SAFE Act – Page 12 – Family Council

Federal Court Rules Indiana Can Protect Children from Sex-Change Procedures

Nov 20, 2024Jerry CoxTransgenderSAFE Act, Transgender

Last week the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling effectively letting the State of Indiana protect children from sex-change procedures.

Joshua Arnold with The Washington Stand reports,

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit upheld an Indiana law protecting minors from gender transition procedures last Wednesday. The appellate court had stayed a preliminary injunction that blocked all of the law except its prohibition on gender transition surgeries in a simple order on February 27, allowing the law to take effect. Wednesday’s ruling (K.C. v. Medical Licensing Board of Indiana) included a 50-page opinion for why the court reversed the lower court ruling, vacated the preliminary injunction, and remanded the lawsuit back to the district court.

In response to the ruling, Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel and Vice President of Litigation Strategy and Center for Conscience Initiatives Jonathan Scruggs said,

“Indiana rightly enacted a law that protects the health and welfare of all children—supporting their natural biological development and ensuring that children experiencing gender dysphoria have a chance for comprehensive healing and compassionate mental health support. Relying on bad science, activists and the Biden-Harris administration have pushed these harmful procedures across the country and even taken steps to prevent state legislatures from regulating these procedures. These procedures have devastated countless lives, which is why countries that were previously leaders in so-called ‘gender affirming’ care are reversing course and curtailing these experimental efforts to alter children’s bodies. The 7th Circuit was on solid ground to uphold Indiana’s law that allows children to receive the help they need—safely.”

ADF filed a friend-of-the-court brief last year asking the court to let Indiana’s law to go into effect.

This is a significant victory.

Sex-change surgeries and similar procedures can leave children sterilized and scarred for life.

Doctors do not know the long term effects that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones might have on people, but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was prompted to add a warning label to puberty blockers after discovering they caused some biological girls to experience brain swelling.

Three years ago a major hospital in Sweden announced that it would no longer give puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to kids. This year the United Kingdom announced a new policy protecting children from puberty-blocking drugs.

In 2021 the Arkansas Legislature overwhelmingly passed the Save Adolescents From Experimentation (SAFE) Act — a law very similar to Indiana’s. The SAFE Act is a good law that protects children in Arkansas from cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers, and sex-reassignment surgeries.

Unfortunately, the SAFE Act has been blocked in court since 2021.

It’s good to see federal courts let Indiana protect children. We believe our federal courts ultimately will recognize that Arkansas’ SAFE act is a good law and uphold it as constitutional.

Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.

Updated: Report Shows Hospitals in Arkansas Performed Sex-Change Procedures on Children

Nov 18, 2024Jerry CoxTransgenderLGBT, SAFE Act

A report from the group Do No Harm shows hospitals in Arkansas have performed sex-change procedures or prescribed puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to dozens of children.

Do No Harm’s Stop The Harm report analyzes medical data from across the country. The report relied on data collected from commercial insurance, Medicaid, Medicare, and VA claims, which Do No Harm says was thoroughly reviewed by medical professionals. The Stop The Harm report made headlines last month after it revealed that some 14,000 minors underwent transgender surgeries, took puberty blockers, or were given cross-sex hormone injections, nationwide between 2019 and 2023.

Do No Harm’s data for Arkansas reveals that from 2019 to 2023, 41 children were treated as “sex-change patients” in the state.

Of those children, data from the report shows three underwent sex-change surgeries at UAMS.

Thirty-eight children received puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. The report also reveals that from 2019 to 2023, doctors and hospitals in Arkansas wrote 234 prescriptions for children to be given puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.

Unity Health in Arkansas Does Not Perform Sex-Change Procedures

The Stop The Harm report initially published in October mistakenly indicated Unity Health in Arkansas performed sex-change procedures on children, and Family Council shared this incorrect information in its initial coverage of the report.

Family Council subsequently obtained a statement from Unity Health President and CEO LaDonna Johnston, saying,

The information published by Do No Harm and then re-published by Family Council on November 18, 2024 regarding Unity Health is false and incorrect. Unity Health, an Arkansas nonprofit corporation, operates three general hospitals in Arkansas: Unity Health-White County Medical Center in Searcy, Unity Health-Newport in Newport, and Unity Health-Jacksonville, in Jacksonville. The Unity Health hospitals in Arkansas are not affiliated in any way with other Unity Health organizations that are located outside of Arkansas.

It is not possible for any physician or other practitioner to obtain privileges to perform “sex change” procedures at any of the three Unity Health hospitals, as these procedures are not allowed to be performed at any Unity Health hospital by the Unity Health Board of Directors.

Family Council also reached out to representatives of Do No Harm, who reviewed data from Arkansas for 2019-2023 with their data broker.

Following the review, Do No Harm determined that sex-change procedures performed at a facility in a different state were misattributed to Unity Health in Arkansas. The facilities are not affiliated with one another.

Do No Harm provided Family Council with a statement correcting the mistake, saying,

We would like to thank Unity Health in Arkansas for bringing a data error to our attention. Claims data incorrectly sourced to Unity Health in Arkansas should have been assigned to a Unity in another state. We apologize to Arkansas Unity Health for the error and thank its leaders for bringing it to our attention.

