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Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester seems to be New York’s epicenter of sex change for children.
According to data compiled by Stop the Harm, Strong has had more pediatric sex-change patients than any other hospital in the state, has prescribed puberty blockers to more children than any other New York hospital, and has performed the third-highest number of sex-change operations on children.
This is a tragedy, and it ought to be a crime.
Strong, which also operates in part under the name Golisano Children’s Hospital, has had 229 children as sex-change patients. For context, New York University and Mount Sinai – both in New York City – have had 150 and 116, respectively. While those two hospitals have, also respectively, performed the first and second highest number of sex-change operations on children, Strong has surgically altered 52 children.
And no other New York hospital even comes close to Strong when it comes to prescribing puberty blockers for children – with 191 children having been written a total of 2,703 prescriptions.
In most European nations, such chemical and surgical mutilation of children would be against the law.
And it ought to be here.
But in America, science – to include medical science – is the handmaiden of progressivism, and politics is the master, even when children are involved.
And so something as biologically definitive as gender becomes subject to the agenda of activists and culture deconstructionists. Sexual reproduction is called a cultural artifact, and the spreading group psychosis of pediatric gender dysphoria is heralded as a protected class.
Tomboys become boys, and boys who like pink become girls, and anyone who messes up a pronoun is cancelled.
And most horrifically, changes are made to the bodies of children which may forever scar them, psychologically as well as physically, and leave many of them unable to one day have children of their own.
The schools are behind it, the politicians are behind it, the activists are behind it, and even the doctors are behind it.
In Europe and most of the rest of the world, they have rejected hormonal and surgical changes to children’s anatomy and biology, but in the United States, where the hand of progressive politics is the heaviest, doctors seem eager to fix what they feel God and nature have gotten wrong. Most of the world has weighed pediatric gender dysphoria and decided that the best course of treatment is emotional and psychological support and attention to other psychological and social difficulties the child may be facing. Be loving and supporting, but call them by their birth name and keep your scalpel and your hormones to yourself.
In that treatment model, a very large percentage of children seem to outgrow the gender dysphoria, and the ones who don’t, having grown to adulthood, are free to choose whatever interventions or therapies that they – as adults – want.
And it ought to be that way here.
In New York, you can’t get a tattoo before you’re 18, and you can’t use a tanning salon before you’re 21, but at Strong Memorial Hospital – and many other hospitals across New York – you can have your entire life and body altered regardless of how young you are.
This isn’t a whack at transgender adults. In America, we believe that the “pursuit of happiness” is an inherent, God-given right, and you can do anything you want for whatever reason you want – when you are an adult. And the obligation of fellow citizens is to respect your choice and treat you with equality and love. There’s no questioning that.
But this is an adult decision.
And it can only be made by the individual involved – when that individual is an adult.
And the obligation of fellow citizens is to protect children from abusive procedures that should be condemned and criminalized. The infatuation with pediatric sex-change therapy is the frontal lobotomy of our day, a medical fad that will leave its victims permanently damaged.
It is shameful that Strong Memorial Hospital leads New York in these butcherous practices. Indeed, for a hospital in New York’s fourth-largest city to rival the largest hospitals in Los Angeles, Seattle and Boston for pediatric sex-change patients is incomprehensible.
But so it is.
And so it is that Rochester and the rest of New York look on in frightened silence, terrified of the retaliatory hand of progressive elites in government, education, the media and healthcare.
And so it is that Rochester has become the pediatric sex-change capital of New York.