed support for mutilating procedures. 

Doctors Protecting Children also use the declaration to confront a group called the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH), an international “nonprofit” group responsible for developing the “Standards of Care” that recommend puberty blockers, hormones and mutilating surgeries to treat gender confusion in children. They stated that WPATH’s guidelines are “demonstrably flawed” considering the April 2024 Cass Review. The four-year, 388-page report examined much of the research to date on gender procedures finding “remarkably weak evidence” that these procedures help children due to may studies lacking “any positive measurable outcomes.” 

In fact, as the declaration notes, leaked WPATH files revealed “widespread medical malpractice” due to doctors “improvising treatments as they go along” while knowing that children cannot give informed consent to these procedures. 

The declaration states, “informed consent is not possible” because an adolescent’s brain is too immature to “strategize, problem solve and make emotionally laden decisions that have life-long consequences.” 

“Despite all the above evidence that gender affirming treatments are not only unhelpful, but are harmful, and despite the knowledge that the adolescent brain is immature, professional medical organizations in the United States continue to promote these interventions,” stated Doctors Protecting Children. 

Doctor Protecting Children ultimately recommended that the rest of the American medical community “follow the science” and that health care professionals urge their leadership to “adhere to the evidence-based research now available.” 

Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “Gender ideology has led to horrible atrocities on children. Counseling, not mutilating surgeries, is the only rational and medically sound option. The American medical community needs return to sound science and recommit to ‘do no harm.’”