Bad Politics Begets Worse Medicine and Law

Even worse than “The Endocrine Society’s Dangerous Transgender Politicization” (op-ed by Roy Eappen and Ian Kingsbury, June 29) has been the American Academy of Pediatrics’s complicity in the provision of hormonal and surgical treatments designed to obstruct the normal development of physical secondary sex characteristics in adolescent and preadolescent children. AAP leadership has been co-opted by those medical purveyors who place their extreme “woke” ideology above the welfare of the children they are sworn to protect.

I taught a law-and-medicine seminar for senior medical students for 10 years. When I sought input on this topic from some of my classmates who have been practicing pediatrics for years, their responses were surprisingly consistent. They found the official AAP line on “gender-affirming” hormonal and surgical treatments repugnant and destructive to their patients, but they were afraid to speak up for fear of retaliation.

U.S. courts’ reliance on clinical-practice guidelines issued by various medical specialties societies isn’t unreasonable. Judges aren’t trained to analyze and dispute medical opinion. The problem lies not with the courts, but with physicians, some of whom have forgotten their commitment to “first do no harm” to vulnerable patients. For pediatricians, and the society that purports to represent them, this means “do no harm to children.”

Donna L. Carlson, M.D.

Redlands, Calif.