The explosive growth of carrying out transgender medical procedures on children came only after researchers found the same medical interventions had failed to improve the lives of adults. Even after full surgery, “‘improvement’ in their actual life situation is not always observed,” noted a transgender psychologist. While adults who underwent transgender procedures described their subjective feelings as improving, “objective measures told a different story,” reports a new 409-page report, titled “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices,” released by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on May 1.

Much of the report focuses on the weak basis and failed results of medical transitions for minors. However, chapter 3, titled “History and Evolution of Adult and Pediatric Gender Medicine,” notes how transgender procedures failed adults before failing children. “Did medical transition at least alleviate gender dysphoria?” asks the report. “Interestingly, there was no relationship between reported happiness and stage of transition.”

Despite demonstrable results, the transgender industry failed upward. Its unsuccessful model for adults in time became the basis for the “affirming model” for minors.

From Adult Failure to Childhood Diagnosis

The now-passe term “transsexual” dates to 1949 to American physician David Cauldwell and only was popularized 59 years ago by Harry Benjamin, “the father of the transgender medicine,” who had a history of jumping from one unproven medical treatment to another. (He had previously supported the fad of endocrine “rejuvenation therapy,” notes the report. “In 1931 he sued the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association … ‘for calling his treatment quackery,’ and lost.”) In his 1966 book, “The Transsexual Phenomenon,” Benjamin promised those who underwent cross-sex hormone injections and “corrective surgery” that “their bodies would at least resemble those of the sex to which they feel they belong” and that such medical interventions held the ability to “change a miserable and maladjusted person of one sex into a happier and more adequate, although by no means neurosis-free, personality of the opposite sex.”

Yet, the report notes, “In the first half of the 20th century, there were few recorded instances of transsexuals.” One of the first to undergo surgical interventions, Danish citizen “Einar Wegener, transformed into Lili Elbe, died in September 1931, after an ‘abyss of suffering.’”

Transgenderism first broke into U.S. public consciousness in 1952, when a 24-year-old former U.S. soldier named George Jorgensen traveled to Denmark for a surgery. Jorgensen, who grew up in the Bronx, went to Copenhagen, Denmark, where he was mutilated by Dr. Christian Hamburger (whose sister was a lesbian).

The introduction to Jorgensen’s autobiography blasphemously likened Jorgensen’s transgender surgery to the resurrection of Jesus Christ:

“[His] celebrity began December 1, 1952, when a banner headline screaming ‘EX-GI BECOMES BLONDE BEAUTY: OPERATIONS TRANSFORM BRONX YOUTH’ greeted readers of the New York Daily News. Hearst Publications’ popular Sunday newspaper supplement, American Weekly, subsequently paid twenty thousand dollars for an exclusive interview with Jorgensen that brought [his] story to millions of American homes, and whetted the appetite of the world press. When [he] returned to the United States in 1953, an unprecedented three hundred reporters were on hand to meet [his] plane at New York International Airport … [His] ‘sex-change’ was viewed by many as a miracle of God in which not Christ, but Christine — Man reborn as Woman — heralded a new dispensation of human history.” (Emphasis added.)

After the Jorgensen transition, Hamburger received 756 letters from 465 people who identified as transgender. Yet even after the floodgates opened, the would-be transitioners remained a relative trickle for decades. The HHS records the history of the transgender medical interventionism:

“By 1979, the demand for ‘sex change’ became significant enough for clinicians caring for this patient population to form a professional association, the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA), which published the first Standards of Care in 1979. In that short typewritten document, ‘Principle 2’ of 32 was: ‘Hormonal and surgical sex reassignment are procedures requiring medical justification and are not of such minor consequence as to be performed on an elective basis.’

“In the third edition of the DSM in 1980, the disorder of ‘transsexualism’ was said to be ‘apparently rare.’ In 1994 DSM-IV reported: ‘Data from smaller countries in Europe with access to total population statistics and referrals suggest that roughly 1 per 30,000 adult males and 1 per 100,000 adult females seek sex-reassignment surgery.’ The ‘transgender tipping point’ had not yet arrived.”

Yet even then, it became clear that adults “aided” by these procedures had not thrived. Peggy Cohen-Kettenis, a psychologist in the Netherlands who carried out medical interventions for trans-identifying people, conducted a survey of all 229 patients diagnosed by the Netherlands Gender Care Foundation (NGCF) as transgender; 141 responded, mostly in their 20s and 30s. Some 65% reported feeling happy, especially men whose physical appearance could pass as female.

