The Medical University of South Carolina initially said it wouldn’t be affected by a law banning use of state funds for treatment “furthering the gender transition” of children under 16. Months later, it cut off that care to all trans minors.

One Saturday morning in September 2022, Terrence Steyer, the dean of the College of Medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina, placed an urgent call to a student. Just a year prior, the medical student, Thomas Agostini, had won first place at a university-sponsored event for his graduate research on transgender pediatric patients. He also had been featured in a video on MUSC’s website highlighting resources that support the LGBTQ+ community.

Now, Agostini and his once-lauded study had set off a political firestorm. Conservative activists seized on one line in particular in the study’s summary — a parenthetical noting the youngest transgender patient to visit MUSC’s pediatric endocrinology clinic was 4 years old — and inaccurately claimed that children that young were prescribed hormones as part of a gender transition. Elon Musk amplified the false claim, tweeting, “Is it really true that four-year-olds are receiving hormone treatment?” That led federal and state lawmakers to frantically ask top MUSC leaders whether the public hospital was in fact helping young children medically transition. The hospital was not; its pediatric transgender patients did not receive hormone therapy before puberty, nor does it offer surgical options to minors.

  • nugmeister64@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I understand your point of view, it’s good that there’s a lot of care taken to make sure the mental impact of transitioning is minimal, but the point is this is a huge amount of work to help someone try and cope with “being” something that doesn’t align with what what they were born and biologically formed as. It’s a noble sentiment, but we should be approaching the whole issue in a way that helps people realize that they don’t have to change to be themselves.

    • darq@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      we should be approaching the whole issue in a way that helps people realize that they don’t have to change to be themselves.

      That is literally the first thing the majority of transgender people try. Usually for years if not decades, before they finally accept who they are and transition.