Yale Pediatric Gender Program treats 'gender-expansive individuals' as young as 3

Yale Medicine's Pediatric Gender Program sees patients as young as three, according to their website.  Speaking in a now deleted promotional video to potential patients and their families, director of the Yale Gender Program Christy Olezeski said that their program works with "gender-expansive individuals 3 to 25."

"Yale Medicine’s program, which treats people as young as 3 and up to age 25, combines mental-health care with medical treatment, in the form of puberty blockers and hormones, when appropriate," reads a passage on Yale's website.

Yale abides by the "gender-affirmative" model of care, meaning that children’s beliefs about their gender are taken at face value. Yale cites the American Academy of Pediatrics 2018 policy and guidelines to support their position, "The guidelines recommend taking a 'gender-affirming,' nonjudgmental approach, which can help eliminate discrimination and stigma, a common problem among gender-diverse children and adolescents."

The gender-affirmation model prevents medical professionals from questioning a child’s self-reported transgender identity, and from exploring possible underlying factors causing their dysphoria. The standard protocol for gender affirmation is administering puberty blockers, followed by cross-sex hormones and then surgery, if desired.

"Gender affirmative" care is rooted in gender ideology, which is a belief system based on the falsehood that whether someone is a man, boy, woman, or girl has nothing to do with one’s biology, but instead is determined by one’s subjective and undefinable "gender identity." Therefore, males can be women and girls, and females can be boys and men. Gender ideology also claims that a felt mismatch between one’s body and gender identity can be corrected by puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries, what the Boston Children's Hospital aims to offer.

Yale refers to deeply flawed studies to justify providing permanent, irreversible medical treatments to minors that, at most, find loose correlations between "affirming" interventions and improved mental health. "About 40 percent of people in the transgender and gender nonconforming communities report having attempted suicide in their lifetime, according to a 2015 study from the National Center for Transgender Equality. This compares to 4.6 percent of the general population," reads their website.

But this study and others that claim "trans" youth are at elevated risk of suicide are commonly compared with average mentally healthy teenagers, which is deeply misleading. When researchers compared "trans" youth with teens suffering from similar mental health problems, there was virtually no difference in suicide rates between the groups. "Trans" youth are not any more suicidal than teens with garden variety mental illness, which means that failing to "affirm" a child’s transgender identity does not drive suicidal behavior.

For Yale, only 6 months of documented gender dysphoria is required to begin receiving medical interventions, so many children who recently decided on a trans-identity can obtain puberty blockers, hormones and surgeries. Double mastectomies, or "top surgery" as they are euphemistically called, require parental consent and a letter of support from a therapist. For genital surgeries, 2 letters from a mental health specialist are required, but they are no less easily obtained, especially now that there are coalitions of health clinicians willing to break the law and subvert the medical safeguarding in place by writing letters of support without ever meeting a patient.

Yale says in a August 2019 Clinical Policy Bulletin that they are willing to perform irreversible surgeries on minors. "Irreversible treatments are generally not authorized for members under the age of 18. However, when delay would cause significant distress, procedures for members under 18 may be approved with parental consent and specific recommendations from a qualified mental health provider."