June 24, 2025 • 19 mins
In this episode of Wellness Unmasked, Dr. Nicole Saphier discusses the critical intersection of parental rights and gender medicine for minors, particularly in light of recent events surrounding COVID-19 and the ongoing debates about gender dysphoria. She emphasizes the importance of parental involvement in medical decisions for children, critiques the current state of gender affirming care, and highlights the need for more research and consideration of mental health in these discussions. Wellness Unmasked is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network - new episodes debut every Tuesday & Friday.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Wellness on MASS. I'm doctor Nicole Saffire, and
we're going to talk about today one of, in my opinion,
the most urgent and controversial topics in modern medicine, the
intersection of parental rights and gender medicine for minors. Now,
I am a physician, I'm a women's health press radiologist,
but I'm also a mother of three, and so this
is something that is deeply personal to me. The question
(00:25):
is no longer you know what doctors believe is medically appropriate.
It's about who gets to decide what's best for the child,
the parents, the doctor, the government, or is it the
child themselves. Now, in recent years, we've seen a growing
number of cases where parents are being sidelined from key
medical decisions. Whether it's school based vaccine programs without parental
(00:45):
consent to gender identity transitions facilitated by counselors and physicians.
Many parents feel that they are losing their seat at
the table. For me, it was the handling of the
COVID vaccines in kids that was eye opening. I don't
know how it was for you, but prior to COVID,
I always felt that I was in control of my
child's well being I spoke with the doctor, I spoke
(01:07):
with their teachers, and I listened to the CDC, and
I took them all as recommendations. But I never felt
that they were dictating what happens to my child. It
wasn't until COVID when the masking and the keeping them
out of school, when it was obviously doing harm to
the children. But yet they continued to say, no, it's
this is what's best for them. They were neglecting all
(01:29):
of the science and they were saying, this is what's best.
I had lawmakers telling me what was better for the
mental and physical health for my child. When I'm a
physician and I'm a parent, they had no idea what
they were talking about. Yet all of a sudden, they
were dictating what happened to my child. If you remember,
you had pediatricians who were refusing care for kids if
(01:51):
they were vaccinated. A Healthline report revealed that one third
of pediatric practices nationwide stated that they would not treat
patients unless the children were up to date with the
recommended vaccines, and that was including COVID nineteen vaccine. Then
Mayor Bill de Blasio said in New York City kids
couldn't even go into restaurants or movie theaters or Broadway
(02:13):
theaters without a vaccine card. And you have to remember
this was after the Israeli Health Ministry alerted US officials
of the safety signals with the vaccine, saying, hey, these vaccines,
these boosters, they're causing inflammation in kids. And by the way,
at that point, we were a couple of years in
we knew that kids were lowest risk. Now that didn't
(02:35):
mean that there was no risk to the child if
they were to be infected with the COVID nineteen virus,
but we knew that the risk was low, and the
reality was most people at that point had already been infected.
I know by that time my kids had already been infected.
I had been infected, So it made me question why
would I go and get this vaccine. In fact, these
(02:56):
rules came out about kids getting vaccinated came out six
weeks after my kids already had COVID, so I knew
that they had natural immunity. It made no sense to
me why I should go and get them this vaccine,
because at that point it was all risk, no benefit.
They already had ample antibodies circulating their bodies, because natural immunity,
(03:18):
as we know, is actually stronger than vaccine induced immunity,
and we already had started seeing that vaccine induced immunity
was waning. Yet Mayor de Blasio and then even Eric
Adams said, Nope, kids have to have the vaccine if
you want to eat out with them in New York City.
It was utter nonsense. Thankfully, I as a physician, and
(03:40):
I wasn't needing to take my kids to the pediatrician
because they were told that they were not allowed to
come in unless they have the vaccine, and unless someone
could tell me how that vaccine was going to benefit
them after they just had the infection, I wasn't going
to do it. Because I read those studies. I read
what Pfizer and Madarna put out. I know that they're
(04:00):
that these vaccines were not without risk, and so tell
me what would the benefit have been had they just
had the infection. No one could answer that question for me.
