New standards of care proposed by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) could potentially lower the age requirement to 14 or younger for gender dysphoric students seeking puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and gender reassignment surgery.
“To lower the age at which medicalization begins doesn't make any sense,” said Dr. Miriam Grossman, a child-adolescent psychiatrist. "It's the opposite that has to happen. We have to be much more cautious and careful about medicalization instead of making it more available at an earlier age.”
Being medicalized refers to the process of being prescribed puberty blockers and subsequently opposite sex hormones.
“The financial interest is that they become lifelong patients and they are going to need to be on hormones for the rest of their lives,” Grossman told the Southern California Record. “Medicaid is going to have to pay for them and that's a big incentive right there and then you have the fact that once they go on these hormones, a lot of them will go on to having surgical procedures, which of course are extremely expensive.”
California widely accepts WPATH standards of care guidelines, according to media reports.
“We need to be following in the footsteps of other countries, such as Sweden, Finland and the United Kingdom, that have looked very closely at the medicalization of kids and decided to make a U-turn, and put up a red light in order to be much more cautious and careful,” Grossman said.
Currently, gender treatments are not administered until an individual is 18 years old.
“It is the biggest decision that anyone is going to make in their whole lives,” Grossman said. “We're talking about irreversible physical changes like infertility and all sorts of secondary sex characteristics, such as voice lowering, which is permanent.”
As previously reported, the number of gender surgeries for people born females in the U.S. quadrupled between 2016 and 2017 with biological women making up 70% of gender reassignment operations.
“Right now in society, we hear so much about those that have privilege, those that are oppressed, those that are minorities and marginalized, and the kids are being made to feel guilty about being middle class, being white and some of them might feel like the only thing they can do to show solidarity to the oppressed and marginalized population is to actually join them and this is the door that's open to them,” Grossman added.