Number of American minors seeking sex changes has doubled since 2017

The number of American children being treated for gender dysphoria has risen sharply in recent years with prescriptions for puberty blockers doubling between 2017 and 2021, reports the Daily Mail.

The data come from health insurance reports meaning the actual numbers are likely to be much higher due to the number of patients paying out of pocket for the experimental and harmful treatment.

The meteoric rise in American doctors attempting to perform sex changes on minors has occurred while other nations are starting to move away from affirmation and puberty suppression and back to a more cautious psychotherapeutic approach for this vulnerable cohort of young people. Sweden, Finland, England, France and New Zealand have all recently abandoned the affirmative model of care due to concerns that the risks far outweigh the benefits.

The Daily Mail took data collected by Komodo Health, an analytics company that monitors health insurance claims, and created graphs showing this explosion in young people being diagnosed and treated for gender dysphoria.

The data show that prescriptions for puberty blockers for those aged 6 to 17 leapt from 633 in 2017 to 1,390 in 2021. These drugs were once thought to be a fully reversible pause to give a child more time to figure out their identity, but recent studies have shown that almost every child put on puberty blockers goes on to take cross-sex hormones, meaning the drugs make further medical transition almost a foregone conclusion.

According to the Daily Mail report, the number of insurance claims for young people taking cross-sex hormones soared from 1,905 in 2017 to 4,231 in 2021. These drugs cause irreversible changes to the body and when combined with puberty blockers lead to infertility. The long-term health risks of these drugs is not yet fully understood but early research suggests an increased risk of cancer, heart disease and osteoporosis. 

Claims related to diagnoses of gender dysphoria tripled from 15,172 in 2017 to 42,167 in 2021, with the sharpest rise being in the two most recent years which saw an increase from 24,847 to 42,167.

But the rise was not seen uniformly across all states. Certain states saw considerably sharper spikes, with diagnoses doubling in California and quadrupling in New York.

The number of bilateral mastectomies performed on adolescent girls aged 13 to 17 also increased during the same time period, but at a slower rate. Surgeons amputated the healthy breasts of 238 gender-confused teenage girls in 2019 and 282 in 2021. 

This data is in line with what nations around the world have witnessed in the past decade. In the interim report of the independent review of England’s gender service, Dr Hilary Cass noted that referrals had surged from just 50 per year in 2009 to 2,500 in 2020, with a further 4,600 on the waiting list.

Medical malpractice lawsuits are now underway in the US, England, and Australia with young detransitioners suing the healthcare providers who allowed them to undergo irreversible medical treatments when they were young and in states of poor mental health. One pediatric neurosurgeon recently called gender-affirming care an “extraordinary medical atrocity,” comparing the treatment to lobotomies and calling the actions of these doctors “basically criminal.”