The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asked citizens last week to share their experiences with so-called gender-affirming care. The inquiry, which gives people 60 days to comment, will help FTC officials determine whether “gender-affirming” medical providers are illegally coercing families and children into purchasing dangerous and irreversible transgender medical interventions.  

Federal law prohibits businesses from using deception and fraud to sell their products. The FTC is responsible for investigating alleged violations of these consumer protections.

The agency believes doctors, counselors, surgeons, and other healthcare providers may be using these tactics — like asking parents whether they “would rather have a dead son or a living daughter?” — to sell “gender-affirming” care.

In last week’s request for public input, the FTC outlined two investigatory goals:

• To determine whether “gender-affirming care” has harmed consumers — particularly children.
• To assess whether medical professionals are violating consumer protection laws by omitting the risks or lying about the benefits of “gender-affirming care.”

The public’s input will help the agency investigate:

• How and when medical professionals recommend transgender medical interventions.
• What prospective patients are told about the risks and benefits of transgender hormonal and surgical interventions.
• What, if any, resources doctors and counselors give families to read up on transgender medical interventions.
• What, if anything, medical professionals disclose about the scientific debate surrounding “gender-affirming care.”
• What harms and side-effects children experience after undergoing “gender-affirming care,” and whether they knew about the risks ahead of time.

The FTC began exploring these questions last month in a workshop on the dangers of “gender-affirming care” for minors. The seven-hour event featured an impressive panel of speakers, including several detransitioners and their families.

The workshop revealed several troubling similarities in the ways medical professionals treat children with sexual identity confusion.

Each detransitioner began “gender-affirming care,” including opposite-sex hormones and transgender surgery, in their early teens; one received a double mastectomy just a week after she turned thirteen.

All experienced significant, preexisting psychological conditions like anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation before declaring themselves “transgender.” Their doctors assumed these comorbidities stemmed from their “transgenderism” and rarely offered treatments other than “gender-affirming care.”

All had trusted their doctors, but none now felt they’d been prepared for the devastation opposite-sex hormones and transgender surgeries wreaked on their bodies.

“They didn’t tell me that taking cross-sex hormones and undergoing major surgery at 14 years old could leave me with pelvic floor disfunction and urinary incontinence problems I now have to manage as a young adult,” Claire Abernathy testified in a shaking voice. “I’m only 20-years-old.”

The parents of detransitioners described feeling pressured to take their children to transgender clinics by doctors who falsely told them their children would die without “gender-affirming care.” They recalled feeling divided from their children and tiptoeing around doctors who would call child protective services if they weren’t suitably “affirming.”

One father remembered: “[My son’s psychiatrist] did not like that I did not take my son to a [transgender clinic]. I felt I had to walk on eggshells to avoid her recommending child services take my son away from our family. She had already suggested he be put in an inpatient facility.”

For FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, the workshop painted a “troubling picture” of a vulnerable population sold an purported miracle cure that left them sick, injured and scarred.

He believes his commission is duty-bound to investigate, regardless of the political or cultural temperature.

“The FTC is the federal government’s guardian against false and deceptive health claims,” he addressed the workshop. “We have brought dozens of enforcement actions against false and misleading health claims, from shyster snake-oil salesmen to power pharmaceutical companies.”

He concluded, “Refusing to investigate these health claims, and the potential consumer harm to parents and children, merely because one political party supports “gender-affirming care” as a matter of ideology would be a political choice.”

Americans have until September 26 to contribute to the FTC’s inquiry. If you or a loved one have been affected by “gender-affirming care,” please consider sharing your experience. Click here to learn how to participate.

Daily Citizen is a news division of Focus on the Family that provides a faith-based perspective to counter the mainstream media’s anti-Christian bias.