Senate HELP Committee Hearing on Pediatric Sex-Rejecting Interventions
On June 3, the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP) held a hearing on pediatric sex-rejecting interventions, Protecting Our Children: Exposing the Dangers of Irreversible Gender Transition Procedures on Minors. Two witnesses testified in support of protecting children from these harmful interventions: Dr. Miceli of Do No Harm and Chloe Cole, a detransitioner and advocate.
The hearing was led by U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, M.D., who has urged Congress to protect children from harmful gender ideology and remove any federal funding for these interventions. Cassidy stated, “It’s our jobs as parents, as doctors, as teachers to protect children from harm.”
ADPed’s Adolescent Sexuality Committee submitted a written testimony to the HELP Committee, providing scientific evidence that sex-rejecting interventions for minors are irreversible, harmful, and pose lifelong medical risks.
States Advocate to Reclaim June as Family Month
Several states have designated June as “Nuclear Family Month,” “Strong Families Month,” or “Fidelity Month,” advocating that America should place greater emphasis on family, marriage, and faith rather than ideological interests.
These efforts are an important cultural reinstatement of the importance of strong families and parental involvement in children’s lives. ACPeds research shows that stable, healthy families are among the most significant contributors to children’s emotional well-being, mental health, safety, and long-term development.
New York Seeks to Replace “Mother” and “Father” with Gender Neutral Terms
New York lawmakers passed legislation that would replace parental terms of “mother” and “father” in state law with gender-neutral language, including “gestating parent” and “non-gestating parent.” This measure unnecessarily erases traditional parental terminology and reflects an ideological shift in family policy. The bill now awaits Governor Kathy Hochul’s decision.
Endorsing and proposing gender-neutral terminology is not new to the state of New York and has been proposed or already adopted in states that maintain their legal protection over gender ideology and sex-rejecting interventions, including Massachusetts, California, Illinois, and Wisconsin.
Seriously Flawed: The “Consent to Transition or Your Child Will Commit Suicide” Study
Transgender activists often claim that restricting access to sex-rejecting medical procedures for minors increases the risk of suicide and use this argument to convince parents to affirm their child as the opposite sex.
A closer examination of the widely cited Trevor Project study used to make this claim raises serious doubts about that conclusion. The study’s methodology is severely biased and flawed due to reliance on self-report, non-random sampling, and limited contextual detail. These findings are unlikely to be accurate; therefore, non-activist researchers interpret them with caution and supplement them with more rigorous research.
In fact, a larger and more rigorous study out of Finland found that suicide was related not to gender dysphoria but to the underlying mental illnesses that typically precede and accompany the gender dysphoria. These same researchers later found that among gender dysphoric adolescents who received sex-rejecting drugs and surgeries, psychiatric symptoms increased markedly during follow-up. Psychiatric illness did not worsen in gender-dysphoric youth who were not medicalized. Taken together, these studies refute the Trevor Project’s findings.
