We are now more than halfway through the 2020s, which have proven to be a decade of profound destabilization. The end of the pandemic circa 2022, now four years ago, marked a shift in Americans’ relationship with the people, institutions, and authorities we had previously thought we could rely on, seeing that they had spent years lying about public health — and just about everything else.
Perhaps no example of the total institutional breakdown in this country is greater than that of the pediatric gender medicine industrial complex, which, in addition to lying about the basic biological reality of male and female by claiming that people can switch sexes — and medically harming thousands of American children in the name of this blatantly false ideology — has also lied about its practices. A recent report from the Department of Health and Human Services shows just the extent of the damage. It documents, in excruciating detail, how children’s hospitals around the country, in red states as well as blue, have used fraudulent billing codes to profiteer off of gender-confused children.
These are, to be clear, supposedly non-profit hospitals which receive millions upon millions of dollars in tax breaks annually due to that non-profit status — that’s not even mentioning the amount in donations and taxpayer-funded research funds that they receive.
Still, pediatric care simply doesn’t make as much money as adult care, with pediatricians routinely making the lowest salaries of all physicians. Medicaid reimburses medical providers less for children, and with over half of American children on Medicaid, well, do the math. Add to that the fact that children, unlike adults, require more non-lucrative routine checkups and counseling than they do lucrative surgeries, and children’s care just doesn’t make that much revenue.
But in the 2010s, the financial interests of children’s hospitals began to align with the preferred elite ideology of the time. Transgender identity, alongside wokeness more generally, was rising among young people, and to criticize it publicly was anathema in elite institutions. With activists — those with medical credentials and those without — having taken over the medical profession, so-called “gender affirming care” became normalized.
And children’s hospitals, the HHS report says, saw dollar signs.
If you’re not a hospital executive or activist, it’s hard to wrap your mind around, but consider the following scenario. Imagine a 12-year-old girl who was sexually assaulted when she was just seven years old shows up to a children’s hospital after telling her school therapist that she hates being a girl.
There are two avenues for the children’s hospital to take.
The first is a referral to a psychologist, who helps her work through her problems and feel more comfortable in her body. Within a few years, she doesn’t need therapy anymore and feels empowered to go on with her life, not needing to be a patient beyond working through her trauma.
The second is giving her an instant prescription for puberty blockers and then testosterone, which she is supposed to continue indefinitely, as well as a double mastectomy by 14 — so that she can “be a boy.”
Which makes the hospitals more money? Which keeps domineering progressive activists happy?
Unfortunately, the answer is obvious: medicalizing confused kids not only appeases medical ideologues, but pays.
Even more unfortunately, this is not a hypothetical example, but Clementine Breen’s very real experience at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. The testosterone prescription wreaked havoc on her health, and she finally stopped it at 18, five years after it was given to her for the first time. She was 19 when she had her first period, and continues to experience medical complications from medical transition: her periods are untrackable and irregular, she suffers from severe cramping and hormonal instability, and experiences chest pain during menstruation as well as vaginal atrophy.
Her story is further documented in the HHS report alongside several other stories from detransitioners and parents of transgender-identifying children.
Breen is now a student at UCLA, where she studies theatre, and in the future hopes to become a teacher and a mother. But she looks at her past as one of self- harm — self-harm that was enabled by the medical professionals who were supposed to help her work past it — and continues to be in recovery from what was done to her as a child.
Indeed, the haphazard medical malpractice that children like Breen received in the name of “care” is a blight upon this country, and the fact that it has been so remunerative for hospitals should shock all Americans reading this report. This is not a partisan issue, although progressive activists would like to make it seem like one. It is, fundamentally, about whether or not we can trust the people and institutions we depend upon — especially in such vulnerable matters of medical care, especially when it comes to children, especially when we are dealing with such blatant untruths by those whose honesty we all depend upon in our most vulnerable moments.
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