That I had lawmakers and I had administrators in the
hospitals saying unless my children were vaccinated, they were not
going to be subjected to going and do these activities,
(04:22):
and they were not going to be given care by
these pediatricians. I mean that sounds like malpractice to me.
If I refuse care for patients, I think I would
be fired. The fact that we had whole administrations that
were supporting it is beyond comprehensible in my opinion. The
reality was during COVID, the parents were entirely removed from
(04:43):
the conversation. We knew keeping them out of school was bad,
we knew putting them in face masks was bad. And
we also knew not every kid needed to get the vaccine,
and certainly even fewer, if any at all, needed to
get a booster shot, Yet we were told that they
needed it. Now the state are actually trying to do
the same thing with gender transitioning of minors. Now, I
(05:05):
know that's a big leap. We're talking about COVID, We're
talking about the vaccines, and now I'm jumping to gender
affirming care. You can't turn on the TV or the radio,
or even walk anywhere without seeing some sort of support
for transgender I mean, it is Pride month. You have
a lot of people talking about it, and you know
the way I feel, you do you. I don't care
what people want to do in their personal lives. I
(05:27):
really don't where I start getting concerned as one where
my tax dollars are involved. Should my tax dollars be
paying for people to undergo some of these gender affirming procedures.
I mean, I'm not paying for my friends who go
out and get boob jobs or those jobs because they
want to look differently. I don't think tax dollars should
(05:48):
pay for that either. And if people want to go
and do genital mutilation and other things, again, if that's
what you want to do, by all means, I don't
think I should pay for it. And by the way,
your insurance company probably shouldn't either, because all that's doing
is raising rates on other people. That's one issue. But
the issue at hand is in which I'm already hypersensitized
(06:09):
because of COVID, is what's happening with the minors, the kids,
with the whole gender dysphoria movement that's happening right now.
By the way, that's what's happening. This is a movement.
This is not a moment. This is a movement. The
gender dysphoria that's happening amongst our youth is rampant, and
we have to ask at what age does a child
(06:29):
truly have the capacity to even make life altering decisions,
and what role should the parents play in guiding them
through a complex medical terrain. So what I want to
do is, let's talk about the medicine. Let's talk about
the science behind what we're seeing. Gender dysphoria is officially
classified on the DSM scale Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
(06:50):
Mental Disorders. That's a mouthful, but every sort of mental
illness is given this since the DSM five, and gender
dysphoria is included because it is a mental health condition
characterized by significant distressed and now their words are caused
by a mismatch between an individual's assigned sex at birth
(07:11):
and they're experienced gender identity. I don't really know what
that means other than they think that they're not what
they are if they're born a girl, they have XX chromosomes,
they have all the female reproductive system, but they think
they're a boy. That's the DSM five of gender dysphoria,
(07:33):
and vice versa. When it comes to a boy who
thinks he's a girl. Because it is fundamentally a psychological condition,
treatment approaches really need to prioritize mental health support and
therapy and careful evaluation rather than irreversible medical and surgical interventions,
especially in children adolescents. Listen, the reality is children's brains
they're still developing well until they're mid twenties. I have
(07:56):
a twenty five year old son. I'm certain his frontal
lobe is not finished. I'm certain of this. Particularly, these
are the areas that are responsible for decision making, impulse control,
and understanding long term consequences. The incomplete neurological development means
that minors lack the full capacity to provide truly informed
(08:18):
consent for these permanent and life altering procedures that we're
seeing kids undergoing right now. Hormone therapy, gender firming surgeries.
These are surgical castration, double massed ectomies. These are massive
surgeries and you can't reverse them. So as a result,
you have irreversible interventions that are being done when children's
(08:41):
brains are not capable of understanding the implications and long
term potential consequences of this. Yet here we are. The
American Academy of Pediatrics and some other medical bodies are
supporting gender firming care for minors, including puberty blockers with
hormones and cross sex hormones. And even now, what is
their rationale. Well, they like to point to studies that
(09:04):
show a reduction in suicidal ideation and depression, emphasize in
in the short term. These were all short term studies.
