Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. speaks during the first day of the Republican National Convention. Photo: Jasper Colt / USA TODAY NETWORK
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) was outraged over a recent New York Times story about gender-affirming care that has already been debunked.
She posted on X on Thursday: “Our children should NEVER be politicized. It’s disgusting that a study on the effect of puberty blockers on kids went unpublished because it revealed the lie Democrats and Big Pharma have been selling to Americans that they improve mental health.”
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“Congress must urgently work to pass my bill, the Protect Children’s Innocence Act, and end this insanity. My bill would make so-called ‘gender-affirming care’ a felony. It’s long overdue.” Her bill would also make gender-affirming care more difficult for transgender adults to access and even ban medical schools from teaching about it.
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Our children should NEVER be politicized.
It’s disgusting that a study on the effect of puberty blockers on kids went unpublished because it revealed the lie Democrats and Big Pharma have been selling to Americans that they improve mental health.
Greene is referring to a New York Times article covering a study that allegedly was not published due to worries about how the far-right would use it for political opportunism. The unpublished study, the Times claims, found null results for puberty blockers’ effects on transgender youth’s mental health.
Journalist Erin Reed responded to the story the day the article came out. First, Reed pointed out, puberty blockers are not supposed to improve youth’s mental health but rather to prevent any worse mental health outcomes from arising. Puberty blockers are a set of treatments that delay the onset – and the permanent effects – of puberty so that trans kids, their families, and their doctors have more time to understand their identities. Their point is not to give youth the bodies they want; it’s to give them time until they can be safely given hormone replacement therapy.
For another, Joana Olson-Kennedy – the lead author of the unpublished study – and her Trans Youth Care clinic have published over 28 studies on puberty blockers previously, each of them showing beneficial effects of puberty blockers. She is no stranger to research on transgender youth and only prevented her article from being published out of worries that it would be misinterpreted and abused by the far-right media – which the Times article and Greene’s social media postings show were a legitimate concern.
Research, including that by Olson-Kennedy, suggests that puberty blockers are safe and have no permanent effects. If a young person changes their mind about them, they simply stop taking them and go through the puberty associated with their sex assigned at birth. Provided that youth initiate puberty within a reasonable time, they’re able to catch up to their peers in bone density development and height.
As Reed writes, “What [Olson-Kennedy] has done is exercise caution, understanding the limitations of her data and recognizing how, in today’s charged climate, misinterpretation and underpowered studies can be used to harm transgender people. By doing so, she has protected both the integrity of her research and the community it serves.”
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