Florida’s Board of Medicine Follows the Science on Transgender Treatments and Banned Them

Good policies shape professional standards that transform the profession itself.

The most effective way to end transgender treatments for minors is to define such treatments as outside the “standards of care” for professionals. This can be done only after exhaustive scientific study of how such care works or does not work.

Leftist transgender advocates talk endlessly about “standards of care” for kids born in the wrong body. WPATH, for instance, puts out “Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People,” a series that talks about the standards of care within the transgender worldview. It is not based on evidence. It is based on the social theory of transgenderism.

Radical transgender groups have been defining “standards of care” based on that theory for years. Few members of the American establishment want to risk the fate of J.K. Rowling to oppose their madness. Institutions like American Academy of Pediatrics have been captured as a result. Same with the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association. Again, their statements of support are not based in medical science; they are based in the transgender theory.

Several countries have done top down analysis of what actually happens when puberty blockers, hormone treatments, and gender surgeries are tried as treatments. The results are not pretty. Yesterday we discussed how Sweden and Great Britain--two countries that were on the tranny-wagon, but who got off after such top-down studies--studied and changed how they defined “standards of care.” They are models.

Today, let us talk about Florida. Florida’s Board of Medicine gathered to study the issue in 2022 and early this year. It heard testimony, gathered evidence, hired researchers, and issued an impressive report very much in line with Sweden and Great Britain. Here are the conclusions from the April 2022 report.

Due to the lack of conclusive evidence, and the potential for long-term, irreversible effects, the Department's guidelines are as follows (follow the links for some of the evidence):

• Anyone under 18 should not be prescribed puberty blockers or hormone therapy.

• Gender reassignment surgery should not be a treatment option for children or adolescents.

• Based on the currently available evidence, encouraging mastectomy, ovariectomy, uterine extirpation, penile disablement, tracheal shave, the prescription of hormones which are out of line with the genetic make-up of the child, or puberty blockers, are all clinical practices which run an unacceptably high risk of doing harm.

• Children and adolescents should be provided social support by peers and family and seek counseling from a licensed provider.

On October 28, 2022, Florida Board of Medicine’s legislative committee voted to ban transgender drugs and surgeries for minors. Later in November, the Board of Medicine and the Florida Board of Osteopathic Medicine formed a joint committee that approved the rule prohibiting minors from receiving puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and transgender surgery.

Then Florida Medicaid proposed rules to exclude such treatments from government payment. They are outside the standard of care, after all. Again, the evidence is overwhelming. Consider just puberty blockers (finding 4.1):

For most outcomes (except suicidality), there is no evidence about the effect of puberty blockers compared to not using puberty blockers. In other words, no studies compared the outcomes between a group of people with gender dysphoria using puberty blockers and another group of people with gender dysphoria not using them.”

“There is very low certainty about the effects of puberty blockers on suicidal ideation.”

There is no evidence to support the effectiveness of these treatments. And what evidence there is contradicts the transgender narrative. What they do makes things worse and fails to make things better.

It can be intimidating when so many so-called professional organizations line up to support transgender treatments. It is depressing that Gov. Brad Little is no Gov. Ron DeSantis, so it is easy to think that Idaho’s medical board is filled with cronies and hospital shills, in it for the profits.

Nevertheless, it must be tried because the medical profession needs more doses of sanity and correction. Idaho's Board of Medicine can help deliver it.

There is not science to support the transgender craze. That has been true since Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally. It is more and more true as more and more studies are conducted. A real medical board could never accept such treatments based on positive evidence of their effectiveness. Period.

Conservatives in Idaho should push for the formation of a real medical investigation of transgender surgeries—and then fully fund the world-class experts to testify about the baleful effects of these surgeries. Or, even better, our board could just study Florida’s reports and adopted those reports as their own.