The chemical and surgical mutilation of children is almost over

Many children’s lives have been ruined by gender ideology, but Donald Trump’s latest executive order is an important step towards restoring sanity.

A society that harms its children cannot be said to be civilised. For all that we in the west pride ourselves on our liberal consensus, we have nonetheless enabled the rise of an ideology that has been responsible for the sterilisation and mutilation of children on the basis of a pseudoscientific and cultish faith in ‘gender identity’. Young people who desperately required therapeutic support were instead fast-tracked into medicalisation. Countless lives have been ruined, and all because the so-called ‘adults in the room’ allowed themselves to be cowed by the demands of the high priests of a dangerous new religion.

Donald Trump has now signed an executive order – ‘Protecting children from chemical and surgical mutilation’ – which seeks to halt this barbaric state-sanctioned practice. It bans federal agencies from promoting ‘gender-affirming healthcare’ for minors. This is long overdue, and it should be celebrated irrespective of one’s political affiliation. After years of word games and euphemism, the phrasing of this executive order is refreshingly frank.

‘Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions. This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation’s history, and it must end.

Countless children soon regret that they have been mutilated and begin to grasp the horrifying tragedy that they will never be able to conceive children of their own or nurture their children through breastfeeding. Moreover, these vulnerable youths’ medical bills may rise throughout their lifetimes, as they are often trapped with lifelong medical complications, a losing war with their own bodies, and, tragically, sterilization.

Accordingly, it is the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called “transition” of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.’

In a section entitled ‘Ending Reliance on Junk Science’ – again, the candour is wonderful to read – the government specifically blames the influence of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). It orders agencies to ‘rescind or amend all policies that rely on WPATH guidance, including WPATH’s “Standards of Care Version 8”’.

For those who don’t know – and this will be many who rely solely on the mainstream media – WPATH is a US-based activist body that has been regarded as the leading global authority on ‘gender medicine’, influencing policy decisions in various countries, including here in the UK via the NHS. Files leaked from WPATH in March 2024 revealed a shocking flouting of basic ethical standards. Internal memos and video recordings of leading WPATH members showed that they were fully aware that many patients were unable to give informed consent to these life-altering procedures, either because they were too young or suffering from psychological disorders.

For instance, when one nurse contacted WPATH to discuss her ethical qualms about allowing a schizophrenic patient to undergo treatment, one of the authors of WPATH’s Standards of Care replied: ‘I’m missing why you are perplexed. The mere presence of psychiatric illness should not block a person’s ability to start hormones if they have persistent gender dysphoria, capacity to consent, and the benefits of starting hormones outweigh the risks. So why the internal struggle as to the “right thing to do?”’ One therapist in California mentioned that he was able to secure treatment for patients who were homeless, suffering from PTSD or depression, and that in one case this had led to an orchiectomy (removal of the testicles). It seemed almost boastful.

The leaked details about children were even more disturbing. Young people who could not possibly comprehend the implications of an existence without fertility or even basic sexual function were allowed to be put on a pathway to lifelong treatment. One leading WPATH ‘expert’ acknowledged in one message:

‘It’s out of their developmental range to understand the extent to which some of these medical interventions are impacting them… They’ll say they understand, but then they’ll say something else that makes you think, oh, they didn’t really understand that they are going to have facial hair, right?’

And then there was the endocrinologist who admitted that ‘we’re often explaining these sorts of things to people who haven’t even had biology in high school yet’.

The leaking of these internal memos and recordings should have been the end of the ‘gender-affirming’ mania. Thanks to the work of journalists Michael Shellenberger and Mia Hughes, with support from Genspect and other campaigners, the ‘WPATH Files’ were widely disseminated. A comprehensive overview was written by Mia Hughes for the Environmental Progress think-tank. The title said it all – The WPATH Files: Pseudoscientific Surgical and Hormonal Experiments on Children, Adolescents, and Vulnerable Adults.

Yet the scandal went largely unreported in the mainstream media. The BBC has, to date, not once mentioned the WPATH Files or their significance in exposing the greatest medical scandal of the century. I was able to produce a special edition of Free Speech Nation on the subject in March 2024, which can be watched in full here.

I had repeatedly contacted the BBC press office to ask why there had been no coverage, an extraordinary omission for the state broadcaster. Even after the release of the Cass Review and its explicit criticism of the influence of WPATH on the NHS, the BBC refused to respond to my enquiries. Finally, in April 2024, a reply was sent, which read: ‘News items are chosen by the news editors of the day based on a number of factors.’ While this did not even begin to answer the question, it did prove that the press office would rather take an evasive approach than face a challenge about the organisation’s ideological bias.

There has never been any justification for medicalising children who are experiencing psychological difficulties around the issue of gender. As Helen Joyce has pointed out in her book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, research shows around 80 per cent of children eventually become reconciled with their sex, either before or in the early stages of puberty, if they ‘are permitted to express themselves how they wish but not encouraged to believe that they are members of the opposite sex’. In other words, doctors were blocking the cure.

In almost all cases, puberty blockers lead to the prescription of cross-sex hormones, which are sometimes followed by surgical intervention. As psychiatrist Dr Az Hakeem has pointed out, puberty blockers amount to a form of chemical castration. ‘We watch a film about Alan Turing and feel sorry for him and say how can we possibly have done this,’ he says, ‘but we’re doing the same thing to our children’. Following the recommendations of the Cass Review, the UK government has now banned puberty blockers entirely. But the likes of Susie Green – the former head of trans youth charity Mermaids, who took her son to Thailand on his sixteenth birthday to have him castrated – are still seeking loopholes to inflict similar damage on other children.

Such people will not be stopped until the law steps in, which is precisely why the recent measures by Wes Streeting for the Labour government in the UK, and now the executive order by Donald Trump, are so seismic. We should never forget that the WPATH ‘Standards of Care’ include an entire chapter on ‘eunuchs’, and urge medical practitioners to remove the testes of patients if they feel that they have an innate ‘eunuch identity’. That such insanely medieval guidelines were, for a while at least, promoted by the NHS, tells us all we need to know about how far the medical establishment had descended. They may as well have been prescribing bloodletting and exorcisms.

Trump will doubtless be accused of ‘fascism’ and ‘trans genocide’ for signing this executive order. But as the woke orthodoxy continues to evaporate, such histrionic language is already losing its power. This is a decisive blow against the state-approved abuse of children. Gender identity ideology still prevails in many schools and public institutions, and the states that have not banned paediatric gender treatment will continue to issue these experimental drugs, so complacency would be a mistake. We are not quite out of the woods yet, but we are certainly beginning to see glimmers of daylight.

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