On Monday, The Kelsey Coalition, a group of parents united in concern about transgender identity being pushed on children, released a heartbreaking video of a father whose son may lose his battle with cancer thanks in part to a reckless diagnosis of gender dysphoria (the persistent condition of identifying with the gender opposite one’s biological sex) and rushed hormone “treatments.”

“Hi. My name is Bill. I’m speaking out because of what happened to my 20-year-old college son,” the father says in the video. “At the age of two, he had his leg amputated for cancer. At age five, he had cancer again, which required a bone marrow transfer. At age eight, his half-brother died of a heroin overdose. When he was 14, he lost his mother to cancer. And now he has stage 4 colon cancer. This is his third bout with cancer in his short life.”

“He hemorrhaged during a surgery last June on his liver and came close to death. He needs to get colon surgery, more chemo, and has a poor prognosis,” the father adds. Yet a rushed diagnosis of gender dysphoria makes his struggle for life even more difficult.

“Just last month, he met with some staff psychologists at the Rochester Institute of Technology, who convinced him that he was transgender. Instead of recommending therapy for my son — a young man who has experienced extreme grief and trauma throughout his short life — they directed him to the Strong Memorial Hospital to begin the feminizing hormone treatments,” the father says.

This could be a medically disastrous and life-threatening recommendation. The boy’s “oncologist is really concerned with the effects of this hormone treatment on cancer growth and the blood clots that could occur during his colon surgery.”

“Aside from whether or not my son is transgender, these hormones are certainly hastening his demise,” the father adds.

In researching the transgender issue, he “learned that there’s no real research to support putting a young man like my son on hormones, that there’s no consideration for his health risk, and that there’s no protocol to diagnose this and no attention paid to the underlying issues like trauma. The counselors cite that there’s no way to evaluate whether a person is transgender. It’s just if they think they are, you have to go along with that, which doesn’t make sense to me.”

The reckless pursuit of transgender identity can cost lives. Many former transgender people have regretted their cross-sex identity, returning to their biological sex and lamenting the permanent scarring they received from hormones and surgery. Yet the direct and immediate threat to a boy’s life due to transgender “treatments” is horrifyingly new.

The heartbroken father says, “They don’t understand and they just don’t care about what’s happening to kids like mine. Therapists are diagnosing these kids as transgender in one visit. There’s no test for this to prove whether or not somebody’s transgender and the doctors are treating these young people with hormones, even kids like mine who most likely have terminal cancer.”

The dad warns against H.R. 5, the Equality Act, which lesbian feminist Julia Beck called a “human rights violation,” because it will remove the right to sex-segregated spaces, from bathrooms and changing rooms to sports teams. But H.R. 5 would also enshrine a view of gender and sex that causes concrete harm to healthy bodies in the pursuit of a false gender identity.

This father may have the strongest voice in America when he opposes the Equality Act. The case of his son reveals just how reckless transgender activism can be.

“Don’t they understand that if they put this new law into effect, how many more kids like mine are going to be harmed?” the father asks. Indeed, how many will be harmed? How many will be misled, permanently scarred, and rendered unable to have children? Tens? Hundreds? Thousands? Countless.

Follow Tyler O’Neil, the author of this article, on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.