Abortion giant Planned Parenthood has increasingly been providing what the left calls “gender-affirming care” for people who believe they are transgender — and in the case of at least one teen, a clinic allegedly supplied him with sex-change hormones after a 30-minute consultation, the Washington Free Beacon reported this week.
The teen, whose parents asked the publication to call “Fred,” is an 18-year-old high school student in New Jersey who was diagnosed with autism at age four and struggled with anxiety and depression as he got older, according to the report. Reporter Aaron Sibarium noted that like many individuals on the autism spectrum, Fred “cycles through obsessions and extreme views.”
“Still, Fred has a few interests that have remained constant throughout his life, all fairly typical for a teenage boy: guns, power tools, and metalworking,” according to the report. “That made it all the more shocking when, in December 2022, at 17 years old, he announced he was a transgender woman. The revelation came a few months after Fred’s best friend, who also has autism, began identifying as transgender.”
Fred’s parents, worried this was another phase, enrolled him in the Gender and Autism Program at the Children’s National Hospital, which is the only clinic of its kind in the United States that focuses on autistic youth.
“Fred was determined to take hormones, they told the clinic, which is known for its lengthy assessments. Before he did, they wanted to be sure his dysphoria wasn’t transient or peer-driven,” according to the report. “The clinic informed them in March that it had a waitlist of about a year. And Fred, who would be turning 18 in two months, wasn’t willing to wait.”
Upon turning 18, Fred went to a Planned Parenthood in late July when his parents had gone out of town. The clinic “prescribes hormones to any legal adult without a letter from a therapist or a formal diagnosis for gender dysphoria,” according to the report. Instead, Planned Parenthood only requires a short consultation, usually with a nurse practitioner, and warnings about the side effects from taking hormones, which can include permanent infertility, baldness, and mood swings, the report stated.
The Free Beacon allegedly confirmed Fred’s story through nursing and medical board complaints, as well as locational data, prescriptions, emails, texts, and other documents.
Sibarium ultimately found, using cell phone tracking data his parents used to keep track of their son, that Fred arrived at the Planned Parenthood clinic on North Fullerton Ave. in Montclair, New Jersey, at around 11 a.m. By 11:39 a.m., the parents received a text message from CVS confirming that Fred’s estrogen prescription was being filled, according to the report.
Rather than being carefully evaluated in a months-long process by psychiatrists, a nurse practitioner had prescribed their special-needs son with estrogen in half-an-hour without their knowledge or permission, the report stated.
“It’s criminal what Planned Parenthoods all over the country are doing,” Fred’s mother, a New Jersey pediatrician, told the outlet. “And most people have no idea this is happening.”
Sibarium wrote that what happened to Fred is a “microcosm of how the nation’s largest abortion provider is eroding the already thin guardrails on gender medicine in America.” While waitlists grow at slower clinics such as Children’s National, concern is growing that young people are rushing to Planned Parenthood to accelerate the process and “circumvent the safeguards.”
Sibarium spoke with an unlikely critic of Planned Parenthood’s foray into transgender so-called “medicine,” liberal psychologist Laura Edwards-Leeper. Edwards-Leeper, who cofounded the first pediatric gender clinic in the country at Boston’s Children’s Hospital, told the outlet that Planned Parenthood has “taken on something that they are not equipped to handle.”
The report details how Planned Parenthood has become one of the largest providers of cross-sex hormones in the nation.
The report stated:
Affiliates in the greater Portland area saw a nearly 400 percent increase in “gender-affirming care visits” between 2021 and 2022, according to their annual reports, while those in Ohio saw a 544 percent increase over the same period. Hormones now appear to be in higher demand than abortion at some branches: A Planned Parenthood in Knoxville, Tenn., told NPR that nearly a fifth of its patients sought hormone therapy in 2021, whereas abortion makes up just 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s services nationally.
Sibarium found that Planned Parenthood’s increasing presence in the space is putting more pressure on pediatric gender clinics to become “more laissez faire themselves,” with some prescribing hormones on a first visit. The result is a “race to the bottom that pulls all providers, no matter their philosophy, toward the informed consent model adopted by Planned Parenthood, which doles out life-altering drugs to almost anyone who requests them,” the report states.
Doctors the Free Beacon spoke with said the abortion giant is even more ill-equipped to handle more complex cases such as Fred’s, given his diagnoses.
“Some young adults are developmentally more like adolescents,” said Edwards-Leeper, who helped write the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) guidelines for minors. “Planned Parenthood really isn’t following the standard of care if they don’t take that into account.”
Fred’s parents employed a similar argument when they filed a complaint with New Jersey nursing and medical boards over the summer.
The complaint alleged that Planned Parenthood violated the standards of care by prescribing Fred estrogen without a thorough assessment by a psychiatric profession, and that his autistic traits limited his ability to consent, according to the report. The complaint also questioned whether 30 minutes is enough time “for anyone to think through the implications of a permanent loss of fertility,” the report stated.
Sibarium pointed to two other “high-profile” detransitioners, Cat Cattinson and Helena Kirschner, who both said they received testosterone from Planned Parenthood after a half-hour appointment. Cattinson was allegedly able to obtain the prescription over a phone appointment.
“Kirschner stopped taking testosterone once her mental health deteriorated; Cattinson, a singer, stopped after it permanently destroyed her singing voice,” according to the report. “Though Planned Parenthood does warn patients about the effects of hormone therapy, those warnings are not standardized across its numerous state affiliates, which means patients in one region might get very different information from those in another.”
Planned Parenthood did not respond to the outlet’s multiple requests for comment by time of publication.
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