On Wednesday, Renee McGuinness of the Vermont Family Alliance testified before the House Healthcare Committee about S. 37, a bill concerning access to legally protected health care activity, including allowing “gender-affirming care” for youth.
McGuinness, a critic of the bill, cited data from major studies to illustrate that even with the best of intentions, “gender affirming care” has a track record of causing harm to individuals.
“We believe that Vermont is taking a position at odds with recent studies and may very well find themselves on the wrong side of history regarding gender-affirming care,” McGuinness said to the committee.
TRANSGENDER TREATMENTS: Results from studies done on the impacts of transgender treatments have not been favorable.
McGuinness started with a study from Europe.
“There is a 2011 study from Sweden that concluded that persons having received a sex reassignment have considerably higher risks of psychiatric morbidity, suicidality, and mortality than the general population,” she said.
Lack of supporting studies
She also noted the apparent lack of evidence-based studies in favor of sex changes. She highlighted a popular website that advocates for trans rights, TheTrevorProject.org, and said she could not find links to studies there to back up the notion that treatments save lives or benefit people.
“I did not find any evidence-based studies on the Trevor Project website that conclude that gender-affirming care saves lives and improves mental health,” she said. “… Anecdotal statements about parents’ fears for their children’s emotional well-being were accepted as legitimate evidence.”
McGuinness added that the Journal of Adolescent Health acknowledges, “There are no large-scale studies examining mental health among transgender and non-binary youth who receive gender-affirming hormone therapy.”
Trauma impacts youth
According to McGuinness, one study that indicates that childhood trauma is a primary driver of anxiety and depression in young people and is where lawmakers should focus their efforts.
“Childhood trauma is the underlying cause of poor mental health — this is the American Academy of Pediatrics study that indicates that childhood trauma is the underlying cause of anxiety and depression which needs to be addressed with restorative and psychiatric therapy, not going directly to gender-affirming care,” she said.
A double standard?
Since 2020, female genital mutilation has been illegal in Vermont, even for ritual or custom purposes. Yet other procedures, such as vaginoplasty orchiectomy, and phalloplasty, are not considered mutilation.
McGuinness noted that England, Sweden, Norway, Finland and France have all passed legislation to protect their youth from such treatments.
Lawmakers ignoring warnings?
Despite having shared data with the House Committee on Judiciary concerning a 2022 study from the UK which found that “practitioners felt pressured to comply with gender-affirming practices that go against clinical assessment and diagnosis practices,” McGuinness said lawmakers “kind of just disregarded” the report.
She added that some studies indicate that “urological complications” are occurring in 25-40% of those receiving such treatments. The percentage of serious complications goes up to 50% and higher when dealing with surgeries in addition to drugs.
Some of the symptoms of these treatments can include “failure to grow, liver damage, mental health problems, skeletal damage,” and even more serious conditions, McGuinness said.
She also reminded the committee that puberty is an essential process in the development of healthy adults, and to disrupt that development is risky.
“The effects of disrupting puberty are not known,” she said.
The entire testimony can be viewed onilne here.
Michael Bielawski is a reporter for True North. Send him news tips at bielawski82@yahoo.com and follow him on Twitter @TrueNorthMikeB.
Yea but it’s wicked profitable! Plus it produces tons of d card holding, marginalized activists that will vote their emotions.
They use “soft” words to cover the fact of what is going on – sterilization and depopulation. Transhumanism is the goal. They want to wipe out the organic, natural human beings. Remember the movie Blade Runner? “In 2019 Los Angeles, former police officer Rick Deckard is detained by Officer Gaff, who likes to make origami figures, and is brought to his former supervisor, Bryant. Deckard, whose job as a “blade runner” was to track down bioengineered humanoids known as replicants and terminally “retire” them, is informed that four replicants are on Earth illegally.” They are behind schedule, therefore, they are accelerating the plan as scripted. When fiction becomes non-fiction. People need to wake up before it’s too late.
Here’s one explanation about what and whose money is behind this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLXdoqXbC6k&t=107s
Great video, glad to have you back! We need more smart women speaking up, for sure!
Really good video.
Ha,ha. I never would have imagined a welcome on this platform. Thanks.
Thanks for promoting the video.
The reason why our legislature is hell bent on this agenda is because it is in service to the United Nations and WEF stakeholders. This is motivated by money. The medical industrial complex, WEF stakeholders, will benefit financially through the prescribing of life lol ng hormones and reassignment surgeries.
I talked to a Brit. about all this recently.
The rates of DETRANSITIONING are so high that this data is hard to find.
They keep it hidden and not all that easy to find because it’s a giant dose of reality that goes against their narrative.
Here, it’s not much different.
There are A LOT of people that go through all this and then want to be changed back..
How often this goes on is not easy to find because they certainly don’t want us knowing how many people regret this and seek to return to whatever they were.
To research this is quite interesting.. the Fake News media all minimize the situation..
So you have to really dig into the sources carefully.. (you can see just how severely we are being manipulated with propaganda when you look into subjects as this- by the way)
This is a decent article that gives us some information about the WHY they detransition.
https://segm.org/first_large_study_of_detransitioners
A lot of people that change their minds later on admit that they felt social pressure to transition.. and I’d go out on a limb to say that many of these very young people simply grow up and get that they were manipulated and perhaps never even wanted to do this. They seek to restore themselves by detransitioning back.
They are also plagued with medical issues such as high rates of urinary tract infections and the such, side effects from meds etc.
This article also says that some of them felt that the transition never even solved their dysphoria!!
And further, I have also read that statistically, many kids will naturally mature out of this if they are just left alone to age out of it.
There is much more new information coming out that is not mentioned here- and it’s THIS that has a whole lot to do with why people are putting the brakes on this entire situation.
It was not that long ago that gender dysphoria was seen as a mental illness and treated as such.
It’s the filthy medical profession and Big Pharma that then began understanding the money that could be made by handing out sex change operations like they are bottles of oxycontin..
(you getting what is going on now?)
I see no mention of the worst part of this proposed legislation, that it provides the state with the rights to assign gender-affirming care despite parental objection. It permits teachers, social workers, and medical providers with the power to confer in secret with children who they believe may have parents who oppose the therapy. It provides these “advisors” with immunity from prosecution for such actions. This is SCARY stuff and might only be possible in a state ruled by a vast majority of woke, liberal legislators.
Watch joy’s video. It essentially makes your children owned by the state, while the video doesn’t get into this, it is but one arm of the multi armed subversion of our country by outside forces, corporatism, Marxism drive. All around. Power and money…….it’s not a coincidence!
Impressive presentation, Ms. Guinness.
It is only with respectful presentations like yours that others will hear you.
Thanks so much for your persistence on this very critical issue.
Michael too, great reporting.