Do No Harm also provided Family Council with copies of the corrected claims data used in preparing the report. Family Council can confirm that Unity Health does not appear in the list of facilities that performed sex-change procedures or prescribed puberty-blockers and cross-sex hormones to children in Arkansas.

Sex-Change Procedures Hurt Children

Medical professionals at UAMS and elsewhere in Arkansas have performed sex-change procedures or prescribed puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children despite the fact that scientific evidence increasingly shows sex-change procedures hurt kids.

These procedures can leave children sterilized and scarred for life. Doctors do not know the long term effects that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones might have on people, but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was prompted to add a warning label to puberty blockers after discovering they caused some biological girls to experience brain swelling.

In 2021 the Arkansas Legislature overwhelmingly passed the Save Adolescents From Experimentation (SAFE) Act. The SAFE Act is a good law that protects children in Arkansas from cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers, and sex-reassignment surgeries.

Unfortunately, the SAFE Act has been blocked in court since 2021. The data that Do No Harm collected indicates doctors and hospitals in Arkansas performed sex-change procedures and prescribed puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children before passage of the SAFE Act and during the years that the SAFE Act has been enjoined by the court.

More and more, people understand it’s critical for us to stand up for Arkansas’ children. Public opinion is shifting on this issue, with more Americans saying that it’s morally wrong to change genders. We believe our federal courts ultimately will recognize that the SAFE act is a good law and uphold it as constitutional.

Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.

This article has been updated as of November 27, 2024, to reflect that Unity Health in Arkansas does not perform sex-change procedures, and to provide additional statements from Do No Harm clarifying that sex-change procedures performed at a facility outside of Arkansas between 2019 and 2023 were misattributed to Unity Health in Arkansas.

14,000 Children Are Forever Harmed: Guest Column

Oct 22, 2024John StonestreetLGBTChild Welfare, LGBT, SAFE Act, Transgender

We now have numbers for the push to transgender a generation.

According to the new bombshell report from the group Do No Harm, nearly 14,000 minors underwent transgender surgeries, took puberty blockers, or were given cross-sex hormone injections, between 2019 and 2023. This report directly counters a refrain often thrown at anyone who expressed concern for the wellbeing of children, that “it’s just not happening.” In fact, just three months ago, researchers at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health announced that “gender-affirming” surgeries were “rarely performed on transgender youth in the U.S.”

Rare, however, is the wrong word for 14,000 youth. As Dr. Miriam Grossman, my guest on a Breakpoint Forum earlier this year, told Washington Watch,

This release of data is really a nuclear bomb. … We are led to believe by politicians and by many groups that these interventions are very rare and hardly happening at all in this country. And that is simply not true.

Indeed. According to the Do No Harm report, just under 14,000 children received transgender-related treatments. More than 5,700 of those treatments were “sex change” operations and more than 62,000 hormone and puberty blocker prescriptions were written in that time frame. These numbers do not include young people who underwent some form of “social transition.”

When these treatments, which go under the misnomer “gender-affirming care,” are carried out on children, the consequences are severe, and often irreversible. As the Cass Review (a comprehensive report out of the U.K. on “gender services” for children) revealed, doctors who recommended and administered these “treatments” knew of the risks of complications. These risks include pelvic inflammatory disease, pelvic floor dysfunction, and pain during any kind of arousal or sexual intercourse. Others saw no issues continuing “treatments” on those who showed serious co-morbidities, including mental health issues. According to one doctor: “The mere presence of psychiatric illness should not block a person’s ability to start hormones.” Another “referred for genital surgery people diagnosed with major depressive disorder, c-PTSD, and who are homeless.” Most troubling is that clinicians and activists from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) have openly admitted that minors cannot fully understand what’s at stake in these “treatments,” especially the permanent damage done to their ability to have children in the future.

In fact, for years, activists have pushed these chemical and surgical interventions on children and their parents by threatening them. “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a live son,” parents are asked, as if anything less than their full affirmation will lead their child to commit suicide. This is a manipulative myth. According to one study published earlier this year, those who undergo so-called “gender transition” surgery are over 12 times more likely to commit suicide than those who do not.

Although the effects of surgery and puberty blockers on children can never be reversed, almost always a child with gender dysphoria grows out of those feelings by the time they hit their mid-twenties. Puberty, it turns out, is quite effective in aligning one’s internal sense of self with the realities of the body. As the authors of landmark research out of the Netherlands wrote, “Gender non-contentedness, while being relatively common during early adolescence, in general decreases with age and appears to be associated with a poorer self-concept and mental health throughout development.”

Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims. This report from Do No Harm reveals that there have been victims of trans ideology, and many of them have been children. This is an ideology with no basis in medicine, science, or observable realities. And yet, it is an ideology that has given birth to atrocities performed in doctors’ offices and hospitals by “experts” we were supposed to “trust.”

We shouldn’t have. This ideology shatters the lives of young people and the lives of their parents. Until this report, we didn’t know how many.