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Dr. Nicole Safire
Welcome to Wellness Unmass. I'm Dr. Nicole Safire and we're gonna talk about today one of, in my opinion, the most urgent and controversial topics in modern medicine. The intersection of parental rights and gender medicine for minors. Now, I am a physician. I'm a women's health breast radiologist, but I'm also a mother of three. And so this is something that is deeply personal to me. The question is no longer what doctors believe is medically appropriate. It's about who gets to decide what's best for the child. The parents, the doctor, the government, or is it the child themselves? Now, in recent years, we've seen a growing number of cases where parents are being sidelined from key medical decisions. Whether it's school based vaccine programs without parental consent, to gender identity transitions facilitated by counselors and physicians, many parents feel that they are losing their seat at the table. For me, it was the handling of the COVID vaccines in kids that was eye opening. I don't know how it went for you, but prior to Covid, I always felt that I was in control of my child's well being. I spoke with the doctor, I spoke with their teachers, and I listened to the CDC and I took them all as recommendations. But I never felt that they were dictating what happens to my child. It wasn't until Covid, when the masking and the keeping them out of school, when it was obviously doing harm to the children, but yet they continued to say, no, this is what's best for them. They were neglecting all of the science and they were saying this is what's best. I had lawmakers telling me what was better for the mental and physical health for my child. When I'm a physician and I'm a parent, they had no idea what they were talking about, yet all of a sudden they were dictating what happened to my child. If you remember, you had pediatricians who were refusing care for kids if they weren't vaccinated. A Healthline report revealed that one third of pediatric practices nationwide stated that they would not treat patients unless the children were up to date with the recommended vaccines. And that was including COVID 19 vaccine. Then Mayor Bill de Blasio said in New York City kids couldn't even go into restaurants or movie theaters or Broadway theaters without a vaccine card. And you have to remember, this was after the Israeli Health Ministry alerted US Officials of the safety signals with the vaccine, saying, hey, these vaccines, these boosters, they're causing inflammation in kids. And by the way, at that point, we were a couple years in, we knew that kids were lowest risk. Now, that didn't mean that there was no risk to the child if they were to be infected with the COVID 19 virus, but we knew that the risk was low. And the reality was most people at that point had already been infected. I know by that time, my kids had already been infected. I had been infected. So it made me question, why would I go and get this vaccine? In fact, these rules came out about kids getting vaccinated came out six weeks after my kids already had Covid. So I knew that they had natural immunity. It made no sense to me why I should go and get them this vaccine, because at that point, it was all risk, no benefit. They already had ample antibodies circulating their bodies because natural immunity, as we know, is actually stronger than vaccine induced immunity. And we already had started seeing that vaccine induced immunity was waning. Yet Mayor de Blasio and then even Eric Adams said, nope, kids have to have the vaccine if you want to eat out with them in New York City. It was utter nonsense. Thankfully, I was a physician, and I wasn't needing to take my kids to the pediatrician because they were told that they were not allowed to come in unless they had the vaccine. And unless someone could tell me how that vaccine was going to benefit them after they just had the infection, I wasn't going to do it. Because I read those studies. I read what Pfizer and Moderna put out. I know that these vaccines were not without risk. And so tell me, what would the benefit have been had they just had the infection? No one could answer that question for me, but I had lawmakers and I had administrators in the hospitals saying unless my children were vaccinated, they were not going to be subjected to going and do these activities, and they were not going to be given care by these pediatricians. I mean, that sounds like malpractice to me. If I refuse care for patients, I think I would be fired. The fact that we had whole administrations that were supporting it is beyond comprehensible in my opinion. The reality was, during COVID the parents were entirely removed from the conversation. We knew keeping them out of school was bad. We knew putting them in face masks was bad. And we also knew not every kid needed to get the vaccine, and certainly even fewer, if any at all, needed to get a booster shot. Yet we were told that they needed it. Now the states are actually trying to do the same thing with gender transitioning of minors. Now, I know that's a big leap. We're talking about COVID we're talking about the vaccines. And now I'm jumping to gender affirming care. You can't turn on the TV or the radio or even walk anywhere without seeing some sort of support for transgender. I mean, it is Pride Month. You have a lot of people talking about it, and you know the way I feel. You do? You. I don't care what people want to do in their personal lives. I really don't. Where I start getting concerned is one where my tax dollars are involved. Should my tax dollars be paying for people to undergo some of these gender affirming procedures? I mean, I'm not paying for my friends who go out and get boob jobs or nose jobs because they want to look differently. I don't think tax dollars should pay for that either. And if people want to go and do genital mutilation and other things, again, if that's what you want to do, by all means, I don't think I should pay for it. And by the way, your insurance company probably shouldn't either, because all that's doing is raising rates on other people. That's one issue. But the issue at hand is, and which I'm already hypersensitized because of, COVID is what's happening with the minors, the kids with the whole gender dysphoria movement that's happening right now, by the way. That's what's happening. This is a movement. This is not a moment, this is a movement. The gender dysphoria that's happening amongst