Banning "Gender Affirming Care" for Minors Isn't a Prevention of Harm- It's Merely a Delay.

Here's why legislation isn't enough to protect kids and young people from being harmed by the "wrong body" lie.

A picture taken on a beautiful, sunny day in DC following Detrans Awareness Day 2025

Last week, I was in Washington DC for Detrans Awareness Day. On one of the days, I also found myself in New York giving a somewhat impromptu speech at a sideshow event which happened at the same time as the United Nations gathered to hold a conference about the status of women globally. Considering that the UN thinks that some men are women if they say they are, dissenting voices to today’s current ideological landscape cannot be found within the discussions being had by mainstream international organizations. Because the real threats impacting women, children and families aren’t a priority for many of the largest and most influential international organizations, sideshow events like the one I spoke at, which are open to the public, were attended by delegates and participants from all over the world.

In this speech, I attempt to go beyond the culture war issues around gender ideology in order to inform delegates from different countries about the nature of the labyrinth we are up against. I hope this speech will reach clinicians, parents and policymakers with the type of information necessary for them to strategize about how to best help their gender questioning and trans-identified young people navigate what is a highly contentious ideological battlefield where trans issues are for the first time, being meaningfully questioned and debated. As always, where there is a contentious debate about all things gender medicine, I will contribute my two cents.

The questions I posed in this speech are:

“What happens when you tell a trans-identified kid ‘NO?’ What happens when an ideologically captured young person has no conceivable medical pathway until at least 18?” I argue that restricting access of gender medicine to legal adults (18 year olds and above, in most countries) will not be enough to meaningfully protect kids and young people from being harmed in mind and in body by gender ideology. Thank you in advance for reading and listening to my testimony.

Without further ado, here are the remarks I made before the committee both in video and in written format (below):

Legislation Isn’t Enough to Protect Young People from Gender Medicine- Here’s Why:

Hi. My name is Maia Poet. I’m 25 years old and I am a detransitioner. I am so honored to speak before you today. Even one and a half years ago when I was still trans, I could have never imagined that the trans train would lead me to this particular destination.

My gender journey began with the iPad I got for my 12th birthday. At the age of 12 in 2012 after months of online research, I came out to my parents as trans.

My parents refused to affirm the identity. Nonetheless, I was already committed to the idea that a gender transition would be my only path to happiness and I began to plan my future as a man.

I began binding my breasts in order to prevent their continued development.

By 18, I went off to college, began my social transition and bought a chest binder that was marketed as 100% safe.

But, I began to experience pain in my ribs and sought advice from a doctor on my university campus. Instead of telling me to stop binding my breasts, she encouraged me to pursue breast removal as a remedy for the pain and discomfort caused by binding. She referred me to a gender clinic. I didn’t pursue it, not for lack of wanting, but because I knew my parents wouldn’t allow it.

By 19, my parents noticed how persistent I was in my transgender identity, so they sent me to Israel for a study abroad.

They hoped that extracting me from a woke, affirmation-only environment and placing me into the highly traditional, conservative Middle East would cause me to quit my gender transition.

Instead, I did the opposite. This was a new opportunity for me to live as a man within orthodox Jewish and Palestinian Muslim communities as well as the broader secular society. I was an Israeli-Palestinian peace activist with a rich social life where nearly everyone knew me as a man. Only a select few people knew my secret- that I was actually a woman.

Though I had no access to the healthcare system and I spent years pursuing Israeli citizenship in order to medicalize far away from my non-affirming parents- I still managed to dabble in cross-sex hormone use. Even though I didn’t have a prescription from a doctor, my other trans friends did. They were more than happy to give me some of their supply.

In May of 2021 I lived through my first war in Israel or a “military operation” as the locals call it. I found myself running back and forth to bomb shelters, and in between sirens I spent hours on social media engaging in fruitless debates with my terrorist supporting leftist American friends back home. I became increasingly disillusioned with the Left. The algorithms began to shift the content I was seeing.

I found myself in right wing internet spaces.

As soon as I realized that I wasn’t actually trapped in the wrong body, and that the last half of my life had been a lie- I was now uniquely aware of the fact that I was trapped in my gender transition. The stakes of quitting were far too high. I had already woven myself into a complex social web as a man in sectors of society where men and women can’t even shake hands. I was actively endangering myself by transitioning in the Middle East- but revealing my real sex would have endangered me far more.

So, I continued my transition- even when I no longer believed in what I was doing.

It was not until I woke up to a blaring siren at 8am on October 7 2023 and didn’t have time to squeeze myself into a breast binder because I had to run into a bomb shelter, that I realized there’s no point in continuing to live this lie. Why was I obsessing over my gender troubles when death was staring me in the face? Turns out there’s bigger fish to fry when you live in a war zone.