Let's remember the American Academy of Pediatrics. They were the
cheerleaders for masking our children all throughout COVID. They were
wrong about keeping them out of school, they were wrong
about keeping them masks, and they're wrong about the vaccines.
(09:26):
They actually scrapped an entire web page on their site
about how important it was for babies and toddlers to
see expressions on people's faces because they didn't want to
seem contradictory to the fact that they were telling people
to now mask up. So obviously, if they were quick
to just delete a web page to now support a
(09:47):
new cause, the masking up cause, they obviously didn't feel
strongly about it in the first place. But the reality is,
where was the science. Was the science babies need to
see facial expressions or was the science babies need to
wear masks? Well, we all know that babies need to
see facial expressions, and which is why we have now
a whole generation of children with speech impediments and other
(10:09):
manifestations of wearing masking at young ages. But they were
their social justice warriors, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and
they just followed in line more coming up on Wellness
Unmasked with doctor Nicol Sapphire. Now when we're talking about
transitioning in kids, they're doing the exact same thing. They
(10:31):
are sticking with those social justice talking points, and they're
pointing to these very small studies with short term results.
Here's the problem, we do not have long term safety
data of what they are doing to our children. Puberty blockers,
for example, were originally developed for rare conditions like precocious puberty,
when kids get puberty way too early, and we're like, wait, wait, wait,
(10:54):
you can't start puberty quite yet because this could be detrimental,
not just psychologically, but also so can have impacts on bone,
soft tissue and other things. So that's why we did that.
But their use in healthy adolescents is completely off label
and experimental and side effects may include reduced bone density, obviously, infertility,
(11:16):
and even impaired brain development. So why would we do this,
I don't know, because that's what social media talking points
are telling us to do. These days, some European countries
are taking notice. Sweden, Finland, and the UK have all
pulled back on youth gender treatments, citing insufficient evidence of
long term benefit and growing concerns about irreversible harm. I'm
(11:38):
so tired of the US being last. We were the
last during COVID. You had Israel, you had the UK,
you had Switzerland, you had all these other countries who
are doing the right things well before the United States.
How can that happen? How can we be such a
great nation at the forefront of scientific innovation and medical
(12:01):
advancements and yet we're always behind when it comes to
implementing them. And why is that? Because we are so
politically influenced and socially influenced into our recommendations. We need
to follow the science, not the politics. And the science
right now it's technically uncertain, I guess you can say,
(12:21):
because you can point to different studies showing different things.
My settled opinion is children who are dealing with gender
dysphoria are suffering from a mental illness, and we need
to rally around them best we can. We need to
look at their social environment, their home life, their school life,
Do they have food safety, do they have financial safety?
(12:44):
What is causing them to feel so out of touch
with their body? And what can we do to help them?
Is it through therapy, is it through medication? I think
it's probably more going to be about making sure that
they feel safe in their environments, They accept them for
who they are and have confidence in who they are
(13:05):
and who they were born to be. I think we
need to stop giving them medications to make them permanently infertile.
We certainly should not be touching them with a scalpel
and causing irreversible harm. Now, some states are trying to
ban these gender affirming treatments, and in a pivotal move
this week, the US Supreme Court is allowing Tennessee's ban
(13:28):
on gender affirming care for minors to remain in effect
while ongoing legal challenges continue. The court six to three
decision didn't rule on the constitutionality of such bans, but
it does allow states to enforce them during litigation, setting
a precedent for how similar laws and other states may proceed. Now,
this wasn't a final ruling, but it signaled the states
(13:48):
can regulate these treatments for now, but there are still
many states that are allowing children, yes children, to make
the decisions whether or not they want to start hormones,
or whether or not we want to consider surgery. In fact,
there are some states that a child just has to
be fifteen. They don't even need parental consent to get
(14:09):
some of these treatments. That is mind blowing to me.
