Minors currently taking puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones would be allowed to continue if they were part of an Institutional Review Board approved clinical trial at a university affiliated center.

Florida Board of Medicine Member Nicholas Romanello proposed the rule, citing that the risks of these procedures outweigh the benefits as well as the lack of consistent, reliable, scientific peer reviewed evidence concerning efficacy and safety.

The rule will move forward with subsequent meetings to the Board of Medicine and Board of Osteopathic Medicine for final approval.

During the public comment period, several people shared their "de-transitioning" experiences and noted the irreversible effects of these procedures.

One pregnant woman shared, "After nearly four years of being on testosterone, I decided to de-transition and accept my womanhood. My mental health improved exponentially. Three years later my menstrual cycle has still been irregular. I still have to shave my face daily and I struggle with hormonal acne."

Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo said in an interview, "The media, the talking points they have, is that everyone agrees, it always works and this is the standard of care. Meanwhile a lot of doctors don't agree with it and are afraid to speak. Countries in Europe like Sweden don't provide this care anymore for children outside of a research setting because they've seen outcomes that are harmful and there's really no medical standard here because it is totally experimental. How can giving puberty blockers to children who require hormones because their bodies are changing or removing their sex organs, how can that not be experimental? Of course it's experimental. So that's something...the Department of Health put forth to the Board of Medicine to consider for some rulemaking and basically, they're still in that process. But they're moving forward toward stopping these procedures in children, which is totally appropriate. That is the right thing to do for the health of children."

"When the evidence is unclear, I'll say it's unclear. And I won't say that these therapies help people when unfortunately the research isn't there. These are low quality studies that people cite as being definitive evidence, and they're not definitive evidence. And it's terrible they are taking advantage of the fact that most people don't have the training to be able to decipher the difference," Ladapo said.

Dr. Ladapo earned his M.D. at Harvard Medical School and a Ph.D. in Health Policy at Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and has been published in many journals and had five research grants from the National Institute of Health doing cardiovascular disease.

"This is a parallel to the COVID vaccines in this country. If you only listen to the media in this country, you would think it is normal for people to recommend these vaccines for babies, toddlers, for children, for young adults. If you only listen to the media in this country, you'd think it's normal for you to provide puberty blockers to children, to provide 'sex reassignment' surgeries to children who have a diagnosis of transgender. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, most of Europe are not pushing COVID-19 vaccines on children. They're not even recommending them. Not pushing them on young adults. In the transgender area, backing off from providing this as routine care because they have been doing it longer than we have. There's literally reports from governmental health organizations in Europe such as  Sweden...where they basically say they can no longer recommend this as part of routine care because it's not clear that the benefits outweigh the risks," said Ladapo.

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SOURCE Liberty Counsel

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