How opposing daughter’s gender transition made parents ‘enemy’ to US medical establishment
Breccan F. Thies
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EXCLUSIVE — When Tandy Lynn Hebert’s and Sean Chiaffon’s daughter Violet was 13 years old, she struggled with her identity to the point of self-harm. The young girl cut herself “enough to where she has scars that look like ridges,” Chiaffon said, and even attempted suicide.
That is when Violet was brought to the Children’s Hospital of New Orleans, where Hebert and Chiaffon were confronted by Louisiana laws and hospital protocols stacked against their ability to decide what was best for their child.
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The hospital staff used “emotional blackmail” to pressure them down the path of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and genital mutilation surgery. “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a live son,” they said.
“How dare you,” Chiaffon said of the medical staff pressure to gender-transition their daughter without parental consent. “They treat us like we are the enemy; like they’re not our kids.”
As states around the country, including Louisiana, weigh bans on genital mutilation surgeries and cross-sex chemicals for children, Violet’s story shows how minor consent laws, a major database company’s records policy, and an eager American medical establishment can enable gender transitions for teenagers without parental consent.
A Washington Examiner investigation revealed how Louisiana’s laws and CHNO’s records policies for adolescent patients worked in tandem with Epic, a medical records software company, to remove parents from their child’s healthcare to allow minors to choose a path of transgender drugs and surgeries at the behest of doctors who advocate for them.
“If parents are blocked from seeing their children’s electronic health records, they are left in the dark about life-altering decisions being made for their children by medical professionals with a political bias or agenda,” Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, chairman of the medical advocacy group Do No Harm, told the Washington Examiner. “The profound impacts on the future health of these kids could bring irreversible harm to an entire generation.”
In under an hour of meeting Violet for the first time in 2019, and with her parents locked out of the room, doctors in the adolescent medicine unit determined that she must truly be a boy and attempted to start her on a regimen of puberty blockers. Hebert said when Violet left the room, her demeanor had changed and that Hebert was “all of a sudden the enemy.”
Doctors told Hebert and Chiaffon they must be “affirming” of her new identity.
“They didn’t give me any other options,” Hebert, from Lafourche Parish, Louisiana, told the Washington Examiner. “They just went straight to talking about testosterone.”
The doctors took Violet to get an X-ray of her hand to determine how far along in puberty she was.
“They had a counselor that took her father and I in a room, and he was telling us that we had to affirm, you know, talking about the suicide rates and things like that,” she continued.
Goldfarb denounced the tactic. “It is morally and professionally wrong for doctors to emotionally blackmail parents to give their children puberty blockers or hormones by falsely claiming a failure to do so will increase risks of self-harm or suicide,” he said.
Louisiana’s age-limitless medical statute
Louisiana law is one of the most permissive in the country for allowing children to choose their own medical path without parental consent.
While several states have passed laws allowing children around the ages of 12 and 13 to consent to their own medical care without their parent’s knowledge, Louisiana does not set a minimum age requirement.
“The consent of a spouse, parent, guardian, or any other person standing in a fiduciary capacity to the minor shall not be necessary in order to authorize such hospital care or services or medical or surgical care or services, or administration of drugs to be provided by a physician licensed to practice medicine to such a minor,” the law reads.
Benjamin P. Mouton, partner and head of medical malpractice at MGM Injury Attorneys based in Baton Rouge, told the Washington Examiner that the law was written both to allow children to consent to their own care and legally insulate doctors from lawsuits.
Despite the law, neither Hebert nor Chiaffon was prepared to allow their daughter down the path of the “gender affirmation” model pushed by the American medical establishment but heavily criticized by many Western European countries.
When Violet’s parents raised concerns about the gender transition treatment, medical staff, including Dr. Ryan Pasternak, sought to lock them out of the process, they said.
“That’s when all the communication got cut for me,” Chiaffon said, with Hebert adding, “When I asked about looking at her health records, they said that I would have to have her permission.”
