Dr. Susan Bradley was a pioneer and leading expert in treating children with what was once called “gender identity disorder” and is now labeled “gender dysphoria” by the American Psychiatric Association.
In an astonishing interview with Laurel Duggan from the Daily Caller, Bradley talked about the problematic use of puberty blockers to stop a child’s normal adolescent development.
She bluntly admitted, “We were wrong.”
Bradley then spoke about the consequences of this treatment:
They’re not as reversible as we always thought, and they have longer term effects on kids’ growth and development, including making them sterile and quite a number of things affecting their bone growth.
This admission, from one of the foremost researchers who prescribed puberty blockers to “pause adolescence,” comes at a time when there is growing realization that this is not the way to treat sexually-confused children.
These are not “reversible” interventions, yet transgender activists and their allies continue to promote this damaging course for children.
But Dr. Bradley is a real expert on this issue with an impressive resume, working at the Child and Adolescent Gender Identity Clinic at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in Toronto, Canada from its very beginnings, almost 50 years ago. She was the Head of the Division of Child Psychiatry at the University of Toronto.
Along with her colleague Dr. Kenneth Zucker, another trail-blazing expert in the field, Bradley worked with children confused about their sexual identity, publishing many articles in psychiatric journals. They co-wrote the seminal book Gender Identity Disorder and Psychosexual Problems in Children and Adolescents in 1995.
Bradley also chaired the APA’s fourth revision of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’s subcommittee on Gender Disorders.
“Around 2000,” Duggan reported, “the clinic began prescribing puberty blockers to gender-dysphoric children as a way to alleviate their distress.”
The journalist wrote:
Bradley, who is now in her early eighties, expressed regret that the clinic had participated in the administration of puberty blockers for gender dysphoria, which she now believes can cement a child’s sense of confusion out of which they would likely otherwise grow. She also expressed concern about the drugs’ side effects.
Children who are affirmed in their sexual identity confusion, first with social transitioning and then with puberty blockers, tend to persist in that confusion, Bradley explained:
We thought that it was relatively safe, and endocrinologists said they’re reversible, and that we didn’t have to worry about it. I had this skepticism in the back of my mind all the time that maybe we were actually colluding and not helping them. And I think that’s proven correct in that, once these kids get started at any age on puberty blockers, nearly all of them continue to want to go to cross sex hormones.
She described the serious consequences of experimenting on children with powerful drugs:
Blocking the sexual development of children is a highly authoritarian intervention. Children … can’t understand the impact of impaired sexual functioning. We are roughly 10 years into this large-scale experiment and already we have reports on issues with cognitive development, bone mineral density, and fertility. All the up-to-date evidence shows that puberty blockers are neither safe nor reversible.
In a second article by Duggan on Bradley’s changed stance, the doctor explained that many of those who claim to be the opposite sex have autism spectrum disorder. Duggan reports:
Children with high-functioning autism previously showed up at eating disorder clinics with suicidal and anxious depression and body image distortions, but as pediatric gender clinics began cropping up, autistic adolescents began gravitating more toward those, Bradley said.
Bradley told her that “people with autism tend to focus very intensely on their subjects of interest and have great difficulty letting go of something once they believe it’s true, both of which make autistic adolescents particularly susceptible to issues with their gender identity and body image.”
The doctor continued to explain:
They have early difficulty with social understanding and the feeling that they don’t fit in; they struggle to understand that they are different in a certain kind of way that other people don’t understand either; and they often feel left out in peer groups. Many of them don’t have a good friend. They’ll often say other kids tease them or leave them out.
These kids are even less well equipped than your average teen to manage strong feelings, and they just get totally disregulated at times. That’s why they become so much more vulnerable, they get suicidal, they get anxious, depressed, very down on themselves.
Being told, “You must be transgender!” by a friend or professional – or by self-diagnosing after reading and watching social media – often brings these children a sense of relief, as Bradley told Duggan:
When somebody happens to mention that, you know, they’re trans or they hear about trans kids and go online, even if all they do is say, “I wonder if I’m trans,” a lot of these kids are automatically accepted. “Well, you must be trans if you’ve even thought about that.” And for them, that is a very helpful reaction, because all of a sudden, they feel as though that explains all of the trouble all the way along.
Bradley knows that if left alone, most who struggle with gender dysphoria will “desist,” embracing their biological maleness or femaleness. Duggan explains what the psychiatrist and her colleagues found in a study of young boys:
She also produced research, along with other clinic doctors, showing that 87.8% of boys referred to their clinic for gender identity issues eventually “desisted,” meaning they stopped believing they were actually girls and came to terms with their sex.
“Transitioning” children, in an attempt to make them look like the opposite sex, is a huge experiment being conducted on our nation’s youth. Dr. Bradley has recognized the damage being done to children’s minds and bodies.
It’s time to stop this cruel, unethical experiment.