Children as young as 8 years old are being given untested experimental drugs to verify their gender identity. Activists argue that these drugs are essential for the health of kids who identify as transgender, and many in the medical establishment increasingly agree. Nevertheless, a dissenting endocrinologist explained to PJ Media that these drugs actually give children a disease that could cause heart and bone problems and stunt brain growth, and condemned the transgender “treatments” often carried out on children as “child abuse.”

If a girl child identifies as a boy, she may be given so-called “puberty-blockers” to prevent her from going through the natural human process of development. In some cases, she would then be given testosterone in an attempt to make her become a man. The effects of these hormones are not fully known, but some negative side effects have been widely reported.

“I call it a development blocker — it’s actually causing a disease,” Dr. Michael Laidlaw, an independent private practice endocrinologist in Rocklin, Calif. who consults with Sutter Roseville Medical Center, told PJ Media. The disease in question is hypogonadotropic hypogonadism. It occurs when the brain fails to send the right signal to the gonads to make the hormones necessary for development.

“We’re talking about what in nature is a rare condition. In the United States, if someone has this condition it’s going to be recognized and treated so the long-term results are unknown,” the doctor explained. “It’s an area that needs to be explored further.”

While endocrinologists — doctors who specialize in hormones and the endocrine system — are familiar with the disease and gladly treat it when a patient has been diagnosed, many of them are effectively causing their patients to contract the same disease in an attempt to affirm gender identity, Laidlaw said. “An endocrinologist might treat a condition where a female’s testosterone levels are going to be outside the normal range. We’ll treat that and we’re aware of metabolic problems. At the same time, an endocrinologist may be giving high levels of testosterone to a female to ‘transition’ her.”

“In this case, it’s being induced by the medication,” he explained.

“When you look at the dosing that they’re doing for females, for example, they give them a dose such that their testosterone levels would be in the normal range for a male, but for a female it’s 10 to 40 times higher than normal,” Laidlaw said. The rates for estrogen given to males are similarly high and unhealthy.

When people are given far more of the opposite sex hormone than their bodies can handle, they are at “increased risk for cardiovascular disease, cardiovascular death, deep vein thrombosis. They’ve looked at adults taking these hormones and have seen already these cardiovascular risks.” When these drugs are administered to children, “one would presume it’s the same or even worse, in the long run.”

Laidlaw warned of similar effects from “so-called puberty-blocking medication like Lupron.” These drugs “may be used for prostate cancer or have a use in females for endometriosis. They stop the pituitary gland to stop from functioning correctly.”

In a healthy human body, the pituitary gland “sends signals to the gonads to produce testosterone or estrogen.” By preventing this natural secretion of hormones, Lupron in kids “blocks development of their organs, and their growth is stunted. If it’s started in early puberty, these kids will not develop mature sperm or eggs, they will be infertile. If they have gonads removed, they will be sterilized.”

“They’re going to end up with lower bone density, perhaps stunted brain development,” the doctor explained. “A lot of the brain impact is unknown. There seems to be some brain development that is sex hormone-dependent.”

Even though the risks are not fully known, activists and medical professionals have pushed drugs on younger and younger children. “Under the Dutch protocol, as of Dutch law, these kids couldn’t take cross-sex hormones until they were 16. In the U.S., the age was lowered to 12. I filed a Freedom of Information Act request and found that in this NIH study they actually recommended kids as young as 8 years old getting on to these opposite-sex hormones.”

Indeed, two doctors involved in the transitioning of children, Ilana Sherer and Johanna Olson-Kennedy, explained in a video that they give “puberty blockers” to children at age 8 or 9, when they are in third and fourth grades. Olson-Kennedy has received a $5.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for a 5-year study on mastectomies done on girls as young as 13. The documents unearthed due to Laidlaw’s FOIA request showed the minimum age for cross-sex hormones in the study had been lowered to 8 in 2017.

“Michelle Cretella was the first one to label it correctly as child abuse,” the endocrinologist told PJ Media. “When a person cannot consent to being harmed in a medical study or a medical setting — when they cannot be aware of the harms — it is an ethical problem.”

Indeed, Laidlaw compared these transgender “treatments” to the horrific experiments performed by Nazi scientists under Adolf Hitler. “They were doing experiments on people who could not consent.”

“If you have children, they can’t consent because they may not have the intellectual capacity or emotional maturity to understand the consequences of what’s going to happen to them,” he argued. “Puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones — they’re going to be infertile. What 11-year-old is ready to have a kid? How would they know what that means? If you want to fully inform a child, you really cannot. Even if you tell the parents, how can the parent decide it? You can’t really do it.”

“That’s one of the problems with the NIH study. There’s no real way for a kid to consent to this and the harms are very great,” Laidlaw said. “The Nazis were trying to hurt people and these people are trying to help, but they’re still harming them.”

He noted that the medications are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). “These are really radical experiments on human bodies such as never has done before in the history of humankind, being perpetrated on children and justified by our medical societies because these political groups have brought their ideology into medicine but there’s no science behind it. You just can’t justify it.”

“Harming people without their consent cannot be justified no matter how many people it helps, in my opinion,” he said.

Laidlaw emphasized just how unscientific it is to treat people based on their self-perception, rather than scientific tests.

“There’s really nothing else as an endocrinologist where we treat with hormones based on what a person feels. Sometimes people feel like their levels are high or low, but you test it and they’re okay,” he said.

As for gender dysphoria — the persistent and consistent identification with the gender opposite one’s biological sex — it cannot be proven through such tests. “They really believe that this gender inside their brain is different than what their body is. You can’t prove this, you can’t test for it, you can’t do blood tests, MRI, CT scan. When someone has a confusion about their gender compared to their sex as the body, we have to look for underlying medical problems like anxiety, depression, schizophrenia. With young kids, it may just be family conflict or parental conflict.”

Laidlaw cited studies that followed children who suffered from gender dysphoria. Most children desisted — identified with their biological sex as male or female. Between 62 percent and 98 percent of children desisted.

If transgender “medicine” really involves giving kids a disease and experimenting on them without their truly informed consent, why do doctors perform it?

Laidlaw explained that the political group the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) pressured its way into the guidelines for the Endocrine Society and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“I and other endocrinologists never had a vote. A very small, select group influenced the leaders of these organizations and put these things out with no scientific backing,” he said.

The Endocrine Society took transgender guidelines from WPATH. “If you look at these guidelines, they give quality of evidence markers. All the quality of evidence is low or very low,” Laidlaw explained. “They have no long-term studies to support what they’re doing and they talk very little about the harms.”

The doctor said he is working on a paper explaining that puberty is a natural and good process, countering activists’ suggestions that it is some sort of disease.

Practitioners of transgender “medicine” “make it sound as though you could stop the puberty of a boy and restart it as a girl and become a woman. But that’s not possible,” he said.

What really happens in such a case? “You blocked puberty, which is a medical disease, hypogonadotropic hypogonadism. Then you add fuel to the fire of the disease by giving them the wrong sex hormone. What they’re doing is intentionally making everything abnormal allegedly to help fix this condition.”

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