Family Research Council’s Dr. Jennifer Bauwens, Director of the Center for Family Studies, spoke before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government on July 27, 2023. The hearing focused on concerns about “gender-affirming care” for children and its potential risks.
Dr. Bauwens addressed the committee by drawing on her experience as a clinician and researcher in trauma therapy for children. She stated:
“Based on over 25 years of experience as a clinician providing trauma therapy to children and as a researcher investigating the psychological effects of traumatic stress, I am here to express my concern about what has been termed ‘gender-affirming care’ for children.
“I have considered it a privilege to practice, research, and train future clinicians and be a part of a discipline aimed at protecting and bringing healing to the most vulnerable in our society–children. But when it comes to gender transition procedures, my field is not operating as a helping profession. Instead, it is actively causing harm.
“…[S]ome in my profession have set aside this basic understanding of child neurological, emotional, and cognitive development. Instead, they have embraced what has been referred to as ‘gender-affirming care,’ which permanently alters the human psyche and physiology through puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical procedures to remove healthy body parts.
“Instead of answers to these questions, we’ve plowed ahead with practices that break ethical research and practice boundaries. Gender-affirming care creates an illusion that there is only one choice for children and their families to experience relief from their distress, and that is to become someone else.
“We should be innovating solutions to heal their distress, not coercing them onto a path that tells them they need to remove or change parts of who they are in order to be whole. I’m calling on you to please act on behalf of children,” Bauwens concluded.
The full text of Dr. Bauwens’s testimony can be found at https://downloads.frc.org/EF/EF23G60.pdf.