If you have to be eighteen to vote, if you
have to be eighteen to enlist in the army buy cigarettes,
I don't know what else you have to do to
be eighteen, But I cannot believe that you would allow
someone under eighteen to say that they want to take
(14:31):
medication that would cause permanent sterilization. This makes no sense
to me. We might as well just get rid of
all age restrictions because it's based on nothing. Fifteen's a
magical number for you, What is that based on? It's
based on nothing. If you actually, if you really want
to say, when can someone give and form consent, it's
not even eighteen. We've already talked about how the brain's
(14:53):
not fully formed. Really, it's probably twenty five twenty six.
So if we're just going to stick with the arbitrary
numbers that we've given, is eighteen you can buy cigarettes
and a list in the army and vote twenty one
you can get alcohol. By the way, I don't understand
those numbers and themselves either. But fifteen for gender affirming care,
(15:13):
that's actually permanent damage. Smoking cigarettes that's long term damaged,
I mean, and by the way, that can stop. That's
not even permanent. You can smoke for a little bit
and stop. So why can you take these medications that
you'll never be able to stop and get healthy from again,
but yet you can't buy cigarettes. I don't know. Honestly,
(15:33):
none of it makes sense to me. I just think
that people are making decisions to try and cater to
a base that they think that these people know what
they're talking about, but they don't. Advocates for the bands
obviously argue that the states have a compelling interest in
protecting children from these irreversible decisions, but opponents call it
discrimination and medical obstruction. But here's what we can't ignore.
(15:58):
Parents are often the collect nateral damage of this ideological fight.
We must protect the parent's role in what is right
for the children. There is no way a fifteen year
old should be able to get a prescription for hormone
blockers without their parents' consent. Absolutely not, and I cannot
believe that we are allowing this to happen. The reality is,
(16:21):
when it comes to gender affirming care, we need more
longitudinal studies on the outcomes of gender affirming care and minors.
I guarantee it's going to show that there is regret,
that there is significant risk, and that those who had
mental illness prior to the surgeries and the hormone blockers,
they're still going to have mental illness after it's all
(16:41):
said and done. Unless we're focusing on the underlying cause
of the mental illness and focusing on helping this person
feel good about their life, it's not going to be anything.
I don't understand how we can look at people who
know they're looking in the mirror and they're not happy
with what they see, whether it's their nose, their chin,
their breasts, their wist, their thighs, or whatever it may be.
(17:05):
They get plastic surgery. After plastic surgery, and it can
be addicted, and you see these people on the street
and you kind of laugh and you shuffle at them like,
oh my gosh, they look like you know, plastic Barbie
or gosh, they've had a lot of work done or
whatever it is. At the end of the day, all
of this work is being done because they look in
the mirror and they are not happy with what they're seeing.
(17:27):
That's also a mental illness. Unless you're focusing on the inside,
nothing you do to the outside matters. You know. I
read MRIZ and CT scans every single day, and I
can tell you it doesn't matter what you've done on
the outside. I can see what's happening on the inside,
(17:47):
and that is where you need to focus. It's okay
to want to look a little bit different, but you
should certainly shouldn't be doing something permanent when you're a child,
because you need to grow into that body. You need
to grow up, you need to figure out who you are,
and you certainly cannot take the parents out of that
conversation because maybe not one hundred percent of the time,
the ninety nine percent of the time parents knows what's
(18:10):
best for their children, and by removing them from the conversation,
that in itself says there's something fishy going on here.
If you have to exclude the parent from the decision
about whether a child should undergo gender affirming care, then
that means you're doing something dirty and it's probably not
what's in the best interest from that child. So shame
on the lawmakers and shame on the advocates who aren't
(18:33):
actually caring for the well being of that child. Parental
rights should not be political. They should be protected as
part of a child's full circle of care. That's my
two cents as a mother, but also as a physician.
