Oregon is a deep, deep blue state, in large part due to the population centers in the western half of the state, most notably notorious Portland, which seems to be the home base for Antifa nutcases. But Oregon as a whole is seeing a troubling rise in what has been a national problem for some time: Transgender diagnoses of minor children, especially girls. That wouldn't be as big an issue if those diagnoses didn't prompt life-changing, irreversible "gender-affirming" treatments, but they do.
There are, as I'm continually pointing out, serious problems with accepted medical ethics in these procedures and treatments, primarily the violation of primum non nocere, generally translated as "first, do no harm." These procedures do harm kids; they take physically healthy youths and subject them to life-altering treatments that can never be reversed.
Oregon is becoming ground zero for this, and it seems to be affecting girls at a substantially higher rate than boys.
A study recently published in Research Connections drew attention for finding very high rates (relatively speaking) of puberty-blocker and cross-sex hormone uptake among adolescents in Oregon. A separate insurance database analysis by the Manhattan Institute, published here for the first time, adds further detail, suggesting that Oregon has become a national leader in transgender diagnoses and medical intervention. Not coincidentally, Oregon is the only state in the country to have formally adopted the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s recommendations as the basis for its Medicaid benefits. And it did so despite its own health regulatory body acknowledging the absence of supportive evidence.
Note that the study, which you can view here, doesn't include rates of surgical interventions, only hormonal and other drug therapies. Small favors, we can suppose. But those hormonal treatments, including puberty blockers, are more than harmful enough on their own.
Using insurance data for minors ages 8 to 17 between 2016 and 2023, the authors of the recent Research Connections study found that about one in 240 girls and one in 630 boys in Oregon were on hormones by age 17. In addition, 0.98 percent of minors—1.51 percent of girls and 0.46 percent of boys—received a “transgender-related diagnosis” (typically “gender dysphoria”) during these years. In other words, about one in every 65 adolescent girls in Oregon is a potential candidate for medical “sex reassignment.” Also of note, the median age of diagnosis in the study was 14 for both boys and girls, and the median time from diagnosis to medical intervention was just under ten months—findings consistent with the rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) presentation,
What's really troubling is that this is a trend that's accelerating in Oregon.
To put these figures into context, when the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) was published in 2013, it reported a diagnostic prevalence of gender dysphoria among adults as 0.002 percent to 0.003 percent for females and 0.005 percent to 0.014 percent for males. Even if we assume (incorrectly) that gender dysphoria is a single clinical entity, this means that diagnosed teen girls and boys in contemporary Oregon thus represent a rise of, respectively, more than 500 and 30 times the prevalence of pre-2013 figures.
More than five hundred times the pre-2013 figures. Right now, in Oregon, 500 times as many teenage girls are being put on life-altering drugs as before 2013.
Read More: Fake News: The Transgender Mass Migration That Wasn't
House Hearing: Med School Deans Now Humiliated by Biology
Could this be due to an in-migration of teens with these issues? It's not impossible; some view having a "transgender kid" as some kind of sick status symbol. Just look at Hollywood, for example, and you'll see such people parading their "transgender" kids. This could well be part of the Great Sorting, as I've been calling it, with people moving and further separating the country into red and blue. It seems more likely that this, in places like notoriously far-left Portland, could be due to the ongoing social contagion that has sprung up around this issue.
Now, gender dysphoria is a real thing. That's been known for decades. Historically, diagnoses have been rare, and also historically, standard treatment was psychotherapy, not drugs, not hormones, not surgery. Most patients, especially young ones, saw good results. But this is something else, and we can't afford to dismiss the increasing use of hormone therapy on kids.
According to the Research Connections piece, far and away the greatest hormonal intervention is administering testosterone treatment to girls. This treatment alone causes permanent changes in a girl's body; the unnatural increase in male sex hormones in a female body results in changes to voice, the growth of facial hair, and can even have behavioral effects, including an increase in aggression. These are things any biologist could tell you, and it makes one wonder if anyone bothered to tell the parents of these kids?
This remains a real problem. These treatments, these irreversible, life-changing treatments, are being administered to kids who cannot give fully informed consent. Oh, they have parental consent, at least in most cases. But should even parental consent be a justification for damaging healthy young people with the unnatural and unneeded administration of hormones and puberty blockers?
No, it should not. Primum non nocere should - must - be reinstituted in these cases. But instead, in Oregon, it's on the increase, at an alarming rate.