our youth is rampant. And we have to ask, at what age does a child truly have the capacity to even make life altering decisions? And what role should the parents play in guiding them through complex medical terrain? So what I want to do is let's talk about the medicine. Let's talk about the science behind what we're seeing. Gender dysphoria is officially classified on the DSM scale, Diagnostic and Statistical Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. That's a mouthful. But every sort of mental illness is given this. It's the DSM 5. And gender dysphoria is included because it is a mental health condition characterized by significant distress. And now their words are caused by a mismatch between an individual's assigned sex at birth and their experienced gender identity. I don't really know what that means other than they think that they're not what they are. If they're born a girl, they have XX chromosomes, they have all the female reproductive system, but they think they're a boy. That's the DSM 5 of gender dysphoria and vice versa when it comes to a boy who thinks he's a girl because it is fundamentally a psychological condition, treatment approaches really need to prioritize mental health support and therapy and careful evaluation rather than irreversible medical and surgical interventions, especially in children and adolescents. Listen, the reality is children's brains, they're still developing well until their mid 20s. I have a 25 year old son, I'm certain his frontal lobe is not finished. I'm certain of this particularly these are the areas that are responsible for decision making, impulse control and understanding long term consequences. The incomplete neurological development means that minors lack the full capacity to provide truly informed consent for these permanent and life altering procedures that we're seeing kids undergoing right now. Hormone therapy, gender affirming surgeries. These are surgical castration, double mastectomies, these are massive surgeries and you can't reverse them. So as a result you have irreversible interventions that are being done when children's brains are not capable of understanding the implications and long term potential consequences of this. Yet here we are, the American Academy of Pediatrics and some other medical bodies are supporting gender affirming care for minors, including puberty blockers with hormones and cross sex hormones and even surgeries. Now what is their rationale? Well, they like to point to studies that show a reduction in suicidal ideation and depression. Emphasize in in the short term. These were all short term studies. Let's remember the American Academy of Pediatrics. They were the cheerleaders for masking our children all throughout Covid. They were wrong about keeping them out of school, they were wrong about keeping them masked and they were wrong about the vaccines. They actually scrapped an entire webpage on their site about how important it was for babies and toddlers to see expressions on people's faces because they didn't want to seem contradictory to the fact that they were telling people to now mask up. So obviously if they were quick to just delete a webpage to now support a new cause, the masking up cause, they obviously didn't feel strongly about it in the first place. But the reality is where was the science? Was the science babies need to see facial expressions or was the Science Babies need to wear masks. Well, we all know that babies need to see facial expressions. And which is why we have now a whole generation of children with speech impediments and other manifestations of wearing masking at young ages. But they were their social justice warriors, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and they just followed in line. More coming up on Wellness unmasked with Dr. Nicole Safire.
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Dr. Nicole Safire
Now when we're talking about transitioning in kids, they're doing the exact same thing. They are sticking with those social justice talking points and they're pointing to these very small studies with short term results. Here's the problem. We do not have long term safety data of what they are doing to our children. Puberty blockers, for example, were originally developed for rare conditions like precocious puberty. When kids get puberty way too early and we're like wait, wait, wait, you can't start puberty quite yet because this could be detrimental not just psychologically, but also can have impacts on bone, soft tissue and other things. So that's why we did that. But their Use in healthy adolescents is completely off label and experimental and side effects may include reduced bone density, obviously infertility, and even impaired brain development. So why would we do this? I don't know. Because that's what like social media talking points are telling us to do these days. Some European countries are taking notice. Sweden, Finland and the UK have all pulled back on youth gender treatments, citing insufficient evidence of long term benefit and growing concerns about irreversible harm. I'm so tired of the US being last. We were the last during COVID You had Israel, you had the uk, you had Switzerland, you had all these other countries who are doing the right things well before the United States. How can that happen? How can we be such a great nation at the forefront of scientific innovation and medical advancements, and yet we're always behind when it comes to implementing them? And why is that? Because we are so politically influenced and socially influenced into our recommendations. We need to follow the science, not the politics and the science. Right now it's technically uncertain, I guess you can say, because you can point to different studies showing different things. My settled opinion is children who are dealing with gender dysphoria are suffering from a mental illness. And we need to rally around them best we can. We need to look at their social environment, their home life, their school life. Do they have food safety? Do they have financial safety? What is causing them to feel so out of touch with their body? And what can we do to help them? Is it through therapy? Is it through medication? I think it's probably more going to be about making sure that they feel safe in their environments and that they accept them for who they are and have confidence in who they are and who they were born to be. I think we need to stop giving them medications to make them permanently