“Would you rather have a living daughter or a dead son?” is the script many parents have heard when they seek help regarding a child who is convinced his true self is not aligned with his biological sex.1 This statement sends children and their families down a road of hormone blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical interventions. There are ironically sex-specific horrors involved with trying to turn a boy into a girl or a girl into a boy, but what they have in common is a mutilated, sterilized, medicalized-for-life individual who now has lost some of what made them a healthy biological girl or boy but has not gained the opposite sex reality they were promised.

by Lita Sanders on June 16, 2026