February 7, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – As tensions rise between parental rights and child gender confusion, a recent article in a prestigious medical journal makes the case for state intervention to “transition” children against their parents’ will.

On December 31, the Journal of the American Medical Association published “Medically assisted gender affirmation: when children and parents disagree,” by a group of academics led by Dr. Samuel Dubin of the University of Michigan. The authors’ approach “prioritizes the developing autonomy of transgender youth in the decision-making process, and claims to be based “in the literature surrounding the risks and benefits of gender-affirming therapy in transgender children and the existing legal basis for recognizing minors’ decision-making authority in certain medical situations.”

“Neglect, as a medico-legal term, can be used to initiate an evaluation by Child Protective Services and remove a parent as a child’s legal guardian in the most severe instances,” the piece argued. “We conclude that situations where a parent prevents a minor from receiving treatments related to gender dysphoria violate the Harm Principle and justify state intervention.”

In fact, a range of scientific literature indicates that reinforcing gender confusion is harmful in the long term, and often fails to prevent significant emotional harm up to and including attempted suicide (with or without surgery), because fixating on “gender affirmation” tends to distract from exploring other issues that may be at the root of a patient’s mental or emotional unrest.

Nevertheless, there have been numerous cases around the world of authorities either subjecting children to gender reassignment or siding against parents who want to protect their children, from a Texas mother’s legal battle to raise her son as a girl over his father’s objections, to the UK’s National Health Service administering puberty blockers to dozens of children who had been misdiagnosed as gender-dysphoric.

"Pediatricians in particular are taught that during certain kinds of office visits they are to interview the child separately from the parents,” Dr. Andre Van Mol of the American College of Pediatricians told the Christian Post. “That may be presented as something with very good intentions, such as discovering patterns of abuse, but it can also be used ideologically to advance the abortion agenda, encourage premature sexual debut and an overconfidence in birth control, and now clearly to advance transgender ideology.”

"Transgender ideologues now seem firmly in the driver's seat of establishing policy for several of these medical organizations, most notably the ones for pediatricians, psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers,” Van Mol warned. “It is not based on science or long-term evidence. Many of us see this as a replay of the lobotomy movement of the '50s and '60s. Opposition to it knows no boundaries of politics or faith, and it is gaining momentum."