Thanks for listening to Wellness Unmasks on America's number one
podcast network, iHeart. Follow Wellness Unmasks with doctor Nicole Sapfire
and start listening on the free iHeartRadio app or wherever
(18:56):
you get your podcasts, and we'll catch you next time.
Welcome to Wellness on MASS. I'm doctor Nicole Saffire, and
we're going to talk about today one of, in my opinion,
the most urgent and controversial topics in modern medicine, the
intersection of parental rights and gender medicine for minors. Now,
I am a physician, I'm a women's health press radiologist,
but I'm also a mother of three, and so this
is something that is deeply personal to me. The question
(00:25):
is no longer you know what doctors believe is medically appropriate.
It's about who gets to decide what's best for the child,
the parents, the doctor, the government, or is it the
child themselves. Now, in recent years, we've seen a growing
number of cases where parents are being sidelined from key
medical decisions. Whether it's school based vaccine programs without parental
(00:45):
consent to gender identity transitions facilitated by counselors and physicians.
Many parents feel that they are losing their seat at
the table. For me, it was the handling of the
COVID vaccines in kids that was eye opening. I don't
know how it was for you, but prior to COVID,
I always felt that I was in control of my
child's well being I spoke with the doctor, I spoke
(01:07):
with their teachers, and I listened to the CDC, and
I took them all as recommendations. But I never felt
that they were dictating what happens to my child. It
wasn't until COVID when the masking and the keeping them
out of school, when it was obviously doing harm to
the children. But yet they continued to say, no, it's
this is what's best for them. They were neglecting all
(01:29):
of the science and they were saying, this is what's best.
I had lawmakers telling me what was better for the
mental and physical health for my child. When I'm a
physician and I'm a parent, they had no idea what
they were talking about. Yet all of a sudden, they
were dictating what happened to my child. If you remember,
you had pediatricians who were refusing care for kids if
(01:51):
they were vaccinated. A Healthline report revealed that one third
of pediatric practices nationwide stated that they would not treat
patients unless the children were up to date with the
recommended vaccines, and that was including COVID nineteen vaccine. Then
Mayor Bill de Blasio said in New York City kids
couldn't even go into restaurants or movie theaters or Broadway
(02:13):
theaters without a vaccine card. And you have to remember
this was after the Israeli Health Ministry alerted US officials
of the safety signals with the vaccine, saying, hey, these vaccines,
these boosters, they're causing inflammation in kids. And by the way,
at that point, we were a couple of years in
we knew that kids were lowest risk. Now that didn't
(02:35):
mean that there was no risk to the child if
they were to be infected with the COVID nineteen virus,
but we knew that the risk was low, and the
reality was most people at that point had already been infected.
I know by that time my kids had already been infected.
I had been infected, So it made me question why
would I go and get this vaccine. In fact, these
(02:56):
rules came out about kids getting vaccinated came out six
weeks after my kids already had COVID, so I knew
that they had natural immunity. It made no sense to
me why I should go and get them this vaccine,
because at that point it was all risk, no benefit.
They already had ample antibodies circulating their bodies, because natural immunity,
(03:18):
as we know, is actually stronger than vaccine induced immunity,
and we already had started seeing that vaccine induced immunity
was waning. Yet Mayor de Blasio and then even Eric
Adams said, Nope, kids have to have the vaccine if
you want to eat out with them in New York City.
It was utter nonsense. Thankfully, I as a physician, and
(03:40):
I wasn't needing to take my kids to the pediatrician
because they were told that they were not allowed to
come in unless they have the vaccine, and unless someone
could tell me how that vaccine was going to benefit
them after they just had the infection, I wasn't going
to do it. Because I read those studies. I read
what Pfizer and Madarna put out. I know that they're
(04:00):
that these vaccines were not without risk, and so tell
me what would the benefit have been had they just
had the infection. No one could answer that question for me.
That I had lawmakers and I had administrators in the
hospitals saying unless my children were vaccinated, they were not
going to be subjected to going and do these activities,
(04:22):
and they were not going to be given care by
these pediatricians. I mean that sounds like malpractice to me.
