Internal emails revealed that a healthcare organization is now operating “gender-affirming” care clinics inside Seattle K-12 public schools that can provide hormone treatment to confused children, all behind their parents’ backs.
Neighborcare Health runs 14 school-based clinics in Seattle Public Schools as well as Vashon Island School District. They announced in January of last year that they would begin offering “gender-affirming” care to students.
“The Neighborcare Health team wanted to share an exciting new update to our School-based Health Center services,” an email obtained by Parents Defending Education from a Program Manager for Neighborcare Health reads. “Our program will begin offering comprehensive, evidence-based, gender-affirming care services to our students and families who need them.”
“While our School-based Health Centers have long offered a continuum of gender-affirming care services including supportive student counseling, promotion of social identity, and health education, this step will allow us to begin offering families access to important medical interventions including hormone treatments,” the email continued.
Here’s what we already know: Forty-eight school districts in Washington state have policies in place to hide students’ gender identity from their parents, helping them “transition” without informing or receiving consent from their legal guardians. Combine that with what we know now about Neighborcare Health clinics, and it paints a worrying picture. Children could begin irreversible hormone treatments based on momentary confusion about their gender without their parents’ knowledge or consent, and without ever having to leave their school’s campus. This is beyond unacceptable. The individuals in charge of these clinics have the capability to brainwash and coerce children into believing they need to medically transition genders in order to “feel better,” granting children as young as 5 years old the ability to make life-altering medical decisions without their parents weighing in or offering perspective.
“Schools are not being ‘supportive’ or ‘inclusive’ when they adopt ‘affirming’ policies,” Manhattan Institute Fellow Leor Sapir noted. “Instead, they are potentially changing the course of psychosocial development and putting kids on track to becoming sterile, sexually dysfunctional, and lifelong wards of the medical industry.”
To make a bad situation worse, we know that the overwhelming majority of children who “come out” as gender-confused later change their minds before adulthood; “gender-affriming” care does not decrease the risk of suicide but rather increases it; and hormone therapy for minors can have irreversible consequences.
A research study published in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy revealed that “puberty blockers, also known as luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone agonists or GnRHa drugs, are not just creating sexless adults, although GnRHa is a drug ‘licensed to chemically castrate men.’ They are: depleting victims’ bone density; hampering their cognitive development; and producing a myriad of deleterious emotional effects.” (Emphasis added.)
It should go without saying, but our government officials should be doing everything in their power to protect children from these dangerous and debilitating treatments, but instead they are promoting and increasing access to them, making it even easier for kids to lie to their parents and inject themselves with hormones.
One of FPIW’s foremost goals is protecting children from this radical gender ideology that poses untold risks to their mental and physical wellbeing. A huge part of this work is exposing dangerous practices affecting our children and demanding accountability, like this case in Seattle Public Schools and the Vashon Island School District.
Will you join us in fighting to protect parental rights and students in our state? Sign up to become a DEFENDER today!
:
[insert graphic]