I am here to explore the question of “what happens when you tell a trans-identified kid “NO”? What happens when an ideologically captured young person has no conceivable medical pathway until at least 18. Since this is the world we are trying to create, let’s explore how this world might look in practice.

It’s important to state the obvious:

Social transition of prepubertal kids only happens due to the promise that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones will be available to obscure the child’s sex forever. If these treatment bans are upheld everywhere, we will inevitably have a cohort of prepubertal socially transitioned children who will approach puberty and be denied the broken life raft they have been promised since before they learned to tie their shoes.

The only options available for them in this social climate, will be interventions like breast binding and genital tucking, which use tissue compressing garments that can be easily bought on Amazon or at Target, but nonetheless cause permanent bodily damage especially when they are used by children whose bodies are still developing.

From the moment these girls begin to grow breasts, they’ll crush them through binding.

I bound my breasts in different ways for nearly a decade and have been severely damaged by this process. My breasts and ribcage are permanently disfigured, I cannot take deep breaths without pain, it hurts to lie down on my sides, I have pain in my ribs, and posture issues.

I am 25. Quitting binding didn’t reverse the damage and all of it has compounded the psychological distress that as a 12 year old drove me to adopt a trans identity in the first place.

These harms are often overlooked because frankly, kids like me are the “lucky ones.” Many feel that transition did not damage our bodies enough for our experiences to count. My transition still robbed me of 12 years, or roughly half of my life- but it did not fundamentally ruin my endocrine system or rob me of my breasts. I am lucky in that sense, but I was still damaged in mind and in body by gender ideology.

But this is not about me. This is about all the kids who are already facing harms that are routinely overlooked, time and time again.

The harms of gender ideology do not actually start in a doctor’s office. The harm starts from the moment that a child adopts the belief that they were born in the wrong body. Each subsequent psychosocial, physical, medical and surgical intervention only carries more potential, more irreversible harms which compound over time.

When we choose to ignore how harmful social transition is, and how easy it is for youngsters to access cross-sex hormones without even needing to see a doctor, we will think that non-affirmation and “Gender Affirming Care” bans will sufficiently solve the multifaceted hydra-like harms of gender ideology. This belief is sorely misguided.

Firstly, the Cass Report has shown that social transition is a significant intervention which predisposes youngsters to medicalization.

Secondly, and most importantly, social transition is harmful in and of itself, not only psychologically but physically as well. Binding and tucking damage the breasts and genitals of children. This of course only makes them more desperate to have those body parts removed entirely.

Though banning “Gender Affirming Care” for minors is an important first step, it isn’t a solution- not by a long shot. It is merely a delay.

We will still have a cohort of young people who’ve been indoctrinated, perhaps socially transitioned as minors (or as young adults) and they will medicalize the day they turn 18 when they are no more capable of consent than they were when they went to sleep on the night before. And, they will be angry. They will come in to gender clinics even more stubborn, even more sure of themselves because of how long their cross-sex identity and desire to transition has persisted.

If we want to end this ideology, it is unacceptable to settle for kids medicalizing at 18. It is unethical to ever turn a healthy person into a lifelong medical patient, especially when they are young and cognitively immature, when they are being lied to by their doctors and treated with protocols underpinned by no evidence that any of this is a good idea……

And those 18 year olds who were denied medicalization as minors will just become even more ardent trans activists because you have told them “no”, we will be right back to where we started.

We must account for this inevitability and take steps to start mitigating this by understanding the how the psychosocial, physical and medical harms of transition are inextricably intertwined. After all, our bodies and minds do not exist separately from one another. This crisis is fueled by a phenomenon pushed largely by people whose normal distress is pathologized, medicalized and institutionally ideologically enshrined.

Our mental health institutions were clearly ill equipped to deal with the underlying mental health issues both social media induced and not, of this cohort. If we do not address this and the indoctrination at every corner, the secret transitions in schools and the groups that give kids breast binders - we will be unlikely to make more than a dent in dismantling gender ideology. We are in for a long fight ahead.

My commitment to my transition was stubborn and it lasted for half of my life, despite my parents non-affirmation. It took war and terror, it took witnessing horrors beyond my comprehension to realize that there is a hell on earth worse than any gender dysphoria.

We must understand that what started as a rogue medical experiment confined to a few European hospitals nearly a century ago, has morphed into a widespread ideological assault on reality which has invaded every institution within Western society, which has thoroughly pervaded youth culture. We are beyond the point where legislation alone is capable of neutralizing the threat of this ideology to our young people.

If these kids are anything like me, they will need to be de-radicalized and they need proper mental healthcare and guidance. If we truly wish to end the death grip of gender ideology on our society, as a start, we need to face the distress that these children are facing in an aggressively honest, compassionate and practical way. Thank you.

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