Conservatives In Shock Over List of Drug Side Effects
A public records request from the University of Utah produced forms describing the risks and benefits of gender-affirming care in detail. For the far right, that’s a scandal.
by Evan Urquhart
Would it shock you to learn that a medical treatment has side effects? No? What if that treatment was for transgender people whose intense discomfort with their bodies leads to clinical impairment and distress in daily life? Still no?
In the midst of a moral panic over trans people’s existence, the fact that drugs to treat gender dysphoria have the same sorts of risks and benefits as any other medical treatment is more than enough to cry scandal and feed sentiments of disgust, horror, and hatred that have made for a worsening political climate for transgender people in the US, with no apparent end to the right’s madness in sight.
The news that the treatments some trans people need, including some trans youth, do indeed have side effects was surfaced by America First Legal, a conservative legal group created by xenophobic former-Trump aide Stephen Miller to harass the Biden administration. Although news reports in 2021 claimed its focus would be on filing lawsuits challenging the Biden administration’s use of executive authority, as with almost every other right-wing organization in the country the group has apparently pivoted to anti-trans activism since then. In a press release, the group claims to have filed five requests for public records in various states, and that the informed consent forms they got in response constitute a “smoking gun.”
This same press release was then turned into a news story, with no additional information or context, by Heather Hunter of the Washington Examiner, a conservative tabloid that’s gone all-in on the anti-trans panic.
The material provided by America First Legal, and therefore the Examiner’s story, contains several outright falsehoods. For example, Ian Prior of America First Legal claims that treatments that have been used for trans youth for over a decade are “experimental.” This lie is then quoted in the Examiner without any information that would lead a reader to doubt it is true.
Another falsehood in the press release (and the Examiner’s story) quotes part of a sentence from an informed consent forms explaining that the drug hasn’t been specifically approved by the FDA for this use, a practice known as off-label prescription. The press release, a subsequent tweet thread, and the Examiner’s story all cut off part of the sentence making it clear that the drug hasn’t been approved for this purpose, creating the false claim that the drugs are “not FDA-approved.”
screenshot from Twitter.com
Every drug used to treat gender dysphoria has of course been approved by the FDA. On the FDA website the agency has sought to correct misunderstandings about off-label prescribing, writing, “From the FDA perspective, once the FDA approves a drug, healthcare providers generally may prescribe the drug for an unapproved use when they judge that it is medically appropriate for their patient.” Ironically, the very same page of the FDA website notes that when the FDA approve a drug as safe, “'Safe’ does not mean that the drug has no side effects.”
Such side effects constitute the bulk of the supposed bombshell by America First Legal, because that’s what informed consent forms contain. They are, typically, lists of potential side effects for a medication prescribed by a doctor. Nothing about these sorts of informed consent forms is remotely unusual, much less improper, so the anti-trans machinery instead seeks to make something out of the fact that medications have side effects at all.
screenshot from the Washington Examiner
In medicine, doctors and patients routinely weigh the risk of side effects against the benefits of treatment to come to a decision about what’s best for a patient’s overall health. For trans youth who seek treatment the debilitating effects of gender dysphoria often interfere with their ability to live a normal life. These effects can include thoughts of suicide, eating disorders, self-harm, and anxiety that can be so severe it interferes with them leaving the home. Many families feel that the potential for easing, or in some cases completely reversing, these symptoms is more than worth the risk of side effects, including the possibility of future regret. The process of making that decision is individual, and would be totally uncontroversial in literally every other area of medicine.
The real controversy, as always, is just that trans people exist. The far right, aided by the right-wing press, don’t want transgender people to exist, or to be treated like everyone else if they do. They don’t want trans medical treatment to be subject to a normal informed consent process just like they don’t want trans people to use nicknames at school, or books mentioning trans people’s existence to be available at public schools. This process of making the ordinary seem frightening and strange has become so far advanced in the U. S. that, instead of claiming that families aren’t being fully informed before they consent to treatment, right-wing groups are taking the evidence of their informed consent and acting is if it shows something is wrong. All trans youth and their families want is to be left to make private medical decisions in peace. The Washington Examiner, and America First Legal, are determined to insert themselves into these private family decisions in any way they can.