A group of “left-leaning, open-minded, and pro-gay rights” professionals say it is “highly suspect” to affirm young people who claim to be transgender, and risky to provide them with hormonal and surgical treatments to change their bodies.

“Our concern is with medical transition for children and youth,” say Youth Trans Critical Professionals on their website. “We feel that unnecessary surgeries and/or hormonal treatments which have not been proven safe in the long-term represent significant risks for young people.”

“Policies that encourage — either directly or indirectly — such medical treatment for young people who may not be able to evaluate the risks and benefits are highly suspect, in our opinion,” says the organization, which is composed of “psychologists, social workers, doctors, medical ethicists, and academics.”

The professionals go on to explain the types of medical interventions that children and adolescents must endure in order to transition to the opposite sex:

Medical transition can involve administering puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to young children. These drugs are being used off-label. The long term side effects are not known, but there is cause for concern. They can certainly result in permanent sterilization of a child who has not even been allowed to go through puberty. In essence, the rush to treat transgender children medically is a massive experiment. For the young person who has never lived as their own sex in their own body, surgical intervention may seem like the next logical step. Young people can undergo such treatment without parental permission once they are eighteen years old. In these surgeries, healthy organs are removed.

Youth Trans Critical Professionals express “alarm” that – because of the current trendiness of being transgendered – many young people have decided they are a member of the opposite sex simply as a result of “binges” on social media sites. They describe a process of transgender activists recruiting for their “cult.”

“There is evidence that vulnerable young people are being actively recruited and coached on such sites to believe that they are trans,” the professionals say, adding:

Social contagion is almost certainly playing a role as well. In many schools and communities, there are entire peer groups “coming out” as trans at the same time. In many cases, these young people may be suffering from mental health problems such as anxiety or depression that leave them easy prey to the cult-like tactics of these online trans activists.

Despite such potential mental health problems, the gender-confused child or young person is no longer legally permitted to see a therapist to engage in “conversion therapy” in some states. The group sees such state prohibitions as dangerous since they may block the process of critical thinking and evaluation of the young person regarding the reasons why he or she desires to become a transgender member of the opposite sex.

“While the sentiment behind this legislation is laudable, in some cases, it is being interpreted to mean that therapists cannot explore gender identity with a youth who is professing to be trans,” argue the professionals. “This would mean we can’t ask why; we can’t explore underlying mental health issues; we can’t consider the symbolic nature of the gender dysphoria; and we can’t look at possible confounding issues such as social media use or social contagion.”

In a recent statement, the American College of Pediatricians has asserted that gender ideology is harmful to children. The College states that it “urges educators and legislators to reject all policies that condition children to accept as normal a life of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex. Facts – not ideology – determine reality…”

The College adds:

No one is born with a gender. Everyone is born with a biological sex. Gender (an awareness and sense of oneself as male or female) is a sociological and psychological concept; not an objective biological one… A person’s belief that he or she is something they are not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking. When an otherwise healthy biological boy believes he is a girl, or an otherwise healthy biological girl believes she is a boy, an objective psychological problem exists that lies in the mind not the body, and it should be treated as such. These children suffer from gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria (GD), formerly listed as Gender Identity Disorder (GID), is a recognized mental disorder in the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-V)…

“According to the DSM-V, as many as 98% of gender confused boys and 88% of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty,” the College asserts. “Conditioning children into believing that a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful is child abuse.”