Part 3: Sage Blair and Redefining Abuse
This is the third and final post about how the Family Acceptance research threaded into the courts and schools and was wielded to hurt the very families it was supposed to heal. Read part 1 and part 2.
Critics of “gender-affirming care” sometimes refer to elective mastectomies and cross-sex hormones as mutilation—and accuse parents who facilitated their kids’ medical transition of child abuse. In fact, in some states like Texas, sterilizing a child is officially a form of child abuse, and moving directly from puberty blockers to cross-sex hormones, without experiencing endogenous puberty, almost certainly caused sterility. So did the gender-affirming procedures of oophorectomy (removal of ovaries) or orchidectomy (removal of testes). Thus, Texas’s child protection agency said it would investigate affirming families for child abuse.
But some argued the opposite. In 2023, Dr. Emily Georges published “Prohibition of Gender-Affirming Care as a Form of Child Maltreatment” in Pediatrics. Withholding those interventions, and not offering medicine to “achieve the patient’s goals,” was child abuse, she argued. Because gender-affirming care “decreases many negative health outcomes, including rates of depression, and improves well-being,” and the benefits “have been shown to far outweigh the risks,” denying them would cause “significant harm.” To do so “meets diagnostic criteria for medical neglect.”