Welcome to Family Policy Matters, a weekly podcast and radio show produced by the North Carolina Family Policy Council. Hi, I'm John Rust and president of NC Family, and each week on Family Policy Matters, we welcome experts and policy leaders to discuss topics that impact faith and family here in North Carolina. Our prayer is that this program will help encourage and equip you to be a voice of persuasion for family values in your community, state, and nation. Thanks for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters. The issue of transgenderism and the prevalence of gender dysphoria and gender confusion among America's youth has reached such a significant level that it has been characterized as a social contagion.
Now, social contagion has been defined as a phenomenon where emotions, attitudes, and behaviors spread rapidly throughout a group, much like a disease influencing individuals to adopt the traits, attitudes, and behaviors of others in their social network.
Well, the concern over this matter has reached such a level, in fact, that the United States Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, recently released a peer-reviewed study and report on the medical dangers posed to children from attempts to change their biological sex. Joining us today to discuss the HHS report and this matter in a broader context is Dr. Farr Curlin. Dr. Curlin is Josiah Trent Professor of Medical Humanities in the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities, and History of Medicine at Duke.
University and is the co-director of the Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative, also at Duke. Dr. Curlin has worked for many years to bring attention to the intersection of medicine, ethics, and theology. He's the co-author of The Way of Medicine, Ethics, and the Healing Profession, as well as more than 150 articles and book chapters addressing the moral and spiritual dimensions of medical practice. Dr.
Curlin has also been called to serve as an expert witness regarding medical ethics in a number of legal cases across the country involving abortion and medicalized gender transition. Dr. Curlin was the keynote speaker at NC Families Winston-Salem dinner on November 13th and is actually one of the primary contributors to the HHS report I previously mentioned. And we look forward to speaking with him today. Dr.
Curlin, welcome to Family Policy Matters. Thank you, John. Glad to be with you.
Well, it's great to have you with us.
Now, Dr. Curlin, before we talk about this very significant HHS report on the dangers of what is referred to as sex-rejecting procedures, let's take a A step back and look at kind of the big picture. How did we get to where we are now in our culture with such confusion and controversy regarding sex and gender issues?
Well, John, I should say at the outset, I'm speaking for myself here. I am one of the contributors to that HHS report. I'm also a professor at Duke. I'm sure many colleagues would disagree with some of my conclusions about this matter at Duke. And specifically, the HHS report doesn't attempt to give a real explanation of how we ended up here, but it does give, and I commend to anyone to look at it, a very careful history of how we ended up here, practically with what I call medicalized gender transition and what the report calls pediatric medical transition.
But it seems to me that if we look at this practice, it's understandable as a kind of conclusion of a logic that's been working in the culture and in medicine and medical ethics, particularly, for a long time. And that logic is that what's most important for the modern self is to be. Free of outside influences that would constrain your own authentic individual development. Philosophers have talked about this, critics of modernity. People just noticed that our culture, and you can see it in every Disney storyline or every ad on TV practically, highly values being original, being yourself, you be you.
And so there's a cultural kind of skepticism about any received wisdom regarding what the human is and what's good for us and what kinds of standards we should follow, what ethical boundaries we should uphold. If those appear to get in the way of an individual having what they believe is right for them. That logic, I think, reaches its conclusion in pediatric medical transition, where we have a practice in which doctors are treating children's otherwise objectively healthy bodies as having something wrong with them, sufficient to lead the doctors to suppress or change the healthy development of their bodies strictly on the basis of the child saying that that's what they want, that that's what they want. what fits their internal sense of who they are. And along the way, as the HHS report shows, doctors are also detaching from what the state of the medical science suggests about whether this actually even brings about the hoped-for benefits to mental health.
It's also detaching from well-established, long-standing norms of medical ethics, and particularly the ethics of how we treat children.
Well, as I mentioned, this has become so prevalent, not only in the United States, but across the globe, that it has been referred to as a social contagion. And there are more and more children who are being influenced to embrace gender confusion, gender dysphoria, to seek for affirmation from their parents, from other adults, from their peers. And it's just exploded in the last 10 years or more. And now it seems that we're seeing a bit of a shift, kind of the pendulum swinging back to what we would consider to be biological reality and common sense. According to the press release accompanying the HHS report, the comprehensive study found that, and I quote, Harms from sex-rejecting procedures, including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical operations, are significant long-term and too often ignored or inadequately tracked.
So, you know, we really don't know what the long-term implications of this are for individuals, although we're hearing from more and more individuals who have had either chemical or chemical and surgical transition who have realized that, hey, this is not who I am. I relate to my biological sex. And, you know, now I have had irreversible chemical and medical things done to my body, and I can't go back. I may be sterile. I may not be able to have children, those sorts of things.
So, long-term and significant implications. What has been going on in the world of medicine, kind of with respect to all of this? Do you see a course correction that is taking place? I know that we're hearing from some European countries who are really taking a hard and fast look and even making some recommendations in the opposite direction. Yeah, it's somewhat paradoxical.
John, because the European societies and their governments are, of course, less politically conservative than the U.S. on average, particularly the Scandinavian countries are very socially progressive, liberal countries. And yet, it's in those countries, in England and in the Scandinavian countries in particular, that over the past several years, people have raised the concern that, as you said earlier, we're seeing a rapid and dramatic uptick in the number of children who are presenting to these gender clinics, believing that they have an identity that is that of the opposite sex and that they need these medical interventions. At the clinic in London called the Tavistock Clinic, they saw a 50-fold, which is 5,000%, increase in the number of young females presenting for these procedures over the course of a decade.
