According to various reports, the National Institutes of Health is using federal tax dollars to launch a study “proving” it’s OK to perform sex-change operations on children.

Researchers intend to show transgender affirmation therapy is safe and effective for children who disagree with their biological sex. John Stonestreet at the Colson Center for Christian Worldview writes,

Let’s be clear about what “affirmation therapy” really means: Children are given high doses of puberty-suppressing drugs. Doctors then flood their systems with testosterone or estrogen to induce the formation of opposite-sex characteristics like breasts in males and facial hair in females. Some patients, partway through this process, will undergo “sex-reassignment surgery” in which their internal and even external genitals are removed or remodeled.

This so-called “treatment” will render them infertile for life and can create a host of side-effects, like cancer, infections, gallbladder diseases, and spikes in blood pressure. There is also no long-term research on how these high doses of hormones affect bodies in the long run—bodies that weren’t designed to handle them in the first place.

There is, however, abundant data on the psychological damage of medically “transitioning.” One study from Great Britain found that 20 percent of patients who’d undergone this procedure regretted it. Walt Heyer, a man who formerly lived as a transgender woman and now identifies with his biological sex once again, thinks that’s a serious underestimation.

Advocates for children have said time and time again that encouraging kids to disagree with their biological sex is dangerous.

The American College of Pediatricians writes, “puberty is not a disease and puberty-blocking hormones can be dangerous. Reversible or not, puberty- blocking hormones induce a state of disease — the absence of puberty — and inhibit growth and fertility in a previously biologically healthy child.”

Read John Stonestreet’s entire column here.

Photo Credit: By Rafael Alcarde Palomares (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons