Planned Parenthood is Helping Teenagers Transition After a 30 Minute Consult. Parents and Doctors are Sounding the Alarm.
The abortion provider is wading into transgender care, doling out prescriptions for estrogen and testosterone, including to special needs kids.
Fred has a history of developmental issues. He was diagnosed with autism—technically ADHD with autistic traits—at age four, struggled with depression and anxiety as he got older, and was expelled from three different special-needs schools due to behavioral problems, stemming in part from an impulse control disorder. He is an 18-year-old high school student in New Jersey and lives with his parents, who asked the Washington Free Beacon to withhold his real name.
Like many people on the autism spectrum, Fred cycles through obsessions and extreme views. He was part of an alt-right group chat as recently as last year, his parents said, but apostatized suddenly and now considers himself far left.
Still, Fred has a few interests that have remained constant throughout his life, all fairly typical for a teenage boy: guns, power tools, and metalworking. That made it all the more shocking when, in December 2022, at 17 years old, he announced he was a transgender woman.
The revelation came a few months after Fred’s best friend, who also has autism, began identifying as transgender. Concerned that this was another phase, but open to the possibility that it wasn’t, Fred’s parents tried to enroll their son, whom they were now calling by a female name at home, in the Gender and Autism Program at Children’s National Hospital, the only gender clinic in the country specializing in autistic youth. Fred was determined to take hormones, they told the clinic, which is known for its lengthy assessments. Before he did, they wanted to be sure his dysphoria wasn’t transient or peer-driven.
The clinic informed them in March that it had a waitlist of about a year. And Fred, who would be turning 18 in two months, wasn’t willing to wait.
In late July, while his parents were out of town and after he had come of age, Fred went to Planned Parenthood, which prescribes hormones to any legal adult without a letter from a therapist or a formal diagnosis of gender dysphoria. The only requirement is a brief consultation, usually with a nurse practitioner, about the drugs’ effects, which range from mood swings and male pattern baldness to permanent infertility.
How brief? Fred arrived at his local clinic, on North Fullerton Ave. in Montclair, New Jersey, at around 11:00 a.m., according to phone tracking data his parents used to monitor his whereabouts. By 11:39, they received a text message from CVS: Fred’s estrogen prescription was on its way. Instead of a months-long evaluation by expert psychiatrists, a nurse practitioner had, in little over 30 minutes, prescribed their special-needs son a powerful drug without their knowledge or consent.
"It’s criminal what Planned Parenthoods all over the country are doing," Fred’s mother, a New Jersey pediatrician, said. "And most people have no idea this is happening."
Fred’s story—corroborated through nursing and medical board complaints, locational data, prescriptions, text messages, emails, and other documents reviewed by the Free Beacon—is a microcosm of how the nation’s largest abortion provider is eroding the already thin guardrails on gender medicine in America. As waitlists swell at clinics like Children’s National, and as concern mounts about the perils of rushed transition, many young people are using Planned Parenthood to skip the line and circumvent the safeguards, making it much more difficult to gatekeep what was once a tightly regulated treatment.
That dynamic has sparked criticism of the organization from an unlikely source: the liberal psychologist who helped bring pediatric gender medicine to the United States.
"I have always been a very strong supporter of Planned Parenthood and am pro-choice," said Laura Edwards-Leeper, who co-founded the nation’s first pediatric gender clinic, at Boston Children’s Hospital, in 2007. "But they have taken on something that they are not equipped to handle." The lack of gatekeeping is so bad, she added, that some of her patients received hormones from Planned Parenthood before coming to her for an assessment.
Others, like Erica Anderson, a former president of the US Professional Association for Transgender Health, say patients they’ve sought to delay from transitioning have simply turned to Planned Parenthood. "I’ve had patients desperate to get hormones where I’ve been the voice of caution," said Anderson, who is transgender herself. "In some cases, they say, ‘I’ll just go to Planned Parenthood when I’m 18.’ Usually I can dissuade them but sometimes I can’t."
Planned Parenthood is one of the largest providers of cross-sex hormones in the United States, and one of the fastest growing. Affiliates in the greater Portland area saw a nearly 400 percent increase in "gender-affirming care visits" between 2021 and 2022, according to their annual reports, while those in Ohio saw a 544 percent increase over the same period. Hormones now appear to be in higher demand than abortion at some branches: A Planned Parenthood in Knoxville, Tenn., told NPR that nearly a fifth of its patients sought hormone therapy in 2021, whereas abortion makes up just 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s services nationally.
This growth has come as pediatric gender clinics, which used to wait months before prescribing hormones, are becoming more laissez faire themselves. Some now prescribe hormones on the first visit, a Reuters investigation found last year, while others say ballooning caseloads have made it harder to conduct the kind of in-depth assessments once standard in the field.
But with Planned Parenthood a constant temptation for older teens, even the most conservative clinics have an incentive to reduce gatekeeping if they don’t want to lose patients. The result, Anderson said, is a race to the bottom that pulls all providers, no matter their philosophy, toward the informed consent model adopted by Planned Parenthood, which doles out life-altering drugs to almost anyone who requests them. And that model has alarmed even the liberal pioneers of gender medicine, who say that some 18-year-olds—especially those with special needs—cannot meaningfully consent to hormones without extensive counseling.
"There are 15-year-olds I work with who are much more mature than average and can make these kinds of decisions," said Edwards-Leeper, who, along with Anderson, has attacked GOP efforts to ban hormone therapy for minors. "But there are also 20-year-olds who are struggling in various ways that make them less able to give informed consent."
These doctors argue that Planned Parenthood, which relies heavily on nurse practitioners and employs few psychiatrists, is ill-equipped to handle complex cases like Fred’s. Its clinicians are not trained to assess patients’ "developmental trajectory," Anderson said, including the role social media or childhood trauma may be playing in their distress. Nor are they trained to consider the impact of autism, which often co-occurs with gender dysphoria and—according to multiple sets of clinical guidelines—warrants a more cautious approach to hormone therapy.
"Because it is often harder for an adolescent with [autism] to comprehend the long-term risks and implications of gender-related medical interventions," guidelines published in the Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychiatry state, "consenting for treatment may be more complex in this population."
The guidelines, developed by proponents of hormone therapy who work with autistic youth, add that a "black-and-white" mindset can lead some on the spectrum to assume, mistakenly, that "gender nonconforming interests" imply a need for medical transition.
Even the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH), whose standards of care are among the most aggressive and controversial in the field, says "it is critical to differentiate gender incongruence" from autistic "obsessions" and "rigid thinking." Though the group does recommend an informed consent standard for people over 18, it also states that its guidelines for minors—which call for "comprehensive" evaluations by experts on autism and other disorders—are "often relevant" to young adults.
"Some young adults are developmentally more like adolescents," Edwards-Leeper, who helped write the WPATH guidelines for minors, said. "Planned Parenthood really isn’t following the standard of care if they don’t take that into account."
Fred’s parents made a similar argument in a complaint they filed with New Jersey’s nursing and medical boards in July. The complaint, a copy of which was reviewed by the Free Beacon, said that Planned Parenthood violated the standards of care by prescribing Fred estrogen without a thorough psychiatric assessment, and that his autistic traits had inhibited his capacity to consent. It also questioned whether 30 minutes was enough time for anyone to think through the implications of a permanent loss of fertility.
"The New Jersey State Medical Board has an obligation to protect children and young adults, especially those with special needs," the complaint reads. "This type of shoddy (and irreversible) medical practice is a threat to all of them."
Planned Parenthood did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Even for people without special needs, Edwards-Leeper said, 18 is a young age to remove all safeguards on gender care. The brain does not finish developing until at least 25, she noted, with the prefrontal cortex—which is responsible for long-term planning and decision-making—taking the longest to mature.
"The 18-25 range has been recognized as a unique developmental period in psychology," Edwards-Leeper said, adding that she tried, but failed, to get WPATH to draft separate standards of care for this age group. "But in the gender field, we have chosen to draw a clear line at 18."
The costs of that clear line are already piling up. At least two high-profile detransitioners, Cat Cattinson and Helena Kirschner, received testosterone from Planned Parenthood after a 30-minute appointment, which, in Cattinson’s case, took place over the phone. Kirschner stopped taking testosterone once her mental health deteriorated; Cattinson, a singer, stopped after it permanently destroyed her singing voice.
Though Planned Parenthood does warn patients about the effects of hormone therapy, those warnings are not standardized across its numerous state affiliates, which means patients in one region might get very different information from those in another. Planned Parenthoods in Virginia and some parts of California warn that testosterone can cause vaginal atrophy, for example. But branches in Michigan, Central and Western New York, Greater Washington and North Idaho, Southeastern Pennsylvania, and the Great Plains region do not, according to resources posted on their websites.
"That’s crazy," Edwards-Leeper said. "Vaginal atrophy should always be discussed. If they’re not including that on their list, that’s a problem."
A few branches, such as California Central Coast, do not even list increased libido as an effect of testosterone.
The lack of standardization extends to lab work—used to determine what dosing regimen will be safe for a given individual—which varies by clinic and in some cases does not include a blood draw. Hormone therapy can affect kidney function, potassium levels, and red blood cell counts, according to Planned Parenthood of Michigan, where bloodwork is required, so people with higher baselines may need lower doses to avoid blood clots and other conditions.
Planned Parenthood’s national office "hasn’t exerted any influence to make things uniform," Anderson said. "I don’t think they have a grip on the fundamental difference between hormone therapy and reproductive health care."
Her (KAMALA HARRIS) more radical positions, such as support for the Obama administration’s Iran deal, prosecuting a journalist who exposed Planned Parenthood’s collection and sale of aborted babies’ body parts (while receiving campaign donations from them), and defending Ilhan Omar’s anti-Semitism, may indeed sit well with a great many leftists, but her actions as Attorney General of California may not. While in that position, Harris jailed hundreds on marijuana charges and authorized anti-prostitution sting operations which, according to SF Weekly, disproportionately targeted Latino men (a crucial Democrat demographic). In addition to this -- though she later admitted it was a mistake -- she prosecuted and jailed the parents of truant teens. She even refused to release the names of Catholic priests accused of sexually molesting children, abnegating law enforcement’s most basic and humane duty -- regardless of anyone’s opinion of the Catholic Church.
David Daleiden: Kamala Harris Prostituted Her Law Enforcement Powers to Planned Parenthood
JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images
18 Aug 202017
5:47
David Daleiden, founder of the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), said Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) prostituted her powers in her former role as California’s attorney general for the benefit of Planned Parenthood in an interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Sunday with host Joel Pollak.
Daleiden noted the partisan and political dimensions of California’s prosecution of him and his CMP colleague Sandra Merritt. Both he and Merritt were charged with 14 cases of illegal recording of confidential conversations and one count of conspiracy.
“Kamala Harris is the biggest threat to First Amendment civil liberties and First Amendment civil rights that our country has ever seen, in my opinion,” said Daleiden. “While she was the attorney General of the State of California, Kamala Harris, at the behest of her political patron — Planned Parenthood — targeted me for criminal punishment solely because of the content of the message that I was publishing and speaking at the time as you mentioned the undercover video series showing top-level Planned Parenthood officials callously negotiating the harvesting and sale of tiny aborted baby hearts and lungs and livers and brains.”
Daleiden continued, “In the State of California, when Kamala Harris was the attorney general, you could do undercover investigations of factory farming, corrupt chiropractors, [and] fraudulent air conditioning repairmen. Local TV news journalists in California [were] filming and publishing undercover video with conversations — sometimes even in private office spaces — and publishing these videos in on a daily weekly basis. Not a single one of those journalists ever had their home raided or were prosecuted by Kamala Harris’s attorney general’s office.”
LISTEN:
“But if you did the exact same kind of undercover filming and publishing, and your message was something that questioned Planned Parenthood or questioned the abortion industry — the sacred cows of Kamala Harris and the San Francisco political establishment in California — then in that case, I became the first and only person involved in news gathering, the first and only citizen journalist in the state of California to ever have the California video recording law enforced against me, criminally,” Daleiden added.
Daleiden went on, “It was launched under Kamala Harris. She targeted our message, specifically. She sent 11 California DOJ agents in April of 2016 to raid my one-bedroom apartment in Orange County with explicit instructions from Planned Parenthood to seize the means of publication, to seize the computers and the video equipment that I was using to publish the videos.”
“Kamala Harris’ deputy prosecutor, Johnette Jauron, who was in charge of the case, she admitted a few years later in 2018 in a filing in court that the reason that I alone have become the first citizen journalist in California to be prosecuted under the California video recording law — to have that law criminally enforced against me when it was enforced against against nobody else for news gathering in California — is because of the content of the videos themselves,” recalled Daleiden.
“It is blatant, unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination and invidious targeting of Americans whose message Kamala Harris disagrees with. So, she is a huge threat to our First Amendment civil liberties in this country.”
Pollak said, “It almost looks as if [Harris] initiated her prosecution of you at the instigation of Planned Parenthood to please Planned Parenthood, to help this politically-connected organization, which is so important for donations in the Democratic Party and for the future of anyone in Democratic politics. She basically acted at their behest. Is that true?”
Daleiden replied, “Yes, absolutely. Like I said, undercover video recording and reporting has never been criminally prosecuted in California in the history of the state until now, until this case, where the entity whose ox is being gored was Planned Parenthood, the political patrons of Kamala Harris and so many others in the California political establishment.”
He further noted how Harris coordinated her prosecution of him and his CMP colleague with Planned Parenthood.
“Just two weeks before she ordered the raid on my home, Kamala Harris had a secret in-person meeting in Los Angeles with several top-level Planned Parenthood of California officials,” stated Daleiden. “We have the action items from that meeting in an email that was produced to us in discovering the case, and those action items show that the meeting was primarily to discuss Planned Parenthood’s political agenda in the state of California, but included within their political agenda were the issues involved in Kamala Harris’s investigation of me.”
Daleiden concluded, “[Harris] was blatantly mixing her political constituent services functions with her law enforcement powers and basically prostituting her law enforcement powers to the service of her political campaign donors. She was running for United States Senate at that exact same time in March and April in 2016. She had petitions urging political support for Planned Parenthood on her campaign website.
He recalled that Harris’s executive office assistant while she was attorney general of California — who was ‘liaising with Planned Parenthood” while “working on this investigation” — later became Harris’s campaign manager during her first run for the U.S. Senate.
“It is a blatant use and abuse of law enforcement power solely to serve private partisan political interests, and that is why she is such a dangerous candidate,” concluded Daleiden.
Breitbart News Sunday broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. Eastern.
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter.
Kamala's Threat to American Democracy
Who, exactly, is a vice-president supposed to be?
Tue Aug 18, 2020
The arrival of Joe Biden’s decision on a running mate is a true turning point in the history of American politics.
There has never before been a presidential candidate who, prior to entering the White House, has shown such undeniable signs of age-related neurological decay. All political disagreements disregarded, the sight of an elderly person succumbing to the demons of those dreaded cognitive ailments -- which all too often rob us of the older people we love -- is truly excruciating to behold.
The political outcome of Biden's mental state is, if possible, even more unsettling. The role of the president is meant to be powerful. All constitutional checks and balances considered, the sheer power of the chief executive, in that one single person invested with authority to counter-balance the power of the legislative and judicial branches, is truly awesome.
In our situation today, we see a man who is clearly not in full command of his mental faculties, who is allowing himself to be considered for that office of chief executive; an office which, unlike a prime minister in a parliamentary system, is intended to be stable and not prone to regular changes in leadership.
The expectation of a normal four-year presidential tenure on Biden’s part if he is elected must, at the very least, be subjected to serious doubt. If pronouncing basic words -- let alone quoting the most famous phrase of our Declaration of Independence -- is such a confusing ordeal for him, then it is our urgent duty to question whether this individual is fit to be the man who must accept the ultimate responsibility for this country’s national security and well-being.
These facts squarely cast the Democrat side of the current election as not a presidential election at all, but a vice-presidential election.
Should Biden win, the chances are very probable that his vice president will become the 47th president to finish out his first four-year term. As the vice president automatically succeeds to the Oval Office if the president dies or is rendered permanently incapacitated, the profoundly anti-democratic repercussions of this situation is worsened by whom Biden has actually chosen.
The traditional custom for presidential hopefuls is to either choose the second-highest-polling candidate in a primary race, as Ronald Reagan did with George H. W. Bush in 1980, or to choose a highly capable politician who is well-respected by most of the party, as Donald Trump did with Governor Mike Pence in 2016. In both of those cases, the aforementioned running mates reflected the Republican Party and its voters quite respectably while promoting unity.
It is highly questionable, meanwhile, whether Kamala Harris -- aside from all of the establishment media’s expected giddy cheerleading -- really represents her party all that well. She was polling at 2% nationally by the time she ended her own presidential bid on December 3, 2019. Her more radical positions, such as support for the Obama administration’s Iran deal, prosecuting a journalist who exposed Planned Parenthood’s collection and sale of aborted babies’ body parts (while receiving campaign donations from them), and defending Ilhan Omar’s anti-Semitism, may indeed sit well with a great many leftists, but her actions as Attorney General of California may not. While in that position, Harris jailed hundreds on marijuana charges and authorized anti-prostitution sting operations which, according to SF Weekly, disproportionately targeted Latino men (a crucial Democrat demographic). In addition to this -- though she later admitted it was a mistake -- she prosecuted and jailed the parents of truant teens. She even refused to release the names of Catholic priests accused of sexually molesting children, abnegating law enforcement’s most basic and humane duty -- regardless of anyone’s opinion of the Catholic Church.
it is highly debatable if these are positions that a high number of progressives who voted for the Democrat primary runner-up, Bernie Sanders, would approve of. Especially today, being tough on minority and drug crime -- to the exclusion of “white patriarchal” clergy sex abuse -- is not en vogue among the Democratic Party’s truly energized base, which is largely college-educated millennials taught to have contempt for not only aggressive inner city policing, but inner city policing overall.
It also remains a question as to how many black American voters Kamala really represents. Without doubt, she completely failed to gain these voters' support during the primary. Many black Americans responded to Barack and Michelle Obama due to their image as people who empathized authentically with the black experience of living in inner city America. Harris’s flip-flopping on criminal justice issues has clearly deprived her of the Obama touch.
What should highly concern all Americans of whatever political persuasion is the fact that, given Joe Biden’s medical condition, a Democrat victory in 2020 could very likely result in a person for whom only 2% of Democrats and Democrat-leaning Independents supported to become president.
The reasons for Biden’s choice of Kamala Harris as his running mate are as yet not entirely clear. What is very clear, however, is that a new president of the United States in the near future could be a person whom a weak and faltering man chose by fiat, and not someone whom the majority of the country elected by the ballot.
That's a problem.
It's a problem for America -- and it's a serious and profound problem for American democracy.
Barry Nussbaum is an exceptional American businessman and real estate mogul, whose distinguished career extends more than 38 years. He is an experienced news commentator on international affairs, who has been featured on major television networks, web-based and in print media. Visit his site: AmericanTruthProject.org.