But, the HHS notes, “while the self-reported subjective outcomes were good, objective measures told a different story.”

“One in seven [male-to-female transitioners] and one in 36 [female-to-male transitioners] had attempted suicide after treatment began. (Of the total number of patients seen at the NGCF in the previous 10 years, three had committed suicide after treatment.) 60% of the MFs and 37% of the FMs were unemployed and 59% of the MFs and 33% of the FMs had no romantic partners,” reports the HHS.

“If it is possible to discern a trend in these reports that the subjective well-being of the transsexuals has increased, whereas an ‘improvement’ in their actual life situation is not always observed,” wrote Cohen-Kettenis in the study’s conclusion. In fact, so-called “sex-reassignment surgery” (SRS) did not appear to lessen patients’ feelings of gender dysphoria, she wrote:

“Although a fair number of persons attribute their feelings of happiness to SRS, there appears to be no direct relation between the subjective well-being and the phase of therapy. Those who have completed SRS are not happier or less happy than those who are still in the initial phase of therapy. In other words, a person’s positive evaluation of his/her life-in-its-totality is not directly related to his/her progress in physical adjustment to the opposite sex.”

This led her to two conclusions. First, “Alleviation of the gender problems does not automatically lead to a happy and lighthearted life. On the contrary, SRS can lead to new problems.”

But second, she and other researchers assumed transgender medical interventions started too late in life to spare transitioners “the burden of a past life” going forward. “Cohen-Kettenis believed that transsexuals would experience better outcomes if they started treatment before adulthood,” said sociologist Michael Biggs. “By the mid-1990s, she was referring some patients aged 16 and 17 to the Amsterdam clinic for endocrinological intervention prior to cross-sex hormones.”

The transgender industry’s failure to help adults became its basis for prescribing transgender procedures to children. In time, Cohen-Kettenis and Delemarre-van de Waal created The Dutch Protocol: puberty blockers at age 12, cross-sex hormone injections at 16, and transgender surgery at age 18. This affirmation model quickly became adopted across the world, with increasing emphasis in the United States.

Much of the HHS report focuses on the failed scientific basis and adverse impacts that transgender ideology in general, and transgender medical interventions in particular, have on minors. That follows Europe’s widescale retreat from an affirmation-based approach to adolescent transgender identity. It also builds on and cites such research as the Cass Review — led by U.K. Dr. Hilary Cass, a former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health — a comprehensive, 388-page report released last April that found “remarkably weak evidence” for the use of puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones and “no evidence that gender-affirmative treatments reduce” suicide for trans-identifying youth.

But the harms do not magically end for those who began transgender “treatments” in adulthood. Walt Heyer, whose grandmother began dressing him as a girl at the age of four, began hormone therapy near the age of 40, had transgender surgery three years later, and left his wife and two children in his mid-40s to live as a woman named Laura Jensen. After eight years of continuing emotional desolation, he again embraced his God-given natal sex. Heyer later wrote his book, “TransLife Survivor,” to share “the raw emotions and experiences of people who are harmed by the grand — and dangerous — experiment of cross-sex hormones and surgical affirmation procedures.”

Injecting confused people with cross-sex “hormones devalue a person, and the surgery destroys people,” said Heyer.

The results dovetail from results from a transgender clinic that found those who undergo transgender surgeries feel lonelier and more depressed afterwards. “In our study, the level of life satisfaction in transgender people was not increased in transgender people who had undergone gender-affirming surgery as compared to those who were unoperated,” says a study published Tuesday in BMC Public Health. “[O]ur data indicate that transgender and gender diverse people, who have undergone gender reassignment surgery feel lonelier” than transgender-identified people who have not elected to have surgery, found a separate study published in May 2023 in the journal Healthcare (Basel).

Experts hailed the administration for having the courage to investigate the state of transgender science. “I’m so grateful that we are living during an administration that has courage and is doing what they said they would do: Looking at all of the science but also looking at the ideology … with common sense,” Jennifer Bauwens, director of the Center for Family Studies at Family Research Council, told “Washington Watch” last week. “That’s really the heart behind this administration, is common sense. And I think we can get a lot done by just adhering to those basic principles.”