infertile. We certainly should not be touching them with a scalpel and causing irreversible harm. Now some states are trying to ban these gender affirming treatments. And in a pivotal move this week, the U.S. supreme Court is allowing Tennessee's ban on gender affirming care for minors to remain in effect while ongoing legal challenges continue. The Court six three decision didn't rule on the constitutionality of such bans, but it does allow states to enforce them during litigation, setting a precedent for how similar laws in other states may proceed. Now, this wasn't a final ruling, but it signaled the states can regulate these treatments for now. But there are still many states that are allowing children, yes, children to make the decisions whether or not they want to start hormones or whether or not. We want to consider surgery. In fact, there are some states that a child just has to be 15. They don't even need parental consent to get some of these treatments. That is mind blowing to me. If you have to be 18 to vote, if you have to be 18 to enlist in the army, buy cigarettes. I don't know what else you have to do to be 18, but I cannot believe that you would allow someone under 18 to say that they want to take medication that would cause permanent sterilization. This makes no sense to me. We might as well just get rid of all age restrictions because it's based on nothing. 15 is a magical number for you. What is that based on? It's based on nothing. If you actually, if you really want to say, when can someone give informed consent? It's not even 18. We've already talked about how the brain's not fully formed. Really, it's probably 25, 26. So if we're just going to stick with the arbitrary numbers that we've given as 18, you can buy cigarettes and enlist in the army and Vote 21, you can get alcohol. By the way, I don't understand those numbers in themselves either. But 15 for gender affirming care, that's actually permanent damage. Smoking cigarettes, that's long term damage. I mean, and by the way, that can stop. That's not even permanent. You can smoke for a little bit and stop. So why can you take these medications that you'll never be able to stop and get healthy from again, but yet you can't buy cigarettes? I don't know. Honestly, none of it makes sense to me. I just think that people are making decisions to try and cater to a base that they think that these people know what they're talking about, but they don't. Advocates for the bans obviously argue that the states have a compelling interest in protecting children from these irreversible decisions. But opponents call it discrimination and medical obstruction. But here's what we can't ignore. Parents are often the collateral damage of this ideological fight. We must protect the parents role in what is right for the children. There is no way a 15 year old should be able to get a prescription for hormone blockers without their parents consent. Absolutely not. And I cannot believe that we are allowing this to happen. The reality is when it comes to gender affirming care, we need more longitudinal studies on the outcomes of gender affirming care in minors. I guarantee it's going to show that there is regret, that there is significant risk and that those who had Mental illness prior to the surgeries and the hormone blockers, they're still going to have mental illness after it's all said and done. Unless we're focusing on the underlying cause of the mental illness and focusing on helping this person feel good about their life, it's not going to be anything. I don't understand how we can look at people who, you know, they're looking in the mirror and they're just not happy with what they see, whether it's their nose, their chin, their breasts, their waist, their thighs, their whatever it may be. They get plastic surgery after plastic surgery and it can be addictive. And you see these people on the street and you kind of laugh and you chuckle at them like, oh my gosh, they look like, you know, plastic Barbie, or gosh, they've had a lot of work done or whatever it is. At the end of the day, all of this work is being done because they look in the mirror and they are not happy with what they're seeing. That's also a mental illness. Unless you're focusing on the inside, nothing you do to the outside matters. You know, I read MRIs and CT scans every single day. And I can tell you, doesn't matter what you've done on the outside, I can see what's happening on the inside. And that is where you need to focus. It's okay to want to look a little bit different, but you certainly shouldn't be doing something permanent when you're a child because you need to grow into that body. You need to grow up, you need to figure out who you are. And you certainly cannot take the parents out of that conversation because maybe not 100% of the time, but 99% of the time, parents knows what's best for their children. And by removing them from the conversation, that in itself says there's something fishy going on here. If you have to exclude the parent from the decision about whether a child should undergo gender affirming care, then that means you're doing something dirty. And it's probably not what's in the best interest from that child. So shame on the lawmakers and shame on the advocates who aren't actually caring for the well being of that child. Parental rights should not be political. They should be protected as part of a child's full circle of care. That's my 2 cents as a mother, but also as a physician. Thanks for listening to Wellness Unmass on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow wellness unmass with Dr. Nicole Safire and start listening on the free iHeartradio app. Wherever you get your podcasts and we'll catch you next time.
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The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show Episode Summary: Wellness Unmasked: The Battle for Parental Rights in Medicine Release Date: June 24, 2025
In the June 24, 2025 episode of The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, hosted by iHeartPodcasts, Dr. Nicole Safire delves deep into one of the most urgent and controversial topics in modern medicine: the intersection of parental rights and gender-affirming care for minors. Combining her expertise as a women's health breast radiologist with her personal experiences as a mother of three, Dr. Safire offers a compelling and critical perspective on how medical decisions affecting children are increasingly sidelining parental authority.
