How Activists Steamroll Parents

By Madeleine Kearns

Sunday, May 08, 2022

 

Parents have a right to refuse their child’s participation in an experiment, whether that’s gender transitioning or masking in schools. And yet we’ve seen how easily activists, who insist that “the science” and the experts are on their side, can override parental objections.

 

Take a National Geographic piece from February titled, “Do masks really harm kids? Here’s what the science says.” The author, Amy McKeever, acknowledges parents’ concerns that “masks harm kids by impairing their ability to breathe, slowing their social and emotional development, and causing them anxiety” but swiftly casts them aside — “experts say that the science doesn’t back up those worries.”

 

McKeever notes that the evidence is unclear as to “how masking affects kids emotionally and developmentally” since answering that question definitively requires children “to shed their masks for a randomized trial, the gold standard in science, which would be unethical.” She quotes Theresa Guilbert, a pediatric pulmonologist and member of the American Academy of Pediatrics, who says that, despite the “experiment that’s been going on with kids wearing masks at school,” “we haven’t seen those fears of health risks realized.”

 

In other words, masking may adversely affect children’s language cognition, social development, and mental health. However, knowing this for sure would require an official experiment that is supposedly risky. And yet, as Guilbert admits, masking children already is an experiment.

 

This recalls the justifications given by Joanna Olson-Kennedy, the medical director of the largest transgender-youth clinic in the United States. In 2019, Olson-Kennedy told an activist-clinician conference that their National Institutes of Health study on early interventions for trans-identifying youth was “observational,” and that the NIH was initially concerned about the lack of a control group. Her justification? “Not treating people with gender dysphoria who are seeking treatment is unethical practice.”

 

In other words, subjecting children and adolescents to experimental drugs and surgeries may be harmful, but anything short of that constitutes neglect. That is quite a statement. The treatment for gender dysphoria with the greatest efficacy and safety is “watchful waiting” (i.e., noninvasive talk therapies), which worked very well until it was baselessly attacked and abandoned at the behest of activists.

 

When considering whether to turn children into guinea pigs, there are two questions worth asking.

 

Is This Necessary?

 

The CDC recommends universal indoor masking for children ages two and above “regardless of vaccination status.” Yet children are at extremely low risk of severe disease and death from Covid-19. Of the less than 0.001 percent of pediatric deaths related to Covid-19 in the United States, most involved comorbidities. Masking children at school is therefore not a proportionate response. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control recognized as much in advising against the use of face masks for primary-school students.

 

The notorious “Arizona study” the CDC relied on to claim that transmission rates in schools without mask mandates were 3.5 times higher than in schools with them has been thoroughly debunked. Noah Haber, a scientist and co-author of a systematic review of Covid-19 policies, told the Atlantic that the research was “so unreliable that it probably should not have been entered into the public discourse.”

 

The American Academy of Pediatrics “strongly endorses” masks for children and “strongly recommends” the vaccine for all individuals over the age of five. But this wouldn’t be the first time the AAP has put politics before science.

 

I wrote last week on the AAP’s activist-directed policy statement and guidelines on gender dysphoria, which have been thoroughly debunked by leaders in the field. Kenneth Zucker, a clinical psychologist with over 40 years of clinical and research experience in childhood gender dysphoria, told National Review that the AAP’s 2018 advice was “so fundamentally flawed that one wouldn’t even know . . . where to start.”

 

Do the Benefits Outweigh the Risks?

 

“Clearly the psychological risks of the handling of the coronavirus are greater than the physical risks,” Dr. Alan Josephson, a distinguished child psychiatrist, told National Review in 2020. “We must be cautious as we just don’t have much data.”

 

The inverse is true with gender confusion, where the physical risks of medical and surgical intervention are obviously greater than the psychological risks of going through natural puberty. Obviously, it’s easier to change your thinking than it is to change your sex (which, in any event, you can’t do).

 

Before the cultural mainstreaming of transgender ideology, a small but robust body of research indicated that 80 percent of gender-confused children would accept their sex by young adulthood when supported through their natural puberty with noninvasive therapies. Unfortunately, this number will likely drop with the rise of “gender affirmation,” which is designed to cause the opposite outcome by actively encouraging children to reject their sex. (Indeed, this already appears to be happening.)

 

The Biden administration’s Department of Health and Human Services released a memo on “early gender-affirming care,” which it deemed “crucial” to gender-distressed young peoples’ “overall health and wellbeing.” The memo claimed that gender-affirming therapies were “demonstrated to yield lower rates of adverse mental health outcomes.” Contrast this with Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare (NBHW) service guidelines, which warn that “uncertain science” and the fact that there are “no definite conclusions about the effect and safety of the treatments” are reasons to conclude that “the risks outweigh the benefits at present.”

 

First, Do No Harm

 

Activists justify their reckless experiments by creating a false sense of urgency. They say children will literally die if their policies aren’t pursued. Meanwhile, they insist that standard and uncontroversial practices (such as not covering half your face and undergoing puberty) are “unethical.”

 

For every expert endorsing these controversial experiments, there is another cautioning against them. In deciding whom to trust, there is no better principle to apply than first, do no harm. Holding fast to that, you don’t need expertise to make a decision — only common sense.