If I refuse care for patients, I think I would
be fired. The fact that we had whole administrations that
were supporting it is beyond comprehensible in my opinion. The
reality was during COVID, the parents were entirely removed from
(04:43):
the conversation. We knew keeping them out of school was bad,
we knew putting them in face masks was bad. And
we also knew not every kid needed to get the vaccine,
and certainly even fewer, if any at all, needed to
get a booster shot, Yet we were told that they
needed it. Now the state are actually trying to do
the same thing with gender transitioning of minors. Now, I
(05:05):
know that's a big leap. We're talking about COVID, We're
talking about the vaccines, and now I'm jumping to gender
affirming care. You can't turn on the TV or the radio,
or even walk anywhere without seeing some sort of support
for transgender I mean, it is Pride month. You have
a lot of people talking about it, and you know
the way I feel, you do you. I don't care
what people want to do in their personal lives. I
(05:27):
really don't where I start getting concerned as one where
my tax dollars are involved. Should my tax dollars be
paying for people to undergo some of these gender affirming procedures.
I mean, I'm not paying for my friends who go
out and get boob jobs or those jobs because they
want to look differently. I don't think tax dollars should
(05:48):
pay for that either. And if people want to go
and do genital mutilation and other things, again, if that's
what you want to do, by all means, I don't
think I should pay for it. And by the way,
your insurance company probably shouldn't either, because all that's doing
is raising rates on other people. That's one issue. But
the issue at hand is in which I'm already hypersensitized
(06:09):
because of COVID, is what's happening with the minors, the kids,
with the whole gender dysphoria movement that's happening right now.
By the way, that's what's happening. This is a movement.
This is not a moment. This is a movement. The
gender dysphoria that's happening amongst our youth is rampant, and
we have to ask at what age does a child
(06:29):
truly have the capacity to even make life altering decisions,
and what role should the parents play in guiding them
through a complex medical terrain. So what I want to
do is, let's talk about the medicine. Let's talk about
the science behind what we're seeing. Gender dysphoria is officially
classified on the DSM scale Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
(06:50):
Mental Disorders. That's a mouthful, but every sort of mental
illness is given this since the DSM five, and gender
dysphoria is included because it is a mental health condition
characterized by significant distressed and now their words are caused
by a mismatch between an individual's assigned sex at birth
(07:11):
and they're experienced gender identity. I don't really know what
that means other than they think that they're not what
they are if they're born a girl, they have XX chromosomes,
they have all the female reproductive system, but they think
they're a boy. That's the DSM five of gender dysphoria,
(07:33):
and vice versa. When it comes to a boy who
thinks he's a girl. Because it is fundamentally a psychological condition,
treatment approaches really need to prioritize mental health support and
therapy and careful evaluation rather than irreversible medical and surgical interventions,
especially in children adolescents. Listen, the reality is children's brains
they're still developing well until they're mid twenties. I have
(07:56):
a twenty five year old son. I'm certain his frontal
lobe is not finished. I'm certain of this. Particularly, these
are the areas that are responsible for decision making, impulse control,
and understanding long term consequences. The incomplete neurological development means
that minors lack the full capacity to provide truly informed
(08:18):
consent for these permanent and life altering procedures that we're
seeing kids undergoing right now. Hormone therapy, gender firming surgeries.
These are surgical castration, double massed ectomies. These are massive
surgeries and you can't reverse them. So as a result,
you have irreversible interventions that are being done when children's
(08:41):
brains are not capable of understanding the implications and long
term potential consequences of this. Yet here we are. The
American Academy of Pediatrics and some other medical bodies are
supporting gender firming care for minors, including puberty blockers with
hormones and cross sex hormones. And even now, what is
their rationale. Well, they like to point to studies that
(09:04):
show a reduction in suicidal ideation and depression, emphasize in
in the short term. These were all short term studies.
