(The Center Square) – Following its workshop on the deceptive practices in “gender-affirming care” for minors, the Federal Trade Commission launched a public inquiry in order to learn from consumers how such care has harmed and deceived them personally.
Do No Harm Senior Fellow Dr. Jared Ross told The Center Square that “the Federal Trade Commission’s request for public comment is a great step forward in exposing ideologically motivated physicians and ending the heinous practice of so-called pediatric gender medicine.”
“This is a much-needed invitation for victims and family members to share their stories and shed light on how vulnerable children and their desperate parents have been manipulated by doctors seeking to spread their ideology and benefit financially while mutilating and sterilizing children to create lifelong medical patients,” Ross said.
Do No Harm is a group of medical professionals and more committed to “keeping identity politics out of medical education, research, and clinical practice,” according to its website.
Similar to Ross, President of the American Principles Project Terry Schilling told The Center Square that “the Trump Administration and the FTC have stepped up to the plate to protect our kids from woke gender ideology.”
“Their decision to request comments shows their commitment to ending the federal government’s support for the Gender Industrial Complex,” Schilling said. “I am confident that we will get justice for the victims of so-called ‘gender-affirming’ care.”
The American Principles Project is an organization that advocates for families.
The period to submit comments will last 60 days, according to the FTC’s news release.
In its release, the FTC said it “seeks to evaluate whether consumers (in particular, minors) have been harmed and whether medical professionals or others may have violated Sections 5 and 12 of the FTC Act by failing to disclose material risks associated with ‘gender-affirming care’ or making false or unsubstantiated claims about the benefits or effectiveness of ‘gender-affirming care.’”
Ross told The Center Square that “pediatric gender medicine uses multiple deceptive practices in selling an alleged cure to a disease that cannot be objectively measured or observed, yet requires mass participation, controlling speech and thought to ‘affirm’ a child’s delusion.”
“From promoting the idea that sex is somehow randomly ‘assigned at birth’ to the absurd and biologically incorrect concept that humans exist on a spectrum of sex, including so-called non-binary,” Ross said.
“This doctrine-driven bastardization of medicine requires us to concede that feelings prevail over objective reality, that the brain overrides the body,” Ross said.
“Gender ideology reinforces regressive stereotypes about human behavior and sexual orientation, imposing extreme body modification as the treatment for societal nonconformity,” Ross said.
Ross told The Center Square that the most harmful deception in the gender-affirming care industry is “the suicide myth.” Ross called it “the most sinister form of emotional blackmail, unprecedented elsewhere in medicine.”
“Suicidal patients not only lack the capacity to give informed consent but also need emergency psychiatric treatment, not hormones and surgery,” Ross said.
“These interventions detract from the true underlying mental health conditions that these gender-confused youth are suffering from,” Ross said. “These very treatable conditions go untreated, psychological inquiry is discarded in favor of dissociation, and medications that worsen mental health (such as estrogen and testosterone) are administered.”
In summary, Ross told The Center Square that “sex is determined at conception, then observed and recorded at (or before) birth.”
“No amount of puberty blockers, cross sex hormones, or plastic surgery can change someone’s sex,” Ross said. “Attempting to convince susceptible children otherwise is deceptive and scandalous.”
As The Center Square previously reported, the FTC held a workshop that concerned the dangers and deception of gender-affirming care for minors in early July.
Doctors, medical ethicists, whistleblowers, detransitioners, and parents of detransitioners gathered at the workshop, many of whom said that practices in gender-affirming care for minors “are misleading to consumers and are ‘one of the greatest frauds’ committed against the American people.”
The FTC has not yet responded to The Center Square’s request for comment.
