A school-based health care group in Seattle is prescribing students hormone drugs and puberty blockers, according to an education watchdog organization. Parents Defending Education published emails earlier this month that were obtained under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, revealing that the Neighborcare Health, which runs several School-Based Health Centers (SBHCs) in Seattle Public Schools (SPS), offers students “comprehensive, evidence-based, gender-affirming care services,” including “important medical interventions including hormonal treatments.”
“This level of care can only be consented to by a parent or legal guardian, and all gender-affirming care treatments will be an informed and private decision made between a parent, their child, and their healthcare provider,” the January 2023 email states. It continues, “This step also represents our continued commitment to providing high quality, identity-affirming care to our LGBTQ+ students, which aligns with Seattle Public Schools’ stated goals in supporting these students.” Parents Defending Education noted that SPS “has a policy in place that allows staff to hide a student’s gender transition from parents.” Neighborcare Health currently operates SBCHs in 15 Seattle schools.
“There are so many profoundly disturbing aspects of this policy. We can only think about this topic by going along with the alarming premise that children have a sexuality or sexual identity and that this can be a driver for health care decisions,” said Meg Kilgannon, Family Research Council’s senior fellow for Education studies, in comments to The Washington Stand. “Parents have been worried about the delivery of health care services to children at schools for over a decade. Pro-life groups have warned that schools in states like California, Washington, and Oregon were allowing minor girls to access abortion without parental consent during the school day using contracted abortion providers like Planned Parenthood.”
“For students to access medical treatments without parental consent is not new,” Kilgannon continued. “The difference here is that the victims of these interventions will be seen and heard. Eventually parents will find out, but how much damage will have been done until then? Add to this the delivery of mental health services through the school’s vendor, and the dangers are obvious. Telehealth delivery of therapy is quite common and the financial incentives to ‘transition’ children are powerful.”
Neighborcare Health claims that “[g]ender-affirming care represents a life-saving treatment for many of the youth and families who choose it,” based on a 2020 study by the LGBT activist group Trevor Project. But a study published last month examining millions of emergency room patients over the last two decades determined that those who had undergone gender transition surgeries were 12 times more likely to attempt suicide than the general population. One 30-year-long study concluded that those who had undergone gender transition procedures were 20 times more likely to attempt suicide than the general population, and another study found that gender transition procedures such as hormone drugs and surgeries have “not been shown to reduce even suicidal ideation, and suicidal ideation is not equal to actual suicide risk.”
Additionally, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) has been aware for years of the “debilitating” and “potentially fatal” effects of gender transition procedures, but has continued to promote such dangerous procedures as safe for children. WPATH “experts” have also discussed amongst themselves how they really know very little about the long-term effects of hormone drugs, other than the permanent damage done to fertility; how puberty blockers are irreversible and may have devastating impacts on both future fertility and current brain development, especially among children; how gender transition procedures do not alleviate mental health issues and may actually make them worse; the dangers associated with surgical interventions; and how to promote these procedures to children, especially in schools.
In light of the real and potential dangers of gender transition procedures, numerous European nations have begun moving away from the practice and placing restrictions on providing gender transition procedures to minors. Earlier this month, the German Medical Assembly voted 120 to 47 to urge the government to heavily restrict the use of puberty blockers, hormone drugs, and gender transition surgeries for minors. Germany joins France, Sweden, Finland, Norway, and the U.K. in slowing or halting altogether the advance of the “gender-affirming care” model still in use in the U.S.
S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.
