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‘Nuclear Bomb’ Study Shows 14,000 Children Have Undergone Trans Procedures

October 10, 2024

The transgender industry has exploded from a trickle of young males seeking transition procedures to thousands upon thousands of minors who have filled the industry’s bank account with more than $100 million, according to a groundbreaking new report.

The group Do No Harm has found nearly 14,000 minors have undergone transgender surgeries, puberty blockers, or cross-sex hormone injections between 2019 and 2023, generating nearly $120 million in revenue. The report documents that during those years:

  • 13,994 children received transgender-related treatments 
  • 5,747 transgender “sex change” operations were carried out on children
  • “62,682 hormone and puberty blockers prescriptions [were] written for 8,579 pediatric patients”
  • “At least $119,791,202 made from sex change treatments performed on minors”

“This release of data is really a nuclear bomb,” Dr. Miriam Grossman told guest host Jody Hice on “Washington Watch” Wednesday. “We are led to believe by politicians and by many groups that these interventions are very rare and hardly happening at all in this country. And that is simply not true.”

These experimental procedures have proliferated, in part because of money, but also because “the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychiatric Association for many years have been taken over by a small group of activists who simply push their agendas forward and stifle debate,” Grossman noted. “And too many of my colleagues are simply spineless and not willing to speak up against it.”

The study’s numbers, which tracked insurance data, “also are not counting any of the treatments that were paid for privately,” noted Grossman, who is a practicing psychiatrist. “While this data represents the tip of the iceberg, this is the first step in holding the medical establishment accountable for participating in, and often times promoting, predatory and unscientific medical interventions for vulnerable children,” said the chairman of Do No Harm, Dr. Stanley Goldfarb.

The procedures sometimes generated millions of dollars for the facility. Boston Children’s Hospital raked in more than $5 million, according to the database. The group released its list of the “Dirty Dozen” hospitals that most profited off pediatric transgender procedures, which includes:

  • The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
  • Connecticut Children’s Medical Center
  • Children’s Minnesota
  • Seattle Children’s
  • Children’s Hospital Los Angeles
  • Boston Children’s Hospital
  • Rady Children’s Hospital
  • Children’s National Medical Center
  • UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland
  • Children’s Hospital Colorado
  • UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh
  • Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center

“Some of these hospitals are actually activists; they are reaching out into the community and promoting their services,” Grossman told Hice.

But other medical institutions have a formal affiliation with a church that opposes such procedures, such as the Roman Catholic Church. For instance, Providence Health and Services has carried out permanently-disfiguring transgender surgeries on 81 children and dispensed cross-sex hormones or puberty blockers to 113 minors over the past five years. “Most of our Catholic hospitals provide care that respects human dignity. But a minority of them have lost the plot. Catholics must channel their anger and shock over this constructively. We’re all on the same team here, including the bishops, and we need to work together to prevent this madness from ever happening again within our hospitals,” said Tommy Valentine, director of CatholicVote’s Catholic Accountability Project, in an email to The Washington Stand. “We are going to work hard to stop the injustice occurring under their roof.”

Yet not everyone has bowed the knee to the industry’s consensus. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) has refused to endorse “any organization’s practice recommendations for the treatment of adolescents with gender dysphoria” and acknowledged “there is considerable uncertainty as to the long-term efficacy for the use of chest and genital surgical interventions, and the existing evidence base is viewed as low quality/low certainty.”

Still, the damage has been profound, experts say. Thanks to transgender activists, children are being permanently “physically disfigured. They’re losing the capacity to have biological children in the future. Many of them will have impaired sexual functioning, inability to have sexual pleasure, and many, many other medical and psychiatric problems,” said Grossman. “There’s so many mental health issues for many reasons. But one big reason is that we are misrepresenting reality to these children, and we are leading them to think that they can just keep [allowing] each person [to] create their own reality. That is extremely destructive from a mental health perspective.”

The procedures often trigger lifelong regret. “We’ve had over 4,000 or 5,000 people that we’ve helped through our website, working with them one-on-one, who have come back and restored their life,” Walt Heyer, who lived for years as a woman before embracing his God-given sex, told a panel at the 2024 Pray Vote Stand Summit (PVSS) in Washington, D.C. last weekend.

Like many transgender-identifying young people, Heyer was psychologically, physically, and sexually abused as a child. Today, he says, he hears aspects of his own story in thousands of young people who speak with him.

“When people approach me and they say, ‘I’m a transgender. I transitioned and I have gender dysphoria,’ I always say, ‘Well, you’re not a transgender. You never transitioned, and you probably don’t have gender dysphoria,’” Heyer said. “That’s not gender dysphoria. That’s trauma.”

“It is categorically impossible to change your gender with hormones and surgery,” Heyer pointed out. “No one has ever changed genders. They’ve changed their persona.”

Once led down the transgender medical pipeline of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and unnecessary surgery, these minor patients have no formal financial — and all-too-often, psychological — support. “We see a population that is vulnerable, that has been taken advantage of, that has no means of intervention, because once they go through ‘gender-affirming care,’ there’s no insurance to go through a detransitioning process. There is no insurance to cover the trauma that happens to someone who’s been told by the medical community, ‘This is the way you're going to get better,” Dr. Jennifer Bauwens, director of the Center for Family Studies at Family Research Council, told PVSS.

She continued, “If we know that trauma is high in a population, what we should be doing is including that variable in every piece of research that we produce, because it’s significant and we need to understand the population well, but not when it comes to the transgender research literature. They don’t include it. They’re not curious [about] why self-harm is so high in this population. And in fact, the very act of ‘gender-affirming care’ is self-harm, which is an expression of trauma.’”

Less than one-third of Americans say they support any kind of transgender procedures for minors in a Rasmussen poll. A strong majority (58%) of Americans oppose all transgender procedures — including supposedly reversible puberty blockers and hormone injections — for children under 18; 47% “strongly oppose” such procedures. 

“The stats in this database represent thousands of kids who are being treated like Guinea pigs for unproven, and sometimes dangerous, medical experiments. I hope politicians and parents alike use this database to see where these treatments are happening and protect their children from being rushed into irreversible, life-altering treatments,” said Do No Harm Senior Fellow and Patient Advocate Chloe Cole.

Thus far, the 2024 Republican presidential campaign has said little about the procedures. Instead, since August, the Trump campaign has focused a $65 million ad campaign opposing transgender-identifying athletes taking part in women’s sports and taxpayer-funded transgender procedures for inmates in prison.

“If I had it my way, we would close every gender clinic in the United States and stop this nonsense. We need to get a backbone, and we need to stand up and say we are destroying lives. We are not helping people,” Heyer told PVSS.

Bauwens also noted that, according to federal election data, “92% to 96% of research psychologists and social workers” have “given to a liberal Democrat candidate” for office.

The most profound damage of the transgender industry comes in the mind- and soul-altering message of gender fluidity, which wars with the biblical view that God created us male and female, Heyer contended. “When we introduce a child or an individual to the idea that they can change genders, we devalue who they are in Christ,” he said.

The report’s full findings can be found at StopTheHarmDatabase.com.

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.



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