Clearly, even if 100% of children in Oregon are trans, there is no over-diagnosis problem, because it can never be over-diagnosed, only under.
Oregon Is Pumping Children Full of Hormones - WSJ
The state pushes teens toward ‘transgender-related diagnoses’ and dangerous treatments.
If you live in Oregon
and your child is confused about her sex, the state is ready to
medicate her and perhaps even put her under the knife. The Beaver State
has become a national leader in providing life-altering hormones to
minors.
According to a new study
published in Research Connections, at age 17, roughly 1 in every 240
girls and 1 in every 630 boys in Oregon received cross-sex hormones for
“gender dysphoria” between 2016 and 2023. These figures are triple and
double the national average for girls and boys, respectively. For
younger children the disparity is even greater: Cross-sex hormone use in
the study was four to five times the national rate among 14- and
15-year-olds, and puberty-blocker use was more than five times the
national rate at age 14.
Oregon
classifies hormones and surgery as “medically necessary” treatments for
gender dysphoria, which the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders defines as a mismatch between one’s sex and one’s subjective
perception of “gender,” accompanied by distress or difficulty
functioning.
According
to the study, teens in Oregon are being diagnosed with gender dysphoria
at alarming rates: 1.51% of girls and 0.46% of boys received a
“transgender-related diagnosis,” almost always gender dysphoria, between
2016 and 2023. The figure for both sexes is 0.98%—10 times the
prevalence of Type 2 diabetes in this age group and only slightly lower
than the share of teens who described themselves as transgender on state
surveys in those years (1.18%). In Oregon, calling oneself transgender
is a fast track to medical diagnosis, drugs and in some cases even
surgery. About 1 in 4 diagnosed minors in Oregon received such
interventions, the study finds.
“Gender
transition” involves the disruption of an adolescent’s natural hormone
production and regulation. The goal is to mimic the appearance of the
opposite sex or attain a sexually ambiguous appearance, all at the
expense of the body’s healthy functioning. The known and suspected harms
of these interventions include infertility, sexual dysfunction,
cognitive impairment, cardiovascular disease, bone health problems and
cancer.
Health
authorities in several European countries have banned or restricted
access to hormonal interventions for minors following rigorous evidence
reviews. In Oregon the trend has been one of reckless acceleration. The
apparent ease with which distressed Oregon teens go from transgender
identification to diagnosis and dangerous medical intervention is no
accident. It flows from deliberate choices made by state health
authorities a decade ago.
Oregon
is the only U.S. state that has formally adopted the medical
recommendations, called standards of care, of the World Professional
Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH. That 2014 decision has
spillover effects for commercial insurance. In 2023, Oregon updated its
Medicaid policies to incorporate WPATH’s eighth and latest Standards of
Care, known as SOC-8.
WPATH
has been in critics’ cross hairs for years, but in 2024 controversy
reached a crescendo as internal WPATH communications obtained by the
Alabama attorney general while defending a lawsuit against the state’s
limits on so-called gender-affirming care for minors revealed evidence
of medical scandal.
These
documents showed that when developing SOC-8, WPATH commissioned
evidence reviews, but it suppressed them after finding “little or no
evidence about children and adolescents.” It then claimed that a
systematic review of evidence was “not possible.” WPATH also initially
recommended age minimums for nearly all “gender transition” procedures,
enlisted almost exclusively authors with financial or other conflicts of
interest, and sprinkled “medical necessity” statements to guarantee
insurance coverage for procedures despite acknowledging privately in an
email that “all of us are painfully aware that there are many gaps in
research to back up our recommendations.” Last month the Federal Trade
Commission sued WPATH, alleging consumer fraud via unfair or deceptive
practices. (WPATH called the lawsuit “baseless,” disputed the FTC’s
jurisdiction, and said its activities are protected under the First
Amendment.)
In
Oregon, where WPATH’s influence has been institutionalized, thousands
of teens have already been exposed to life-altering drugs and surgery.
Authorities likely believed they were responding to demand, but the
numbers suggest they were creating it. Some objecting parents faced
child-welfare investigations.
When
the state first approved Medicaid coverage for “gender transition”
procedures in 2015, officials projected that only about 175
people—adults and minors combined—would use the services each year, with
costs not exceeding $200,000. In the first year alone, costs exceeded
$720,000. By 2024, the figure had risen to more than $12.3 million—over
60 times the original projection. The number of Oregonians receiving
covered procedures was roughly 10 times the anticipated number in 2015
and 80 times by 2023.
Among
minors, transgender-related diagnoses in Oregon rose threefold between
2017 and 2023, according to a Manhattan Institute insurance database
analysis. Hormone prescriptions soared, and surgery became more common.
In 2019 alone, 33 minors had double mastectomies and two had
hysterectomies, according to data from the Oregon Health Authority’s All
Payer All Claims Reporting Program.
Oregon
has slightly more than 1% of America’s teens, but between 2019 and 2023
its clinics accounted for at least 7% of all “gender” mastectomies on
teen girls. During those years 26 minors had “bottom surgery”—23
hysterectomies and three castrations.
Videos
from WPATH conferences, also obtained through the Alabama lawsuit,
revealed that clinicians at the Oregon Health and Science University’s
Transgender Health Program were pushing the field to extremes,
denouncing medical gatekeeping, offering young patients “nonbinary” body
configurations with no parallel in nature, and basing medical decisions
on “embodiment goals,” regardless of medical history or mental health.
(WPATH, which wasn’t a party to the Alabama suit, issued a statement
defending the quality of SOC-8 “and the process through which it was
developed.”)
Public-record
requests, meantime, revealed that Oregon health authorities have known
for years about the lack of evidence for these interventions. In 2012, a
state-commissioned evidence review found “very poor evidence of the
benefit” from puberty blockers. After regulators added “transition”
procedures with no age minimums to state Medicaid benefits, a follow-up
report co-authored by unnamed gender clinicians at OHSU affirmed the
policy despite acknowledging the “paucity of data.”
Oregon’s
extreme liberal culture, one-party politics and activist-captured
medical and child-welfare systems illustrate the “gender affirmation”
model taken toward its logical conclusion.
