(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) The Children’s Mercy Kansas City’s YouTube channel posted a video supporting government intervention should parents refuse to let their trans-identified child medically transition.
In the video, which since appears to have been deleted, Maura Priest, a philosophy professor at Arizona State University and an “occasional visiting researcher” at Children’s Mercy Hospitals, made the claim that children have a “fundamental right” to puberty-blocking drugs without the approval of their parents, according to the Post Millennial.
A segment from the video, posted by Libs of TikTok, went viral.
Priest argued in a seminar, titled “Transgender Children and the Right to Transition: When Parents Mean Well But Do Harm” that by denying puberty blockers, children were “harmed phsychologically and physically.”
A paper by the same name was published by Priest in the American Journal of Bioethics.
The video’s description described Priest as “defend[ing] the right of transgender children to transition,” and pointed to the state to “protect” children from ” the serious psychological harms, including higher risk of homelessness, self-harm, and suicidality, associated with non-supportive parents refusing medical assistance for gender transition.”
Throughout the lecture Priest compared parents who refuse to give consent to medical transition to physical abusers.
She also relied on the affirm-or-suicide myth to make her claims, attempting to assert that children are at higher risk of self-harm if denied “treatment.”
Children’s Mercy Kansas City has a pediatric transgender healthcare program called “Gender Pathways Services,” and has “treated” hundreds of minors.
“With 150 children already in the program ranging from ages 4 to 17, the list of referrals is much longer,” said an article listed on its website.
According to the article, the Gender Pathway Services clinic estimated that 17% of its patient population was under 13 years old.
“Children can conceptualize themselves as gendered individuals as young as 2-3 years old,” the article continued. “Very young children may question gender-based expectations or assert that they are a different gender from the sex assigned at birth.”
The controversy follows another recent scandal that Libs of TikTok helped uncover after revealing a series of about 90 videos posted by the Boston Children’s Hospital’s Gender Multispeciality Service making outlandish claims about transgender children.
The hospital has since removed the videos from its YouTube page, and Twitter has censored many of them.