Let's remember the American Academy of Pediatrics. They were the
cheerleaders for masking our children all throughout COVID. They were
wrong about keeping them out of school, they were wrong
about keeping them masks, and they're wrong about the vaccines.
(09:26):
They actually scrapped an entire web page on their site
about how important it was for babies and toddlers to
see expressions on people's faces because they didn't want to
seem contradictory to the fact that they were telling people
to now mask up. So obviously, if they were quick
to just delete a web page to now support a
(09:47):
new cause, the masking up cause, they obviously didn't feel
strongly about it in the first place. But the reality is,
where was the science. Was the science babies need to
see facial expressions or was the science babies need to
wear masks? Well, we all know that babies need to
see facial expressions, and which is why we have now
a whole generation of children with speech impediments and other
(10:09):
manifestations of wearing masking at young ages. But they were
their social justice warriors, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and
they just followed in line more coming up on Wellness
Unmasked with doctor Nicol Sapphire. Now when we're talking about
transitioning in kids, they're doing the exact same thing. They
(10:31):
are sticking with those social justice talking points, and they're
pointing to these very small studies with short term results.
Here's the problem, we do not have long term safety
data of what they are doing to our children. Puberty blockers,
for example, were originally developed for rare conditions like precocious puberty,
when kids get puberty way too early, and we're like, wait, wait, wait,
(10:54):
you can't start puberty quite yet because this could be detrimental,
not just psychologically, but also so can have impacts on bone,
soft tissue and other things. So that's why we did that.
But their use in healthy adolescents is completely off label
and experimental and side effects may include reduced bone density, obviously, infertility,
(11:16):
and even impaired brain development. So why would we do this,
I don't know, because that's what social media talking points
are telling us to do. These days, some European countries
are taking notice. Sweden, Finland, and the UK have all
pulled back on youth gender treatments, citing insufficient evidence of
long term benefit and growing concerns about irreversible harm. I'm
(11:38):
so tired of the US being last. We were the
last during COVID. You had Israel, you had the UK,
you had Switzerland, you had all these other countries who
are doing the right things well before the United States.
How can that happen? How can we be such a
great nation at the forefront of scientific innovation and medical
(12:01):
advancements and yet we're always behind when it comes to
implementing them. And why is that? Because we are so
politically influenced and socially influenced into our recommendations. We need
to follow the science, not the politics. And the science
right now it's technically uncertain, I guess you can say,
(12:21):
because you can point to different studies showing different things.
My settled opinion is children who are dealing with gender
dysphoria are suffering from a mental illness, and we need
to rally around them best we can. We need to
look at their social environment, their home life, their school life,
Do they have food safety, do they have financial safety?
(12:44):
What is causing them to feel so out of touch
with their body? And what can we do to help them?
Is it through therapy, is it through medication? I think
it's probably more going to be about making sure that
they feel safe in their environments, They accept them for
who they are and have confidence in who they are
(13:05):
and who they were born to be. I think we
need to stop giving them medications to make them permanently infertile.
We certainly should not be touching them with a scalpel
and causing irreversible harm. Now, some states are trying to
ban these gender affirming treatments, and in a pivotal move
this week, the US Supreme Court is allowing Tennessee's ban
(13:28):
on gender affirming care for minors to remain in effect
while ongoing legal challenges continue. The court six to three
decision didn't rule on the constitutionality of such bans, but
it does allow states to enforce them during litigation, setting
a precedent for how similar laws and other states may proceed. Now,
this wasn't a final ruling, but it signaled the states
(13:48):
can regulate these treatments for now, but there are still
many states that are allowing children, yes children, to make
the decisions whether or not they want to start hormones,
or whether or not we want to consider surgery. In fact,
there are some states that a child just has to
be fifteen. They don't even need parental consent to get
(14:09):
some of these treatments. That is mind blowing to me.