So people started to say, wait a second, what's going on here? The UK, as well as Denmark, and Sweden and Finland and a few other countries have done careful, systematic analyses of the data. That's available to ask what is happening to these children? Is it making them better? And those have all concluded that the data does not support the assumption or the conclusion that these interventions even improve mental health outcomes.
None of them improve rates of suicide, which remain high in people dealing with gender dysphoria. And yet, we also now have greater awareness that these interventions have real and obvious adverse medical effects, like rendering children sterile, like preventing them from developing sexually and potentially developing fully neurologically and cognitively, as well as happens when one goes through a healthy normal puberty, which is being blocked in a lot of these young children.
So, Europe is clearly swinging back. UK does not allow these procedures right now outside of a research study, and there's only one research study being contemplated there. Finland, Denmark, et cetera, have all basically pumped the brakes on this. The U.S. has been behind this curve.
It has been, I think, because of an ideological capture, it seems to me, of some of our major medical associations, including. The American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and certainly the capture of organizations like the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH. We've had a persistence in these associations saying, oh, no, there's nothing wrong here. These practices are, quote unquote, medically necessary, notwithstanding the clear fact that every single systematic review has concluded that the data don't even show they benefit, much less that they're medically necessary.
So that's encouraging and discouraging. I think at the same time, I do sense that there's a growing ability to ask questions about this without people feeling terrified that they're going to be drummed out of their universities for being hateful just because they raise a question about this. I do feel like there's more questions being asked. And once light shines in this area, I think we will see the practice quickly unfold.
Well, and thank you for being a significant part in shining that light and speaking the truth, especially through this report. I think it's quite notable what you were just talking about regarding major medical organizations in the United States. At the release of the report, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy was quoted as saying, The American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics peddled the lie that chemical and surgical sex-rejecting procedures could be good for children. They betrayed their oath to first do no harm, and their so-called gender-affirming care has inflicted lasting physical and psychological damage on vulnerable young people.
That's not medicine, it's malpractice. I thought those were pretty strong words from the HHS secretary, and I think Echo, in different words and in a little bit of a different tone, what you just commented on about sort of the status of things in the U.S. And hopefully, this report is going to help, as you said, shine the light and bring truth and common sense and biology back into the consideration. Yeah, I do hope it does help in that respect. I do think it's a scandal of our time that associations like the American Academy of Pediatrics basically set aside their standards.
That they profess to follow in being evidence-informed, in being careful about not over-interpreting that evidence, in taking seriously our obligations as fiduciaries, and those are obligations physicians have, parents have, and the state has to be fiduciaries of children's health. They've sort of set all that aside in this kind of rush to affirm this new thing, what they've called gender-affirmative care, but which is a rejection of the gender that fits the child's sex and is a rejection of the healthy body and its current form in pursuit of a child's perception of what their gender is, with no corollary, you know, in the body, no corollary in medical science. And I hope this leads to a chastening of these medical associations and a retreat from associations going around trying to push whatever the latest socially cosmopolitan popular idea is, and instead, just in a disciplined, careful, rigorous way, acknowledge what medical science shows and does. Show and sustain our commitment to the patient's health, which includes a commitment to letting children's healthy secondary sex characteristics develop. Very good.
Well, we're just about out of time, but I want to give you an opportunity just to kind of give a word of hope to our listeners. I know that this issue has been such a major focal point for recent history in our nation, and I know that it's impacted a lot of individuals, a lot of families, and there's a lot of concern about it. Again, thank you for your role in just spreading the truth, shining a light, but also being a significant contributor to this report. And by God's grace and His will, hopefully, it's going to have a very significant impact on the status of things in our nation. But what hope would you offer to our listeners who may have a loved one or have been impacted by gender confusion, gender dysphoria, these complicated issues?
What hope would you offer to them?
Well, I'd first offer solidarity with them and with their child that this is also a ground of hope. The goodness of Health is something that ultimately people can't suppress very long. I think part of the reason this is going to be seen as a scandal is that it so obviously contradicts common sense understanding of human biology and health. And so I think this misunderstanding, this movement will fall away in time as people return to the truth of the way the world is. And I think the prior years of observing children who experience a lot of difficult and awkward symptoms and thoughts and feelings when they're going through adolescence is that if we'll be patient with them, and particularly in this case, avoid medicalizing these challenges, avoid trying to change their body to make them feel better about themselves, but instead affirm: hey, the way you are is good.
It's good that you are a boy. It's good that you're a girl. It's good that you exist. It's good that you have a healthy body. That children will in time generally come to terms with their being male or female, and they will learn to live that way.
That's what historical data shows. And I think we have good reason to believe that that's what we'll find today as well. And so I just encourage folks. To avoid the move to medicalize this experience and be patient with your child and encourage them that it is good that they are male or female, that they're a boy or a girl. Very good.
Well, for those listening on the radio, you can go to the North Carolina Family Policy Council website at ncfamily.org. We will have a link to this HHS report and would encourage you to avail yourself of that resource. If you're listening to this podcast, there will be a link available to that report as well.
So definitely check that out. It's a pretty in-depth, long report, but there's an executive summary that's just a few pages. And that will be good to review. And then if you want to take a deeper dive, you certainly are encouraged to do so. But Dr.
Farr Curlin, just wanted to say thank you so much for joining us today on Family Policy Matters and for your incredibly valuable insights and very important work on this and many other important issues. We're grateful for you and appreciate you. It's my pleasure. Thank you, John. Thank you for listening to Family Policy Matters.
If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show and leave us a review. To learn more about NC Family and the work we do to promote and preserve faith and family in North Carolina, visit our website at ncfamily.org. That's ncfamily.org. And check us out on social media at NC Family Policy. Thanks and may God bless you and your family.
