Did Biden, Harris know there’s ‘scant evidence’ for ‘gender-affirming care’ when they pushed it on kids?

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have repeatedly supported “gender-affirming care” for “transgender” minors, but the National Institutes of Health has approved multiple research grants acknowledging there is “scant evidence” to support the idea that experimental medical interventions improve the lives of children who identify as the opposite sex.

America First Legal, a nonprofit organization that describes its mission as protecting Americans’ rights from “an unholy alliance of corrupt special interests, big tech titans, the fake news media, and liberal Washington politicians,” filed a Freedom of Information Act request aiming to uncover communications between the White House and the NIH regarding potential harm to children and adolescents caused by the interventions euphemistically referred to as “gender-affirming care.”

“While the rest of the world has rightfully pulled back on life-altering ‘gender’ experiments on children, the Biden-Harris administration is full steam ahead despite scant and dubious ‘evidence’ of any so-called benefits but plenty of data of the clear and obvious harm,” Ian Prior, a senior adviser at America First Legal, told The Daily Signal in a written statement Friday.

Prior was referring to European countries such as the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Finland that have begun to reverse the trend of pushing “gender-affirming care” on children.

“America First Legal is committed to finding out exactly what the Biden-Harris administration knew, didn’t know, and didn’t care about while they were pushing this crime against humanity on our nation’s children,” Prior added.

The records request, provided exclusively to The Daily Signal, asks the NIH for “all communications with the White House and the Executive Office of the President regarding the potential harm to children and adolescents caused by ‘gender affirming’ care.”

In the request, America First Legal cites documents obtained by Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit founded by presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Those records show that the National Institutes of Health approved multiple grants for research into “gender-affirming care” that acknowledge the scarcity of evidence supporting such medical interventions.

“Children’s Health Defense is happy to provide this [Freedom of Information Act] information to AFL for further analysis and investigation,” Mary Holland, the group’s CEO, said in a written statement. “The public needs to understand fully the government’s policies on transgenderism, especially as it relates to children.”

NIH Grants Reveal ‘Scant Evidence’

Children’s Hospital Los Angeles applied for a research grant for which the NIH first awarded funds in 2015, according to records provided to Children’s Health Defense. The federal government has awarded $7.5 million to date for this research.

When requesting funds, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles wrote that it aimed to “expand the scant evidence-base currently guiding the clinical care of [transgender and gender dysphoric] youth and thus, is of considerable public health significance.” (Gender dysphoria refers to the condition of persistently and painfully identifying with the gender opposite one’s biological sex.)

The hospital’s grant application noted that, while previous studies focused on adults who underwent “treatments,” “no known U.S. studies have examined similar outcomes among transgender youth with gender dysphoria.”

“No U.S. data have been collected on the longer-term physiological impact on [transgender and gender-nonconforming] youth initiating [gonadatropin-releasing hormone agonists] in early puberty,” the grant application noted, referring to the drugs often euphemistically referred to as “puberty blockers.”

The Food and Drug Administration has not approved these drugs—first developed to treat cancers that feed on testosterone and estrogen—for gender dysphoria among minors. Prisons use the same drugs to carry out the “chemical castration” of sex offenders.

The hospital’s grant application noted, “Very limited data also exist on the longer-term psychosocial outcomes of [transgender and gender dysphoric] youth initiating any gender-affirming medical care.”

Children’s Health Defense also obtained a grant application from the Visiting Nurse Service of New York, which noted a “dearth of evidence on health care needs of [transgender and non-binary] individuals after surgery, their psychosocial adjustment during this phase of their identity development, their quality of life and long-term physical and emotional wellbeing.” It also noted the “significant gap in the current evidence on best practices.”

The federal government has awarded $2.8 million for this research, first funded in 2021.

Finally, the nonprofit highlighted a grant to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Since August 2022, the federal government has spent $1.7 million on this research. This study aims to clarify whether the use of estrogen in males who identify as female leads to increasing blood clots.

The grant application laid out a hypothesis: “Youth receiving estrogen for [‘gender-affirming’ hormone therapy] will exhibit progressive prothrombotic changes in the coagulation system that increase with longer time on [‘gender-affirming’ hormone therapy].”

The application acknowledged that “the thrombosis risk of using estrogen [‘gender-affirming’ hormone therapy] in youth as per current practice guidelines is unknown,” but that the longer an adult male takes estrogen as a cross-sex hormone, the greater his risk of blood clots, studies show.

Those previous studies are inadequate, the application noted, because “studies reporting an association of [‘gender-affirming’ hormone therapy] with thrombosis were conducted with outdated treatment regimens and did not include [transgender] youth, who are likely to receive [‘gender-affirming’ hormone therapy] for a much longer time than [transgender] adults.”

The Biden-Harris Narrative

Despite the lack of evidence supporting “gender-affirming care” for minors, the Biden-Harris administration has loudly supported so-called puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for Americans under 18.

America First Legal pointed to a public White House statement from March 31, 2022, celebrating the “Transgender Day of Visibility,” as evidence of the White House’s loud support for these experimental treatments.

That document laid out many actions the Biden-Harris administration took to promote “gender-affirming care” for minors. Those actions included:

• The Justice Department sent a letter to state attorneys general suggesting that laws banning experimental interventions for kids might violate federal law.
• A document from the Department of Health and Human Services purported to explain why “gender-affirming care” is “important to transgender, nonbinary, and other gender expansive young people’s well-being.”
• HHS actions to “support transgender children in receiving the care they need” in response to states that “target parents and doctors who provide gender-affirming care to transgender children with child abuse investigations.”

In a particularly noteworthy passage, the White House document also noted that the NIH will “increase funding for research on gender-affirming procedures to further develop the evidence base for improved standards of care.”

In other words, while most of the administration was working overtime to protect these experimental transgender interventions on kids, at least one agency was asking whether pumping cross-sex hormones and chemical castration drugs into kids was a good idea after all.

Previous Evidence Against ‘Gender-Affirming Care’

America First Legal previously exposed a high-ranking FDA official who urged the federal agency to approve “puberty blockers” for minors, even while acknowledging that preliminary studies revealed that minors who take the drugs experience “increased risk of depression and suicidality, as well as increased seizure risk.”

Internal documents from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, a pro-transgender activist group, revealed that WPATH leaders knew about various side effects of “gender-affirming care,” including cancer in teens, reduced sexual function, and the lack of informed consent for procedures with lifelong impacts. These medical professionals endorse the experimental treatments anyway.

Many doctors also testified in favor of a Florida rule that would prevent Medicaid dollars from funding “gender-affirming care.” The doctors—including psychiatrists, endocrinologists, neurologists, and a former WPATH leader—testified that these interventions are experimental and may do more harm than good.

[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by The Daily Signal.]

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