When someone tries to end an argument by insisting they’re on “the right side of history,” remind them how often history has proved such confidence wrong.
This is especially true in the realm of health care.
Not long ago, Purdue Pharmaceuticals pushed OxyContin as an answer to ordinary pain. Yet Oxy not only created a wave of addiction; it helped launch a public-health catastrophe. Aggressive 1990s and 2000s prescribing fueled the first overdose wave, wrecking families and communities while pushing many patients from pills to heroin and later fentanyl. The toll shows up in deaths, broken homes, strained hospitals, lost workers, and hollowed-out towns. But Oxy generated $35 billion for Purdue. (RELATED: The OxyContin Story)
Thalidomide followed a similar arc. Marketed in the 1950s for anxiety, insomnia, “tension,” and morning sickness, it was once treated as “safe” for pregnant women. By 1961, after it was linked to severe birth defects, it was pulled from European markets. More than 10,000 infants — possibly twice that — were seriously harmed in utero, and about 40 percent died at or shortly after birth.
That is a pattern worth remembering when we look today at hormone replacement therapy and puberty-suppressing drugs. These are often framed as the compassionate answer for children with gender dysphoria. The first — and often the only — steps taken to purportedly change a kid’s gender nonetheless permanently ruin their health.
While lawmakers across the country have rushed to protect children from predatory mutilating surgeries, chemical mutilation of kids with gender dysphoria is being used to sidestep the law and is allowed in several states that ban surgeries. After all, this is big business. (RELATED: Detransitioner: The AMA Must Protect Kids)
We have seen comorbidities like ADHD and eating disorders treated instead as gender dysphoria, and gender dysphoria largely treated with medications to suppress puberty in young kids, and in older ones, attempting to change people’s gender through aggressive hormone treatments.
Where a small sliver of Americans used to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria and treated in this way, now, it has become commonplace, with about 1.3 percent of American adults identifying as transgender. According to advocacy group Do No Harm, about 150 percent of the number of kids who underwent gender reassignment surgeries (mostly mastectomies) were prescribed hormones and puberty blockers. That means there are significantly more kids on gender-transition drugs than undergoing surgeries — and big bucks for Pharma companies. (RELATED: Even Mamdani’s New ‘Transgender’ Clinic Won’t Treat Kids)
How big? While several big pharmaceutical companies are present in the hormone therapy market, the market for puberty blockers (drugs designed to permanently, chemically mutilate children) is dominated by AbbVie and Endo Pharmaceuticals. Endo Pharmaceuticals makes $85.5M per year on its puberty-blocker medication, Supprelin LA, which sounds like a lot but not compared to AbbVie, which earns as much as $700 million annually from Lupron. When these medications are used for children, they cost eight times more than they do for adults. (RELATED: Minors Can Easily Access Transgender Drugs Online, Watchdog Warns)
None of these drugs has FDA approval for use on children with gender dysphoria; companies like AbbVie and Endo have taken zero proactive steps to stop the prescription of puberty blockers. Instead, the drugs not promoted for this usage are quietly given to minors off-label. So, it’s easy to see why pharmaceutical firms would do nothing to curb their usage. And with the outrage surrounding the permanent, adverse effects from irreversible mastectomies, let alone genital surgeries, it’s also easy to see why drugmakers would want to focus attention on anyone other than themselves. (RELATED: Transgender Mass Murderers: The Drugs and Demons That Drive Them)
This is currently happening with regard to a drug discount program called 340B. That program largely keeps rural health care providers in red states afloat. Drugmakers are attacking the program because it limits their profits, claiming it facilitates “transing the kids,” even though the states that most benefit from it have outlawed gender transition surgeries on children. It’s a clever sleight of hand to seize on a topic conservatives are rightly outraged about while only enhancing, and definitely not jeopardizing, one of drugmakers’ big profit centers — puberty blockers and gender transition medications. (RELATED: Rural Hospitals Rely on ‘340b’ Drug Discounts)
Conservatives should not be fooled. The transgender “rights” and “acceptance” movements are the only civil rights movements in history where the primary driver has been corporate profit — and specifically pharmaceutical sector profit. This must not be forgotten as debates surrounding federal health care policy, and indeed state-level rules, play out.
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Jared Whitley is a longtime D.C. politico, having worked in the U.S. Senate and White House, with an MBA from Hult Business School in Dubai. He currently lives in Utah, where this month he was named one of the best columnists in the state by the Society of Professional Journalists.
