Category: Sex change
Rigged report exposed: Utah review appears to defend child sex-altering drugs while ignoring sterility and sexual risk
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) ratified legislation in January 2023 prohibiting health care providers from providing sex-altering surgeries or drugs to minors.
The law, which enraged gender ideologues and other non-straight activists, also required the Utah Department of Health and Human Services to conduct a “systematic review of the medical evidence regarding hormonal transgender treatments and provide recommendations to the Legislature.”
The HHS’ statutorily mandated review, which was completed last year then submitted in May 2025 to the legislature, painted the ruinous trans-drugs — which are also used to sterilize sex offenders — in a positive light, characterizing them as “effective.”
According to a damning new report from the medical advocacy group Do No Harm, however, the Utah review — which was conducted on behalf of the HHS by the University of Utah College of Pharmacy’s Drug Regimen Review Center — “is filled with falsehoods and serves as an aid to push harmful medical interventions as the answer to minors’ confusion, all while blatantly ignoring the associated risks.”
‘Utah legislators must not rely on a report that clearly undermines the safety and well-being of minors.’
While the executive summary for the review states that the HHS “does not take a position on whether to lift the moratorium” and the authors were not contracted to include a synthesis of the evidence they came across, the over-1,000-page review nevertheless delivers what is effectively an endorsement of sex-altering drugs for minors:
After having spent many months searching for, reading, and evaluating the available literature, it was impossible for us to avoid drawing some high-level conclusions. Namely, the consensus of the evidence supports that the treatments are effective in terms of mental health, psychosocial outcomes, and the induction of the body changes consistent with the affirmed gender in pediatric GD patients. The evidence also supports that the treatments are safe in terms of changes to bone density, cardiovascular risk factors, metabolic changes, and cancer.
Do No Harm indicated that the Utah review “deviates from established standards for systematic reviews, emphasizes the volume of evidence over its quality, relies uncritically on guidelines from self-proclaimed experts, neglects significant life-altering adverse effects, and includes input from advisers, some of whom demonstrate bias in favor of ‘gender-affirming care’ for minors.”
RELATED: ‘Not medicine — it’s malpractice’: Trump HHS buries child sex-change regime with damning report
Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Do No Harm noted, for instance, that the review glossed over some of the worst, most life-changing effects of gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonists, known as “puberty blockers,” and cross-sex hormones — namely infertility, sterility, and sexual dysfunction. While admitting that “infertility is a known risk,” the authors of the review didn’t bother including it as an outcome of focus in their report. The risk of sexual dysfunction, meanwhile, was apparently not mentioned once.
Extra to leaning heavily on low-quality scientific literature, much of which was observational and not trial-based, the review may have also been ideologically contaminated. After all, among the advisers who consulted on the project were Nikki Mihalopoulos, chief of the division of adolescent medicine for the department of pediatrics at the University of Utah School of Medicine, and Brooks Keeshin, a professor of pediatrics at the university. Both have written positively about “gender-affirming care” for minors in recent years.
Mihalopoulos co-authored a 2021 paper that stated, “Pediatric health care providers can play a critical role in building solutions in policy and advocacy … to improve the health of transgender/gender diverse youth. Many government entities, especially at the state and local level, actively resist efforts promoting equal rights.”
Keeshin wrote in an article published last year that “as states pass adolescent bans on gender-affirming care across the country, Utah offers a potential pathway forward in restrictive states to help maintain or open access to care.” Keeshin also suggested that some adolescents could benefit from radical sex-rejecting medical interventions.
Do No Harm concluded on the basis of these and other issues with the review that Utah lawmakers are better off turning to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ thorough and peer-reviewed report, which was released last month.
The federal HHS’ report underscored that “the harms from sex-rejecting procedures — including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical operations — are significant, long-term, and too often ignored or inadequately tracked.”
Michelle Havrilla, Do No Harm’s director of programs, said in a statement, “This Utah Report is unreliable, unscientific, and fails to meet the standards of a systematic review.”
“The Report’s inaccuracies and bias diminish its credibility and allow left-wing activists to weaponize it for their political machinations. Utah legislators must not rely on a report that clearly undermines the safety and well-being of minors,” added Havrilla.
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‘Not medicine — it’s malpractice’: Trump HHS buries child sex-change regime with damning report
The Department of Health and Human Services delivered what could prove to be a lethal blow this week to the profitable and predatory child sex-change industry that has been on the defensive since President Donald Trump’s Jan. 28 executive order directing all federal agencies to ensure that medical institutions receiving federal funding “end the chemical and surgical mutilation of children.”
HHS published an exhaustive peer-reviewed report on Wednesday that should make abundantly clear to those still clinging to LGBT activists’ preferred narrative about so-called “gender-affirming care” that “the harms from sex-rejecting procedures — including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical operations — are significant, long term, and too often ignored or inadequately tracked.”
“This is a new day in the Department of Health and Human Services. It’s a new day in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health, a new day for the country,” Admiral Brian Christine, assistant secretary for HHS, told Blaze News. “It is because of President Trump and Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that this information has come out.”
‘The HHS report should put an end to the scourge of child mutilation masquerading as health care.’
The 410-page report, titled “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices,” reads as the weightier American counterpart to Britain’s damning Cass Review, detailing:
- the often glossed-over risks and medical uncertainties involved with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and sex-change genital mutilations;
- the unscientific nature and strategic omissions of fact in the World Professional Association of Transgender Health guidelines;
- the manipulation of medical definitions undertaken in service of gender ideologues’ medical agendas;
- ethical concerns regarding consent for sex-change procedures as well as the regret often experienced by victims of such procedures; and
- the “international retreat” from the “gender-affirming” model of care.
