A whistleblower doctor is revealing gender ideology’s pervasive and disastrous effects on the medical field.
The cultural shift toward gender ideology happened in 2020 when the pandemic removed guardrails around medicine, the doctor told City Journal’s Christopher Rufo, who interviewed the physician on the condition of anonymity.
Normally, doctors operate under the authority of the professional societies that govern their specific practices, the doctor said, but during COVID, medical decrees started coming down without peer review or evidence, such as masks, social distancing, and emergency-use authorizations.
“Everyone within the medical community knew that if he questioned transgender ideology, he would suffer the same type of repercussions that had happened during Covid,” the doctor said.
The doctor also threw cold water on the idea that a child must be affirmed in his or her new gender identity to avoid the risk of suicide. In fact, affirmation is harmful, the physician said.
“You have these children who are going through confusing times, difficult times; when you affirm this belief system, what you’re really doing is telling them: ‘You hate yourself at this moment, and I will affirm that,'” the physician said. “We have to ask ourselves, why do these people have such high rates of suicide? Because we’re affirming that they should hate themselves and that they should try to destroy themselves.”
The physician recalled a story about a teenage boy with a severe case of Crohn’s disease at the children’s hospital who had received multiple surgeries. One day, the teen was being wheeled into the operating room yet again, and at the same time, another child was headed to another operating room to have an implant put into his arm so his hormones could be suppressed, the doctor remembered.
“The first kid had no choice. He had no control over his condition of Crohn’s,” the physician said. “But the second kid was put into that situation because of the psychiatrists, the psychologists, the doctors, the politicians, and those in the media who convinced him that this was the correct thing to do to cure his mental anguish.”
The whistleblower doctor sounded the alarm in particular on puberty blockers.
Puberty blockers shut down the activity of the hypothalamus, which “controls all the other hormonal structures in your body—your sexual development, your emotions, your fight-or-flight response, everything.”
The hypothalamus is “not just a hormone factory” though, the doctor explained.
“It’s this system that allows you to stand in awe of the beauty of a sunset, or to hear the sounds of orchestral music and to stop whatever you’re doing and want to listen. And I always think that if someone were to ask me, ‘Where is it that you would look for the divine spark in each individual?’ I would say that it would be somewhere ‘beneath the inner chamber,’ which is the Greek derivation of the term hypothalamus. To shut down that system is to shut down what makes us human,” the doctor said.
The physician said doctors feel the need to “express their faith” to other believers in the “ideology” of transgenderism.
“If these rituals are not derived from a cultural heritage with a moral tradition, they become susceptible to unbound human depravity,” the doctor said. “When you look at the Judeo-Christian tradition, you have the outlawing of child sacrifice and other ways that standards were codified. But in the transgender ideology, none of these guardrails exist. So, what becomes the greatest expression of faith to other believers? To sacrifice the most pure and innocent.”
Asked by Rufo what the future of transgender medicine looks like, the physician responded, “I don’t know. I pray that there is a change.”
Many medical professionals have lent their full-throated support to minors receiving puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and in some cases, surgical transitions, which can mean double mastectomies and genital surgery.
Meanwhile, critics have sounded the alarm about the permanent effects of these treatments and procedures.
Both puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones come with serious health risks. Puberty blockers can affect bone growth and density and cause sexual dysfunction, voice damage, and infertility, among other issues. Cross-sex hormones can cause infertility, deadly blood clots, heart attacks, increased cancer risks of the breasts and ovaries, liver dysfunction, worsening psychological illness, and other serious conditions.
Meanwhile, it is more popular than ever for youth to adopt new gender identities. An estimated 300,000 minors aged 13 to 17 identified as transgender as of last year.