Three Fundamental Truths to End the Scandal of Paediatric Gender Medicine

Genspect’s Canadian Director, Mia Hughes’ speech at Jason Lavigne’s Fundamental Truths event in Red Deer, Alberta

A Scandal Beyond Belief

For the last six years, I’ve been trying to alert Canadians to the medical scandal unfolding in our paediatric gender clinics, which is a difficult task because the truth is so extraordinary that it simply defies belief.

Doctors in these clinics are treating a type of young person that contradicts all existing knowledge about child and adolescent development. They pump this fictional patient cohort with toxic, unproven drugs in the complete absence of scientific justification, and then they usher them into the operating theatre to have healthy body parts needlessly amputated.

So I’m delighted to be here today in the only Canadian province that has made any attempt to shield young people from this field of medicine that has so catastrophically lost its way.

And I’m especially delighted to be taking part in an event with the theme of fundamental truths because this is actually a topic I think about all the time when I’m reading the mainstream coverage of paediatric gender medicine, when I see the trans activist response to puberty blocker bans, or when I listen to practitioners in the field of so-called “gender affirming care” talk about their patients.

Because everything they say is wrong. Dangerously wrong. But they are completely incapable of seeing it.

That’s because the entire field of paediatric gender medicine is built upon faulty foundations. And basic logic tells us that when the first step in your reasoning is wrong, everything that follows will also be wrong.

So now I’m going to share with you the three fundamental truths that everyone involved in the scandal of paediatric gender medicine has either forgotten—or is choosing to ignore.

Three fundamental truths that are the key to bringing this scandal to an end.

Fundamental truth #1 – There is no such thing as a transgender child.

Now that’s a simple but highly controversial statement. So let me explain.

First of all, to state the obvious: it’s not possible for a child to be born in the wrong body. That shouldn’t need saying, but such is the time in which we live.

And it is not possible to have a girl brain in a boy body, or vice versa. This is absurd nonsense that we somehow allow to be taught to our children as if it’s fact.

But nonsensical political slogans aside, to believe in the existence of transgender children, you have to believe three impossible things.

First, you have to accept that a child who is still young enough to believe in Santa and the Tooth Fairy has a fully formed, stable identity — something even most adults struggle to attain. I’m 47, and I still haven’t found mine.

You must believe that a child who lives in a world of fantasy and magic somehow knows, with certainty, who they truly are.

Second, you must believe that a child can distinguish stereotypes from this deep inner identity, meaning that they can tell the difference between liking certain clothes and toys and having an authentic identity that somehow makes them a member of the opposite sex.

And third, that this invisible subjective identity is so important that it overrides biology and the material reality of the child’s body.

That all requires an enormous leap of faith. It requires that you reject all the existing knowledge about childhood development — decades of high-quality replicated long-established research.

And you must take this leap of faith because political activists demand it. These activists do not have any science to support their claim that transgender children exist; they have nothing but political slogans.

The reality is, every story of a “trans child” consists of nothing more than stereotypes — little boys who like Barbies and princess gowns, or tomboys with short hair and a dislike of dresses.

And yet, at the behest of a political movement that has no grounding in truth, we tell these innocent children that their likes and preferences mean they are members of the opposite sex.

And because children have a great capacity for imagination and magical thinking, and because they trust the adults who are tasked with guiding them safely through the world, these children believe it.

Astonishingly, many people today think it is harmless to lie to an effeminate little boy and tell him that he’s really a girl; or to tell a tomboy that she’s really a boy.

On the surface it may appear to be the compassionate thing to do to relieve the child’s suffering, because after all, it is not easy to be different from your peers.

But at some point in the future, these children collide with reality. And that reality is called puberty. It’s actually quite easy to turn a little boy into a convincing girl just by putting him in a dress and giving him a girl’s name, or vice versa, but the illusion becomes unsustainable once the hormones begin to surge.

So now the child must be medicalised — the natural developmental stage of puberty blocked with potent endocrine disruptors followed by powerful wrong-sex hormones.

Which brings me nicely to my next fundamental truth.

Fundamental truth #2 – Not a single adolescent is capable of consenting to the medical interventions on offer in paediatric gender clinics.

The treatments euphemistically packaged as “gender affirming care” involve drastic, irreversible interventions that have the potential to rob a young person of their health, fertility, sexual function, or future ability to breastfeed.

No adolescent has the cognitive capacity to understand what that means.

And crucially, the clinicians prescribing these interventions know this.

In the leaked WPATH Files — internal communications from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, that Michael Shellenberger and I released last year — a leading Canadian paediatric endocrinologist admitted that discussing fertility preservation with 14-year-olds is like, and I quote, “talking to a blank wall.” He also admitted that he sees significant regret about fertility loss in his patients as they reach adulthood.

Now, I know this to be true because at 14, I, like so many other women, was that blank wall. All the way to my late 20s, I was adamant that I would never want children.

Then, at age 30, it was as if someone flipped a switch inside me and I needed to have a baby right away.

And today, at 47, I am the proud mother of three children who have brought more joy into my life than my teenage self could ever have imagined.

This is a completely normal life trajectory; it is the reason we would never offer vasectomies or tubal ligation to adolescents, no matter how strenuously they may insist that they will never want to be parents.

Everything we know about adolescent development tells us that this life stage is defined by change and experimentation.

It is a period of identity exploration, when young people try on different selves — when beliefs are held with passionate conviction one day, only to be discarded the next.

And because we know that adolescents do not have fixed, stable identities, we should also know that permanent, irreversible medical interventions that imprint adolescent identities onto the body could never be appropriate or ethical.

Fundamental truth #3 – Ideas, behaviours, and emotions are contagious.

It has long been recognized that the messaging adolescents are exposed to as they come of age and form their identities is vitally important.

Because, humans are social creatures. We mimic the behaviours of those around us, absorb the emotions circulating through our social networks, and, consciously or unconsciously, shape our identities around the ideas and people we encounter in our lives.

And no group in society is more malleable, or more impressionable, than adolescents.

In the 1980s, there was a global contagion of bulimia, triggered by magazines and talk shows running stories warning teenage girls and young women about this new and concerning eating disorder.

Media coverage inadvertently caused the behaviour to spread by planting the idea into the fertile minds of millions of adolescent girls and young women under immense pressure that they could binge and purge to meet the the era’s expectation of thinness.

Bulimia was the culture-bound syndrome of the 80s and 90s. Celebrities shared their battles with it. Characters suffered from it in television shows. And every story sucked more girls and women into the epidemic.

But that was the pre-internet era. In the digital age, social contagions are turbocharged.

The most striking parallel to what we are witnessing today, that actually happens to be my favourite, occurred more recently, with the outbreak of TikTok tics that began in Germany.

In 2019, German psychiatrists observed a sudden surge of adolescent girls presenting to clinics with abrupt-onset Tourette-like tics. This immediately raised alarm bells. Tourette’s typically affects boys and begins in early childhood. This was an entirely new patient population.

So researchers scrambled to find the trigger and quickly identified the index case. Adolescent girls with these sudden-onset symptoms began appearing in German clinics just three months after Jan Zimmermann, a young Tourette sufferer, launched a YouTube channel that exploded in popularity. The girls displayed the exact same symptoms as Jan: the same outbursts and catchphrases.

The phenomenon soon migrated to TikTok, where it spread like wildfire.

Researchers coined a new term for what they were observing: mass social media–induced illness — a modern iteration of the long-recognized phenomenon of mass sociogenic illness.

So now let’s go to 2014, when paediatric gender clinics across the Western world witnessed an eerily similar event. All of a sudden, those waiting rooms also began to fill with an entirely new patient cohort: adolescent girls, when, historically, the patient population (like Tourette’s) would have consisted of predominantly young boys.

The surge was so sudden, and the inflection point so obvious, that in a sane era clinicians would have scrambled to identify the trigger of what was clearly a social contagion.

Instead, in the age of trans rights, no one even bothered to look.

And just like TikTok tics, it wouldn’t have taken much effort to find the answer. All it required was a glance at the cultural messaging of the time.