The report — which National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya indicated “marks a turning point for American medicine” — notes that the overall quality of evidence concerning the effects of sex-change medical interventions on long-term health, psychological outcomes, quality of life, and regret was found to be “very low.”
Accordingly, the beneficial effects alleged in the literature and often cited by gender ideologues are likely to differ substantially from the actual effects of the sex-change procedures.
‘It’s literally a billion-dollar industry. It creates lifelong customers.’
What’s more, the report noted that while the risks of child sex changes are many and unmistakable — including infertility, sexual dysfunction, impaired bone density accrual, surgical complications, and heart, metabolic, and psychiatric disorders — publication bias, a failure of existing studies to adequately track and report harms, and other factors may have obfuscated the true fallout of so-called “gender-affirming care.”
The report minces no words in its conclusion, stating:
Many U.S. medical professionals and associations have fallen short of their duty to prioritize the health interests of young patients. First, there was a rapid expansion and implementation of a clinical protocol that lacked sufficient scientific and ethical justification. Second, when confronted with compelling evidence that this protocol did not deliver the health benefits it promised, and that other countries were changing their policies appropriately, U.S. medical professionals and associations failed to reconsider the “gender-affirming” approach. Third, conflicting evidence — evidence that challenged the foundational assumptions of the protocol and the professional standing of its advocates — was mischaracterized or insufficiently acknowledged. Finally, dissenting perspectives were marginalized, and those who voiced them were disparaged.
“The American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics peddled the lie that chemical and surgical sex-rejecting procedures could be good for children,” HHS Secretary Kennedy said in a statement.
“They betrayed their oath to first do no harm, and their so-called ‘gender-affirming care’ has inflicted lasting physical and psychological damage on vulnerable young people,” continued Kennedy. “That is not medicine — it’s malpractice.”
RELATED: Sacrificing body parts and informed consent to the sex-change regime
Photo by Bob Riha Jr./Getty Images
When other Western nations, Britain in particular, began to re-evaluate their barbaric medical approaches to gender dysphoria, the Biden administration and the U.S. medical establishment dug in their heels and pushed the child sex-change regime to new extremes.
For instance, Biden’s transvestic Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services Rachel Levine, formerly Richard Levine, successfully pressured WPATH to drop its recommended minimum age requirements for sex-change mutilations. His reasoning for lowering the recommended age minimums — 17 for genital mutilations, 15 for healthy breast removals, 16 for breast implants, and 14 for hormone treatments — was apparently not based on scientific evidence but on politics.
Levine’s successor, Trump HHS Assistant Secretary Brian Christine, told Blaze News, “There was absolutely an effort by the prior administration and, very specifically, an absolute effort by the individual who was the prior assistant secretary for health, Rachel Levine,” to continue politicizing children’s health.
He added that both ideology and profit prompted medical professionals and associations to similarly dig in their heels.
“It’s literally a billion-dollar industry. It creates lifelong customers,” said Christine. “You bring a little boy or a little girl in and you have them either get hormones or they get a mutilating surgery — you’ve created a lifelong customer. You’ve created someone who’s going to come back again and again and again because of surgical complications or other things going on.”
Gender dysphoria is an “emotional and mental condition,” he explained. “There’s no question about that. These individuals who truly have gender dysphoria, they suffer terribly. They deserve compassion. They deserve mental health care. What they don’t need are sex-rejecting surgeries.”
Christine said that treating gender dysphoria as a mental health condition is especially important with kids. “You should treat them with mental health care because we know that if you do, the majority of these kids, by the time they’re in their late teens, are very comfortable in their own skin,” he said.
Neeraja Deshpande, policy analyst for the Independent Women’s Forum, said that the report, “in addition to creating a more transparent system, confirms once and for all what never should have been up for debate to begin with: that so-called surgical and chemical body alteration in the name of ‘gender transition’ is a medical danger to children.”
Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, said in a statement to Blaze News, “The HHS report should put an end to the scourge of child mutilation masquerading as health care.”
Luis Soto/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
“The peer-reviewed study only confirms what the American Principles Project and anyone with common sense has known all along: The gender industrial complex relies on bad faith, bad science, and a radical ideology that places the financial interest of drug companies over those of children,” said Schilling.
Schilling suggested to Blaze News that elements within the child sex-change regime are now more likely to reap the whirlwind in court.
“This is, at a minimum, some type of consumer fraud. I do think that because of how horrific the harm that they did was that it does cross into serious criminal areas.”
While Schilling noted that the industry presently enjoys robust protection from trial attorneys and left-wing institutions, once major legal actions break through, prompting big payouts, “then you’ll have blood in the water, and the sharks will start circling.”
Schilling alluded to Chloe Cole‘s lawsuit as one such potential breakthrough action.
Cole, a detransitioner who has raised awareness across the country about the horrors and fallout of sex-change medical interventions, has sued Kaiser Permanente for alleged medical negligence in connection with the sex-rejecting procedures the health system performed on her as a minor.
Schilling commended the numerous experts who put their names to the report — including doctors and scientists from the Baylor College of Medicine, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Duke University — stating, “They’re very courageous for doing this. This is a very powerful and embedded industry that’s been doing really big and terrible things in the country … and for these guys to put their names behind it is a very big deal.”
When asked whether this report ultimately amounts to a lethal blow against the sex-change regime, HHS Assistant Secretary Christine told Blaze News, “Yeah, we certainly hope so. We certainly believe it will be. Listen, our job in the administration is to protect our children, protect our citizens. Our job is to produce gold-standard science. That’s exactly what we have done. It’s exactly what we’re doing.”
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