It is CHNO’s policy to cut parents out of being able to view their child’s medical records once they turn 13. In the state of Louisiana, children can consent to medical treatment without parental confirmation or knowledge, and there is no legal minimum age for doing so.
In order to obtain “proxy access” to their child’s medical records, “Your teen, considered age 13 to 17, must approve the proxy access request privately, in person at his or her next doctor visit,” the hospital’s website states.
CHNO decided to call Violet by a different name without telling her parents, and when Hebert called the hospital to talk to her own daughter, “The staff didn’t even know when I asked for her by her real legal name. They didn’t know who I was talking about.”
At the hospital, one of the attendants at the front desk asked only for Violet’s contact information, which seemed inappropriate to Hebert.
“I’m like, ‘Well, wait, do you need mine too? And she was like, ‘No, you know, at 13, we separate kids and parents,'” Hebert said. “I’m just like, is this for real? You don’t want to get mine as well? I mean, she’s still a minor.”
When Hebert raised concerns to Pasternak about her parental rights in the medical treatment of her daughter, including the hospital’s policy to cut parents out at 13 and Louisiana’s law facilitating the policy, “he just laughed at me.”
“That was kind of frightening,” Hebert said. “I was afraid that if I did not consent, who knows what would have happened.”
Neither CHNO nor Pasternak, who is an active advocate for keeping these records secret from parents, responded to requests for comment from the Washington Examiner.
Violet had little or no interest in identifying as a boy prior to in-patient treatment at CHNO, according to her parents. But viewing social media to encourage transgender identity and having online access to doctors through Epic coerced Violet to consider the drastic measure, they said.
“I want to be able to trust medical professionals, I want to be able to bring her to counseling and things like that,” Hebert said. “But no, I can’t trust any medical professionals right now.”
Epic and electronic health records
Hospitals can bypass parents through the use of electronic health records and patient portals.
CHNO uses MyChart, which is an online portal that holds medical records and enables patients to schedule appointments run by a company called Epic. That is how Violet, and patients like her, are able to talk to doctors without even having to secure transportation to a hospital or clinic.
According to Epic’s website, more than 305 million patients have current medical records through its software, and over 160 million use MyChart specifically.
“Each healthcare organization that uses Epic makes its own decision regarding the level of access parents have to their child’s healthcare information,” Anna McCann, a public relations representative at Epic, told the Washington Examiner.
A backend Epic website designer for a hospital, on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional retribution, noted the company is a proud and willing participant in blocking parents and allowing children to change their gender and name on their medical records.
Screenshots of a simulated record for a child obtained by the Washington Examiner show prompts for “legal sex,” “gender identity,” “sex assigned at birth,” and “sexual orientation.”
According to the description of “sex assigned at birth,” in the screenshots provided by a Do No Harm whistleblower, it is the “sex assigned to the patient by a medical or birthing professional when they were born,” which “may or may not be the sex on their birth certificate.”
Moreover, Epic has boasted of its system specifically for the facilitation of transgender treatment.
“Many Epic community members have incorporated questions about patients’ preferred pronouns, sex assigned at birth, and gender identity into each patient’s chart in Epic,” an article on Epic’s website states. “A transgender patient’s sex assigned at birth—along with the patient’s current anatomy—might inform clinical decisions, while their legal sex might be relevant to identifying them in billing workflows.”
On Tuesday, the Louisiana legislature voted to enact a ban on transgender procedures for children in the state, overriding Gov. John Bel Edwards’s (D-LA) veto and joining 20 other states with similar bans. Most of the other bans are tied up in lawsuits, and some have seen judges block their implementation.
Many believe one way to help block the procedures for children is to change the age of consent to 18.
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Violet, whose gender transition was thwarted, in part, due to not having access to transportation to the medical center, is “doing better” and stopped self-harm.
“I’m not saying it’s perfect,” Hebert said, “You know, there’s good days and bad days, but hey, that’s with any teenager, right?”