One of Texas’s top doctors calls out the pro-trans movement in a new Substack post.
Cardiologist Peter McCullough headlined his Courageous Discourse post, “Childhood Gender Dysphoria Occurs in <0.1% and 80% of Cases Resolve with Natural Puberty.”
“Since the beginning of mankind [sic] little girls developed into women and boys into men. In the last few decades led by the Dutch, a medical experiment has been conducted on children who as they approach puberty are not comfortable with their gender, a rare condition termed childhood gender dysphoria [CGD],” McCullough wrote.
“The DSM-5 estimates that 0.005% to 0.014% of males and 0.002% to 0.003% of females develop gender dysphoria. The outcomes of this novel experiment have been nothing short of horrific: physical illness due to side effects of medications (puberty blockers, hormones), retarded development of intellect, increases in the burden of psychiatric care needs, sterilization, disfigurement, and increases in all cause mortality,” he continued.
McCullough noted that around half of American states have banned transgender procedures for children because of concerns about long-term health consequences for patients, pointing readers to the literature on the subject.
“Kaltiala-Heino et al have summarized the work of prior studies and have determined at least 80% of CGD resolves with normal puberty. Cognitive behavior therapy likely can increase this number considerably. For those who do not resolve CGD they may make bi- or homosexual choices in adulthood. Importantly, with the natural process there is no harm inflicted,” he wrote.
Toward the end of his post, McCullough called the operations on children a “diabolical medical experiment” and added, “[m]ost of the doctors themselves have not taken this journey and no one can adequately give informed consent to parents let alone the child. A reasonable stance on this issue is to do no harm and keep transgender medicine programs shut down while researchers can assess how much damage has occurred to those who have already transitioned.”
McCullough formerly served as the Vice Chief of Internal Medicine and Chief of Cardiovascular Research at the Baylor Heart and Vascular Institute. Although he has a long and distinguished career in the medical field, he sprung to popular recognition when he appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast to criticize the effectiveness and medical basis of existing COVID-19 policies, including vaccine mandates and lockdown measures in late 2021.
The Literature on Desistance
The literature on “desistance,” a medical term that in this context refers to a child claiming to be transgender and then later reversing their claim, is heavily mired in debate about its methodology.
Some researchers believe the literature on desistance is flawed. They believe the researchers have overblown the number of children who “grow out of” their transgender identity, KQED reported in 2018.
“The methodology of those studies is very flawed, because they didn’t study gender identity,” said Diane Ehrensaft, director of mental health at UCSF’s Child and Adolescent Gender Clinic. “Those desistors were, a good majority of them, simply proto-gay boys whose parents were upset because they were boys wearing dresses. They were brought to the clinics because they weren’t fitting gender norms.”
The Kaltiala-Heino study draws heavily on the work of Thomas Steensma, a researcher and clinician at the Center of Expertise on Gender Dysphoria in Amsterdam.
Steensma contrastingly told KQED that while there were some methodological flaws in the early research on gender dysphoria (previously called gender identity disorder), there are some consistencies that desistance is a frequently observed phenomenon. “[The] only evidence I have from studies and reports in the literature … is that not all transgender children will persist in their transgender identity,” he said to KQED.
Steensma co-authored a study of 127 gender dysphoric adolescents in 2013. Steensma and his fellow researchers found that 80 of the children, or 63%, had desisted by age 15 or 16.
There were some grounds on which critics could raise objections.
For example, 28 of the children were classified as desistors because they stopped attending the clinic and could not be contacted. However, 52 of the children were classified as desistors because their parents returned questionnaires showing the subjects’ gender dysphoria had ended.
Dr. Erica Anderson, a gender clinician at UCSF, who is transgender, pointed out to KQED that 38 of the 127 kids were originally designated “subthreshold” for gender identity disorder, which the physician says “begs the question of whether these kids were actually divergent [in their gender identity] before the study selected them.”
Notably, Anderson would go on to make headlines 5 years later when the doctor told the Los Angeles Times that the rise in 13-year-olds receiving hormone treatment without even meeting with psychologists had “gone too far.”
“A fair number of kids are getting into it because it’s trendy,” Anderson told The Washington Post. “I think in our haste to be supportive, we’re missing that element.”
Nevertheless, desistance has been observed in other examinations that also recorded childhood homosexual tendencies in its subjects.
Reinforcing the notion raised by McCullough that early childhood gender dysphoria was connected more with adult homosexuality than transgenderism, psychologist Dr. Devita Singh wrote in her 2012 dissertation that “severity of childhood cross-gender behavior was a significant predictor of sexual orientation.”
Singh contacted 139 former subjects of a body dysphoria study who had aged into adulthood during the creation of her dissertation. All of the subjects were boys.
She wrote, “Regarding sexual orientation, 82 (63.6%) participants were classified as bisexual/homosexual in fantasy and 51 (47.2%) participants were classified as bisexual/homosexual in behavior. The remaining participants were classified as either heterosexual or asexual.”
By the time Singh contacted the boys, who were now adult men, 122, or 88%, of the study desisted from their gender dysphoria. Most were either homosexual or bisexual adults.
Transgender Issues in the News
Transgender issues have rushed to the forefront of national and state politics.
The 2024 presidential campaign included a heated exchange between then-former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris on whether taxpayer dollars should be used to support transgender surgeries for illegal immigrant prisoners. This debate surfaced after an ACLU questionnaire that Harris had filled out in 2020 implied that she would.
Another example that The Dallas Express has extensively covered involves Jeff Younger, a Texas man embattled in a years-long custody battle over the sons of his now ex-wife, Anne Georgulas. This story made national headlines, with most recently, a California judge giving Jeff Younger’s ex-wife authority to castrate their son, James, against Younger’s permission.
Georgulas allegedly took their children to California to evade Texas law and benefit from SB 107. California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the bill, which went into effect on January 1, 2023.
“I lost all parental rights to my sons. Goodbye, boys. Perhaps, we will meet when you are adults. California Judge Juhas gave my ex-wife authority to castrate my son, James. All contact with my boys must be supervised. I won’t do that. I send letters and gifts to my sons. My ex is not required to give them to the boys. I cannot post pictures of my sons. Let my story be a cautionary one for young men. Fathers have no rights to their children. Do not enter the family law system,” Younger posted on X.
