A psychologist at Boston Children’s Hospital claimed many kids know their gender ‘seemingly from the womb’
A protester stands outside Boston Children’s Hospital © Getty Images / Nancy Lane
While most children who present in Boston Children’s Hospital’s gender clinic know their gender “usually around the age of puberty,” many others come out of the womb knowing they were born into the wrong body, psychologist Kerry McGregor explains in a since-deleted video posted in August by the Harvard-affiliated medical facility. The clip resurfaced this week, drawing even more controversy to the scandal-plagued institution.
“A good portion of children do know as early as seemingly from the womb and they will usually express their gender identity as very young children, some as soon as they can talk,” McGregor says in the video before revealing that the clinic sees children from “ages two and three up to the age of nine” and instructing parents on how to “just be supportive” of their supposedly “gender-diverse” children by “giving them the space and support to explore their gender.”
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While Boston Children’s is not the only hospital to offer gender transition services from counseling to surgery to kids – as of August, some 13 US hospitals perform gender transition surgeries on minors – the Harvard-affiliated facility attracted unwanted attention in August after it was called out by conservatives for its videos advertising those services. Blaming a “right-wing misinformation campaign” for what it claimed was an avalanche of death threats and bomb scares, the clinic attempted to memory-hole evidence it provided such procedures to children, deleting dozens of videos – including the “babies know they’re trans” clip – from its YouTube account
However, while Boston Children’s now claims to only perform the procedures on patients over 18 years of age, 65 of the 204 gender-affirmation surgeries performed by its Center for Gender Surgery from January 2017 to August 2020 were done on patients under 18, according to a peer-reviewed study published earlier this year in the Journal on Clinical Medicine. The paper describes the Harvard facility as “the first pediatric center in the United States to offer gender-affirming chest surgeries for individuals over 15-years-old and genital surgeries for those over 17 years of age.”