Dr. Safire begins by reflecting on her experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting how parental control over their children's well-being was compromised. She states:
"Prior to Covid, I always felt that I was in control of my child's well-being... But I never felt that they were dictating what happens to my child." (05:30)
She criticizes the mandates such as masking and school closures, arguing that they did more harm than good despite the low risk COVID posed to children. Dr. Safire shares her frustrations with the inconsistent messaging from health authorities and legislators:
"They continued to say, no, this is what's best for them. They were neglecting all of the science and they were saying this is what's best." (08:15)
She underscores the impact of these policies on her ability to provide care, noting that pediatricians began refusing to treat unvaccinated children, which she deemed as malpractice.
Building on her concerns from the pandemic, Dr. Safire transitions to the current debate surrounding gender-affirming care for minors. She draws parallels between COVID-19 policies and the treatment of gender dysphoria in youth, emphasizing the removal of parental input in medical decisions:
"Now the states are actually trying to do the same thing with gender transitioning of minors." (16:45)
She expresses deep concern over the increasing trend of allowing minors to make irreversible medical decisions without adequate parental consent, questioning the ethical and medical foundations of such practices.
Dr. Safire examines the scientific basis—or lack thereof—behind gender-affirming treatments for minors. She discusses the classification of gender dysphoria in the DSM-5 and critiques the medical community's approach:
"Gender dysphoria is included because it is a mental health condition characterized by significant distress... it is fundamentally a psychological condition." (19:20)
She argues for prioritizing mental health support and therapy over irreversible medical and surgical interventions, highlighting the incomplete neurological development of minors:
"Children's brains are still developing well until their mid-20s... minors lack the full capacity to provide truly informed consent for these permanent and life-altering procedures." (21:10)
Dr. Safire questions the long-term safety and efficacy of puberty blockers and hormone therapies, noting potential side effects such as reduced bone density and infertility:
"Puberty blockers were originally developed for rare conditions like precocious puberty... their use in healthy adolescents is completely off-label and experimental." (22:45)
Highlighting international responses, Dr. Safire points out that several European countries have retracted youth gender treatments due to insufficient evidence of long-term benefits and concerns over irreversible harm:
"Sweden, Finland, and the UK have all pulled back on youth gender treatments, citing insufficient evidence of long-term benefit and growing concerns about irreversible harm." (24:00)
She contrasts this with the United States' slow response, questioning why a nation renowned for scientific innovation struggles to lead in implementing evidence-based medical practices:
"How can we be such a great nation at the forefront of scientific innovation and medical advancements, and yet we're always behind when it comes to implementing them?" (24:30)
Dr. Safire addresses the recent Supreme Court decision allowing Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for minors to remain in effect during ongoing legal challenges. Although the Court did not rule on the constitutionality, the decision sets a precedent for other states:
"The U.S. Supreme Court is allowing Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for minors to remain in effect while ongoing legal challenges continue." (24:50)
She emphasizes the inconsistency in age-based consent laws, questioning why minors as young as 15 can make irreversible medical decisions when adults are required to be 18 for voting, military service, and other significant privileges:
"If you have to be 18 to vote, enlist in the army, buy cigarettes... why can you take these medications that cause permanent sterilization at 15?" (25:30)
Dr. Safire highlights the collateral damage posed to parents caught in the ideological battle over their children's medical care. She advocates for restoring parental involvement in medical decisions, asserting that parents typically have their children's best interests at heart:
"Parents are often the collateral damage of this ideological fight. We must protect the parents' role in what is right for the children." (25:10)
She critiques the politicization of medical recommendations, urging a return to evidence-based practices:
"We need to follow the science, not the politics and the science." (24:35)
Concluding her segment, Dr. Safire calls for more longitudinal studies to assess the long-term outcomes of gender-affirming care in minors. She predicts that such studies will reveal significant risks and regrets, advocating for a focus on addressing the underlying mental health issues rather than resorting to irreversible medical interventions:
"Unless we're focusing on the underlying cause of the mental illness and helping this person feel good about their life, it's not going to be anything." (25:50)
She reinforces the importance of parental rights in medical decisions, emphasizing that they should not become politicized:
"Parental rights should not be political. They should be protected as part of a child's full circle of care." (25:55)
Dr. Nicole Safire's insightful and passionate discussion on The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show sheds light on the critical issue of parental rights in the realm of gender-affirming care for minors. By intertwining her professional expertise with personal experiences, she effectively argues for the necessity of preserving parental involvement in medical decisions affecting children. Her call for more robust scientific research and a balanced approach free from political influence underscores the ongoing struggle to balance medical advancements with ethical considerations and family rights.
Notable Quotes:
Note: This summary excludes advertisements, intros, outros, and non-content sections, focusing solely on the substantive discussion led by Dr. Nicole Safire.