(LifeSiteNews) — Top American pediatricians acknowledged major concerns connected to transgender drugs for children in resurfaced videos from 2022, The Daily Caller reported in an exclusive article published Tuesday.
During a 2022 conference for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which sets the standards for transgender “care,” including age ranges for certain treatments like puberty blockers, double mastectomies, and other interventions, numerous physicians were recorded expressing some of the major medical problems linked to the increasingly popular pharmaceutical interventions.
In one such video, WPATH certified pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Daniel Metzger expressed a “concern” that puberty blockers can restrict proper calcium development such that it will never fully occur in children who start on the drugs at puberty.
Metzger says he explains to families interested in starting the drugs that “normally puberty is the time of putting the calcium into your piggy bank.”
“You’ve got a piggy bank for your calcium and you better get it all in by 25 because at 25 you’re going to live off that piggy bank,” he said, adding that puberty-blocking drugs “slow that calcium accrual back into the bones quite a bit, back to the prepubertal level.”
“This is a concern that not everybody is getting their piggy bank completely filled up with calcium” by the cut-off in the early- to mid-20s, he warned.
Metzger also warned that the drugs could prevent the natural development of tissue that would be necessary to continue with reconstructive transgender surgery to make a male more closely resemble a female, and acknowledged that informing families about the fertility complications is one of the most challenging aspects of his job because children and teens generally have little concept of what their future fertility means.
In addition to the video featuring comments by Metzger, another video obtained by The Daily Caller shows Dr. Scott Leibowitz, whom the outlet pointed out had been “a co-lead in the development of the adolescent chapter of the WPATH Standards of Care and member of the WPATH Board of Directors,” as he “challenged the reversibility of puberty suppression,” even as it is presented by pro-trans legacy media outlets.
“I think when we just say, ‘Oh, puberty blockers are just reversible and it’s a very noninvasive treatment,’ I would say it’s more invasive than oftentimes the media makes it out to be or other people,” he said.
“There’s challenges with puberty suppression that we have to acknowledge and that’s why it’s ‘reversible asterisks,’” Leibowitz said. “One cannot be on puberty suppression endlessly. You get to a place where physiologically we need hormones.”
As alluded to by Leibowitz, the notion of “reversibility” of transgender drugs is something of a misnomer since the vast majority of children who start on that track will continue on it by taking cross-sex hormones, which will very likely sterilize them.
Around the same time that the WPATH doctors were expressing concerns, Dr. Kathryn Lowe, a board-certified pediatrician and member of the executive committee of the American Academy of Pediatricians section on LGBT Health and Wellness, acknowledged in a 2022 virtual meeting that transgender hormone drugs would likely render gender-confused kids unable to have children of their own in the future.
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“The big thing is, here, the infertility concerns with starting gender affirming hormone therapy,” Lowe said in the video, LifeSiteNews reported. “For kids who go on a blocker at tanner stage two, and then they add in gender-affirming hormone therapy — there isn’t a lot of research about this out there — but what we do know is these kids probably will be infertile.”
Similarly, pediatric endocrinologist and director of Boston Children’s Hospital’s GeMS (Gender Management Service) program Jeremi Carswell, MD, admitted in a resurfaced video that rates of gender dysphoria have “skyrocketed” and that transgender drug regimens can damage fertility.
And calcium deficiency and infertility are not the only likely ramifications of transgender interventions.
As LifeSiteNews has extensively reported, the drugs and surgeries have also been linked to permanent physical and psychological damage, including cardiovascular diseases, cancer, strokes and blood clots, and suicidality. The serious risks come even as leaders in the field have acknowledged that “social contagion” is a factor in the growing phenomenon of transgender identification and subsequent surgical and chemical mutilation by “affirming” practitioners.