Because 2014 was the year Time magazine put Laverne Cox on its cover with the headline: The Transgender Tipping Point: America’s Next Civil Rights Frontier.

And with that, the modern trans rights movement launched.

Trans-identified celebrities were everywhere, trans characters appeared in children’s books and television shows, trans influencers proliferated with astonishing speed online. Schools began teaching gender identity ideology as if it were scientific fact. And in a perfect-storm scenario, smartphones and social media exploded in popularity at exactly the right moment — creating the ideal superspreading environment for this seductive idea to go viral.

The message adolescents received was simple: If you hate your body, that could mean you’re trans.

And right on cue, legions of confused adolescents who hated their developing bodies began showing up at gender clinics believing themselves to be trans.

Just like the TikTok tics. A mass social media–induced illness.

Except on this occasion, instead of scrambling to contain the epidemic, doctors picked up their syringes and scalpels and set about permanently medicalising the innocent youth caught up in this powerful cultural storm.

And activists marched in the streets demanding that these young people be allowed to sacrifice their health, fertility, and body parts — while swiftly demonising anyone who dared point out the obvious parallels to social contagions of the past.

When Ideology Drives Good People to Evil

Which brings me to my final point. I want to say something about those activists and all the people driving this scandal.

When Premier Danielle Smith enacted laws to protect the youth of Alberta from this deeply unethical experiment, she faced a tsunami of fury from trans activists. An NDP MP accused her of launching “hateful attacks on trans kids;” a union leader called the law “cruelty disguised as policy,” and a member of Canada’s Senate said the legislation was “unscientific and immoral” and “only designed to hurt” these young people.

Not a word of that is true. Yet those activists believe it with a ferocious passion.

Because they are blinded by ideology and they have forgotten the three fundamental truths I’ve shared today.

They are the quintessential True Believers. They live in a fictional world and they are fighting to protect a non-existent type of child from an imaginary enemy.

Theirs is a moral quest of good versus evil. And they mistakenly believe themselves to be on the side of good.

But this is not a story about good versus evil. It’s a story about ideology versus reality.

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously wrote: “To do evil, a human being must first believe that what he is doing is good.” Ideology, he warned us, is what gives evildoing its justification—and gives the evildoer the steadfastness and moral certainty to carry it out.

It is ideology that drives doctors to commit acts of evil beyond comprehension: to amputate the healthy breasts of teenage girls, to block the natural development of innocent children, and to rob young people of their fertility and sexual function before they can even comprehend what that means.

When the Canadian Medical Association launched a legal challenge to Alberta’s puberty blocker ban, its president dismissed the law as “political interference,” explaining — and I quote — that “medicine is a calling,” and that doctors are compelled to care for and promote the well-being of patients.

But that statement reveals the problem. The CMA remains blind to the scandal unfolding in plain sight—operating under the comforting illusion that good intentions alone are enough to protect patients from harm.

Yet noble intentions are no safeguard against harm.

History is littered with medical scandals, and at the centre of each, there were well-intentioned doctors who left a trail of devastation in their quest to help patients.

The doctors who prescribed Thalidomide didn’t do so with the intention of causing major birth defects.

The obstetricians who sent expectant mothers for prenatal X-rays didn’t deliberately set out to cause childhood leukemia.

And the recovered-memory therapists of the 1980s truly believed they were helping victims of child sex abuse, when, guided by ideology, they implanted false memories of incest into the minds of hundreds of thousands of women, shattering families and destroying lives.

There can be little doubt that paediatric gender medicine is destined to take its place in history alongside these medical catastrophes.

Because the fundamental truths make one thing unmistakably clear: not a single one of these kids is trans; and not a single one can possibly grasp the lifelong consequences of these interventions. And if they cannot comprehend the consequences, then these treatments are not appropriate for a single young person. Not one.

So this means all that is required to end this scandal is to remember the fundamental truths every one of us has always known — and to have the courage to speak them clearly, without apology, until they are heard.

Mia Hughes is the author of The WPATH Files and the director of Genspect Canada.