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As the political debate over health care for transgender youth has intensified across the U.S., elected officials and advocates who favor withholding gender-affirming medical procedures for minors have often said parents are not acting in their children’s best interest when they seek such treatment.
Major medical associations say the treatments are safe and warn of grave mental health consequences for children forced to wait until adulthood to access puberty-blocking drugs, hormones and, in rare cases, surgeries.
Youth and young adults ages 10–24 account for about 15% of all suicides, and research shows LGBTQ+ high school students have higher rates of attempted suicide than their peers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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Sending a transgender child to a unit that does not align with their gender identity should be out of the question, no matter a hospital’s constraints, said Dr. Jack Turban, director of the gender psychiatry program at the University of California, San Francisco, and a researcher of quality care barriers for trans youth in inpatient facilities.
“If you don’t validate the trans identity from day one, their mental health’s going to get worse,” Turban said. “Potentially, you’re sending them out at a higher suicide risk than they came in.”