Gender clinics welcome parent involvement as long as they do what they’re told.
Dartmouth Health recently testified that giving children puberty blockers and hormones is “rendered following consultation with medical and mental health professionals and parents and guardians.” But parents are given one option: social and medical transition.
Parents who push back against puberty blockers and hormones for their children can expect to face emotional blackmail and end runs around their authority.
Dartmouth Health coerces moms and dads with the suicide myth. They tell parents that their children are at immediate risk of suicide unless parents affirm their delusions and agree to let the clinic provide what they euphemistically call “gender-affirming care” (GAC). (Related: Trans or Die: The Ideological Blindness of a Dartmouth Health Endocrinologist.)
Detransitioner Prisha Mosley described this emotional blackmail when she testified to Maine legislators about the 15-minute appointment where she was diagnosed as being transgender:
She asked questions like ‘Do you like your period? Do you get along better with boys?’ And when I answered those questions honestly, she looked me in my eyes and told me ‘You are a boy.’ I remember my dad looking like he was in shock, and my mother was crying, and they just asked them, ‘Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?”
We get a sense of the pressure Dartmouth Health puts on parents from pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Frances Lim-Liberty’s Concord Monitor Op-Ed. “I had seen Nick a couple of months ago, and the family was ready to start gender-affirming hormone therapy at that visit. Today, they were no longer on the same page.”
When the parents expressed concern that their daughter might change her mind, Lim-Liberty responded, “But what if he doesn’t change his mind? What have we done then?”
Lim-Liberty conjures the suicide myth in another anecdote, this one about a boy whose parents had refused to sign the hormone consent form for three years. “My biggest fear manifested, would she make it to her 18th birthday, just three months away?” She describes her plans to wait out the parents. “I promise her we will start medical affirmation as soon as she turns 18.”
In her March testimony against HB619 which would ban sex-trait modifications for minors, Dartmouth Health internist Dr. Simrun Bal said that decisions about the medical transition of minors should be in the hands of the “patient, family, and physicians.” But she made it clear that she has no qualms about undermining parents who aren’t on board with social and medical transitions.
We often encounter parents who may not be supportive, and in that case the child turns to other trusted role models in their life, like teachers, peers, and others in the community who are leaders. I worry that not accessing those supportive social supports will mean difficulties in accessing care and going through a potential transition.
Even if parents find therapists and physicians who are concerned about the harms of GAC, our conversion therapy ban, signed by Gov. Chris Sununu, makes it a crime for them to help a confused girl learn to be comfortable with her own female body.
Parents and guardians can even lose custody if they don’t affirm their children’s new identity.
Until lawmakers regulate the medical industry or lawsuits end these practices, it’s important for parents to protect their children from white-coated activists who put profit and ideology above medical science and their patients’ welfare.