AMAC Foundation Hosts Webinar on Threat to Children from Extreme Gender Ideology

This week, the AMAC Foundation hosted a joint webinar with “Do No Harm,” an advocacy organization dedicated to keeping politics out of medicine, to raise awareness about the threats that parents and families face from extreme gender ideology. The online event was attended by some 300 concerned parents and grandparents who were passionate and engaged on this important issue.

During the webinar, AMAC Senior Advisor Brittany Baldwin asked three expert panelists about their firsthand experiences witnessing the dangers of extreme gender policies in doctors’ offices and schools. The panel also discussed breaking research on children’s hospitals’ secretive policies to push gender transitions on teens.

The panelists included Dr. Travis Morrell, a Board Certified dermatologist and dermatopathologist in private practice in Western Colorado; Michelle Havrilla, an oncology certified nurse practitioner who is the current director of programs at Do No Harm; and January Littlejohn, a Florida mother and parental rights activist. As Littlejohn has detailed at previous AMAC events, her 13-year-old daughter was socially transitioned at her middle school in 2020 without her knowledge or consent. In 2021, she and her husband filed a federal lawsuit against the school district for parental rights violations. AMAC Newsline recently detailed Littlejohn’s story in a feature column.

As Havrilla explained, one of the most serious threats facing children who believe they are transgender is the lie that puberty blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones are “temporary,” with no negative long-term side effects. “I became more aware of gender ideology as I started paying attention to what was happening in major medical institutions,” she said. “These institutions were claiming puberty blockers are supposedly reversible and without side effects. But my oncology training told me otherwise.”

“Before joining Do No Harm, I worked primarily with breast and prostate cancer patients where Lupron and other forms of hormonal endocrine therapy are used legitimately to treat these diseases. And most if not all of the patients that I worked with had some type of side effect related to either Lupron use or hormone therapy or endocrine therapy use. And so, if these were adults who were experiencing these very significant side effects, I could only imagine what children were experiencing and the long-term effects that no one no one was talking about.”

“Like Michelle, I had prescribed Lupron for cancer and have seen adult patients go through instant menopause or basically a male menopause,” Dr. Morrell added. “I knew these side effects, but then when I heard that it was going to kids, I knew that there was no scientific rationale. I spent a long time reviewing the evidence and there was definitely no clinical rationale.”

In fact, as Dr. Morrell explained later in the webinar, not only are puberty blockers not reversible when prescribed to minors, they often create lasting harm that those confused kids will have to deal with for the rest of their lives. “If you think about bone health or osteoporosis, weak or breakable bones when you’re 50 or 60, you know you only get one chance at building that bone mass and it’s really when you’re younger, and puberty blockers are going to stop that,” he said. “Also really concerning to me is that we know that there are reports of people’s brain development being stopped – by that mean IQ and memory.”

Both Morrell and Havrilla emphasized how thankful they were that Do No Harm had provided them a platform to speak out about this dangerous trend in the medical establishment.

From a parental perspective, Littlejohn shared with attendees the shocking reality of just how prevalent gender ideology is in schools and what parents and grandparents can do to protect their kids. As she explained, her daughter’s school created a secret “transition plan” that it attempted to hide from Littlejohn and her husband. “When we finally got a meeting with the middle school – because initially the school would not even tell me – they told me my daughter was protected by a non-discrimination law,” she said. “But when we were finally shown the social transition plan that they created with our 13-year-old daughter without our knowledge or consent, this went well beyond names and pronouns. They asked her which restroom and locker room she preferred to use, and which sex she preferred to room with on overnight field trips.”

“These types of plans are very common,” Littlejohn continued. “Anybody can look them up. They’re from an organization called Gender Spectrum. And so the same variation of this plan was being used all over our country and we quickly learned that what happened to our family was not an isolated event and it really nearly almost destroyed our family.”

In fact, according to data from Do No Harm, at least 13,900 minor children underwent sex change treatments in the United States between 2019 and 2022. That figure includes more than 5,700 children who had irreversible sex change surgeries, most commonly double mastectomies. All of this was big business for hospitals and gender clinics, which raked in at least $120 million from the treatments over that time period.

At the end of the webinar, the panelists took questions from attendees – one of the most common being what AMAC members and other concerned citizens can do about the threat of radical gender ideology and how they can help if they know someone struggling with their gender identity. Several members expressed that they already have loved ones who are struggling with this issue and asked for guidance on how to help them.

“My call to action for the parents and grandparents on this call would be to inoculate your kids from this ideology,” Littlejohn said. “Teach them the truth. We can and should have compassion for those who are struggling with identity issues, but we should not be affirming any kind of false identities that can lead to medical harm.”

You can view the entire webinar HERE.