Virginia Could Move Closer to Protecting Children From Harmful Gender Interventions

Last week, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin took a step toward protecting children from the harms of sex change interventions.

Youngkin added an amendment to legislation requiring school administrators to notify parents about safe gun storage policies. 

The amendment would further require school administrators to let parents know if their child requested a school employee to “participate” in either their “social transition” or their actual transition to a “stated gender” different from their biological sex. 

In other words, the amendment would let parents know if their child is experiencing gender dysphoria and school employees are “affirming” their child’s gender incongruence. 

It’s important to protect children experiencing gender dysphoria, as once children are on the transgender medicalization pathway, they are often shepherded by medical providers toward increasingly harmful interventions such as cross-sex hormones and surgical procedures.

Ultimately, as the most authoritative reviews of the evidence on this issue has shown, there is no strong evidence to support the effectiveness of child sex change interventions, and they carry known harms as well as further unknown risks. 

The “affirmation” approach to pediatric gender medicine – which is enabled by school administrators dutifully “affirming” the gender incongruence of distressed children – is demonstrably ineffective and unsupported by the weight of the evidence. What’s more, children lack the capacity to meaningfully consent to such interventions. 

In fact, Do No Harm Parent Advocate January Littlejohn has seen the harms of this process first-hand. School administrators aided the “transition” of January’s own daughter and encouraged her to use a new name and pronouns. Now, January is a fierce advocate for the rights of parents to protect their children against the harms of gender ideology.

Protecting children from this “affirmation” approach is an important first step to prevent further harmful medicalization.

Additionally, Youngkin proposed amendments to legislation that would force medical professionals to sit through so-called “unconscious bias” trainings.

The legislation would “require unconscious bias and cultural competency training as part of the continuing education requirements” for the renewal of licensure.”

Youngkin proposed a tweak to the bills, changing the requirements so that medical professionals would instead have to “complete two hours of continuing learning activities that address maternal health care for populations of women that data indicate experience significantly greater than average maternal mortality.”

Unconscious or “implicit” bias is a dubious concept; the tests used to evaluate or identify implicit bias fail to meet widely-accepted standards of reliability and validity and have been found to be “poor predictors” of real-world bias and discrimination.

Do No Harm believes that Virginia’s medical professionals don’t deserve to be subjected to mandatory training that accuses them of racism and pushes unsupported concepts.