If you have to be eighteen to vote, if you
have to be eighteen to enlist in the army buy cigarettes,
I don't know what else you have to do to
be eighteen, But I cannot believe that you would allow
someone under eighteen to say that they want to take
(14:31):
medication that would cause permanent sterilization. This makes no sense
to me. We might as well just get rid of
all age restrictions because it's based on nothing. Fifteen's a
magical number for you, What is that based on? It's
based on nothing. If you actually, if you really want
to say, when can someone give and form consent, it's
not even eighteen. We've already talked about how the brain's
(14:53):
not fully formed. Really, it's probably twenty five twenty six.
So if we're just going to stick with the arbitrary
numbers that we've given, is eighteen you can buy cigarettes
and a list in the army and vote twenty one
you can get alcohol. By the way, I don't understand
those numbers and themselves either. But fifteen for gender affirming care,
(15:13):
that's actually permanent damage. Smoking cigarettes that's long term damaged,
I mean, and by the way, that can stop. That's
not even permanent. You can smoke for a little bit
and stop. So why can you take these medications that
you'll never be able to stop and get healthy from again,
but yet you can't buy cigarettes. I don't know. Honestly,
(15:33):
none of it makes sense to me. I just think
that people are making decisions to try and cater to
a base that they think that these people know what
they're talking about, but they don't. Advocates for the bands
obviously argue that the states have a compelling interest in
protecting children from these irreversible decisions, but opponents call it
discrimination and medical obstruction. But here's what we can't ignore.
(15:58):
Parents are often the collect nateral damage of this ideological fight.
We must protect the parent's role in what is right
for the children. There is no way a fifteen year
old should be able to get a prescription for hormone
blockers without their parents' consent. Absolutely not, and I cannot
believe that we are allowing this to happen. The reality is,
(16:21):
when it comes to gender affirming care, we need more
longitudinal studies on the outcomes of gender affirming care and minors.
I guarantee it's going to show that there is regret,
that there is significant risk, and that those who had
mental illness prior to the surgeries and the hormone blockers,
they're still going to have mental illness after it's all
(16:41):
said and done. Unless we're focusing on the underlying cause
of the mental illness and focusing on helping this person
feel good about their life, it's not going to be anything.
I don't understand how we can look at people who
know they're looking in the mirror and they're not happy
with what they see, whether it's their nose, their chin,
their breasts, their wist, their thighs, or whatever it may be.
(17:05):
They get plastic surgery. After plastic surgery, and it can
be addicted, and you see these people on the street
and you kind of laugh and you shuffle at them like,
oh my gosh, they look like you know, plastic Barbie
or gosh, they've had a lot of work done or
whatever it is. At the end of the day, all
of this work is being done because they look in
the mirror and they are not happy with what they're seeing.
(17:27):
That's also a mental illness. Unless you're focusing on the inside,
nothing you do to the outside matters. You know. I
read MRIZ and CT scans every single day, and I
can tell you it doesn't matter what you've done on
the outside. I can see what's happening on the inside,
(17:47):
and that is where you need to focus. It's okay
to want to look a little bit different, but you
should certainly shouldn't be doing something permanent when you're a child,
because you need to grow into that body. You need
to grow up, you need to figure out who you are,
and you certainly cannot take the parents out of that
conversation because maybe not one hundred percent of the time,
the ninety nine percent of the time parents knows what's
(18:10):
best for their children, and by removing them from the conversation,
that in itself says there's something fishy going on here.
If you have to exclude the parent from the decision
about whether a child should undergo gender affirming care, then
that means you're doing something dirty and it's probably not
what's in the best interest from that child. So shame
on the lawmakers and shame on the advocates who aren't
(18:33):
actually caring for the well being of that child. Parental
rights should not be political. They should be protected as
part of a child's full circle of care. That's my
two cents as a mother, but also as a physician.
Thanks for listening to Wellness Unmasks on America's number one
podcast network, iHeart. Follow Wellness Unmasks with doctor Nicole Sapfire
and start listening on the free iHeartRadio app or wherever
(18:56):
you get your podcasts, and we'll catch you next time.
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