Category: LC Video

Twenty-six U.S. states have banned certain medical interventions for children with gender dysphoria. In a free country, the barrier for straight up banning a medical intervention needs to be very high. The evidence needs to be overwhelming that such interventions are bad—that they do far more harm than good. That is not the case for puberty suppressing drugs, hormone replacement therapy, or even surgery. Such bans are an insult to liberty and should be removed.

If a doctor, parent, and child, all agree that a particular medical intervention is the best solution for their problem, then who the Hell is the government to stop them? Who the Hell are you to stop them? It doesn’t matter how you feel about transgenders, unless such interventions are clearly net bad for patients to the point where no reasonable person would perform them, they should not be banned.

There are lots of studies on transgender interventions, and there is some evidence that puberty suppression, hormones, and/or surgery help children and adolescents with their gender dysphoria, their quality of life, depression, and even lessens their chance of suicide. Unfortunately, that evidence is mixed and the studies are far from conclusive. Researchers on both sides seem biased and exaggerate the quality of evidence for their positions while undervaluing the evidence in favor of other positions.

The evidence is mixed enough that doctors and parents need to approach such decisions with a heavy dose of caution. The burden of evidence for stopping, and especially changing, a child’s natural puberty needs to fall on the intervention. If doctors are negligently transitioning kids who should not be transitioned, then those doctors should be charged and sued under normal medical malpractice or negligence laws. We don’t need to ban procedures to enforce basic medical law.

I strongly encourage parents and medical professionals to be careful about transitioning children, and for parents to get second opinions from different-thinking doctors. The evidence in favor of such interventions is quite modest, and it’s hard to tell which children are more likely to benefit from them. Nevertheless, such decisions should be in the hands of the parents, doctors, and the children, not the government. We are not truly a free country if medical interventions can be banned on such weak justifications.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o70COGCfz98