by Laurel Duggan
The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital pressured a 14-year-old boy’s mother to consent to a puberty blocker implant and, when his mental health drastically declined, refused to take it out, according to The Free Press.
Casey began experimenting with his gender identity at age 13 and had no prior history of gender confusion, but when he visited the center at age 14 for counseling he was rushed onto puberty blockers, his mother, Caroline, told The Free Press. Medical professionals downplayed the seriousness of the drug’s infertility risk and hyped up the risk of suicide in front of her child to pressure her to consent to the drugs, she told the outlet.
When Casey first heard about transgenderism at age 13 he thought, “Holy crap! You can do that?” he told The Free Press; he began experimenting with a genderfluid identity and after six months began identifying as a transgender girl and using female pronouns. By the time he visited the transgender center for counseling, he had already heard about puberty blockers and was determined to get them.
The clinic required consent from both Casey’s mother and father, who have joint legal custody, in order to start the blockers; the father quickly consented, but Caroline was more skeptical, according to The Free Press. She eventually agreed following pressure from clinic staff, but revoked her consent after Casey’ life deteriorated while on the medication.
“Please be advised that I’m revoking my consent for this course of medical treatment,” Caroline’s email to the clinic read, according to The Free Press. “Grades have dropped, there’s been an in-patient behavioral health visit and now he’s on 5 different medications. Lexipro [sic], Trazadone [sic], Buspar, etc. [Casey] is a shell of his former self riddled with anxiety. Who knows if it’s because of the hormone blockers or the other medications. I revoke my consent. I want the hormone blocker removed. Thank you.”
The clinic told her that, in the case of joint custody agreements, they couldn’t remove the blocker without both parents’ consent, and the blocker implant is still in place.
“He was more concerned with what would make me happier,” Casey told the outlet in reference to his father’s decision to support the puberty blocker use. “My mom was more concerned about the future and my dad was more concerned about how I felt.”
Clinic employees regularly warned parents that their children would likely commit suicide if they were denied puberty blocking drugs or other transgender medical interventions, according to former case manager Jamie Reed, whose whistleblower account led to an ongoing investigation of the transgender center earlier this year. In reality, transgender suicide rates are vastly exaggerated, and a decade-long study at the UK’s Gender Identity Development Service found the suicide rate to be 0.03%.
When clinicians told Caroline in front of her son that he was at risk for suicide if she withheld consent for puberty blockers, she felt that “the therapist was planting the idea for him right there.”
“I was flabbergasted, and I really felt like this is not a meeting for me to get answers to my questions, and for everybody to have equal say,” she told The Free Press. “This is like I’m the last man standing and now it’s being implied that if I don’t okay this, I don’t care if my kid kills himself.”
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Laurel Duggan is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.
Photo “Doctor and Child” by Pavel Danilyuk.
This prescribing physician is practicing malpractice. I encourage the mother to seek legal counsel and have this litigated in court. In the interim she should contact child protective services who could secure an emergency injunction stopping the medication immediately. Having to secure permission from both parties when there is co-custody is both impractical and nonsensical.