One of the most sacred responsibilities of any society is to protect its children.
Children depend on adults precisely because they cannot always recognize danger, understand the consequences of decisions placed before them, or protect themselves from people and institutions they have been taught to trust. Parents have that responsibility. Teachers have it. Government has a role to play here, as well. And doctors, entrusted with the health and bodies of our children, carry a particularly profound responsibility.
This week, sitting inside the North Carolina Court of Appeals in Raleigh, I watched a case that demonstrated what can happen when institutions charged with protecting children do the opposite.
Prisha Mosley was there fighting for her opportunity to put her claims before a jury.
Prisha entered the medical system as a vulnerable teenager struggling with depression, anxiety, an eating disorder, and the aftermath of sexual assault. She needed adults who would take those problems seriously and help her through them. Medical professionals she trusted directed her toward gender transition. She began testosterone at 17 and later underwent a double mastectomy.
This story is far too commonplace for us to ignore. Doctors are engaging in systematic deceptions, guiding minors to go into irreversible, life-altering surgeries and therapies in the quest to alter gender identity. “Do no harm” has been abandoned for this radical gender ideology.
For years, powerful institutions insisted that so-called “gender-affirming care,” including puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for some minors, represented appropriate medical treatment. Under the Biden administration, the Department of Health and Human Services promoted this approach and opposed efforts to restrict it.
But the medical debate has changed substantially, in large part thanks to President Trump’s leadership on this issue. Questions about the quality of the evidence supporting pediatric medical transition can no longer simply be dismissed as politics or prejudice.
President Trump’s second term has ushered in a much-needed era of sanity in our broader effort to protect children. In January 2025, he signed Executive Order 14187, directing federal agencies to end federal support for specified gender-transition interventions for people under 19 and ordering HHS to review the medical evidence behind these practices.
As a result, in 2025, the Trump administration’s Health and Human Services conducted a comprehensive review of medical interventions for children and adolescents with so-called gender dysphoria. That review raised serious concerns about the evidence supporting puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries for minors, concluding that evidence of benefit was very weak while some potential harms were significant and irreversible.
Republicans in Congress have pursued accountability as well. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a physician and chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, has investigated medical organizations and federally funded providers over their involvement in pediatric gender medicine and has pressed organizations to explain the evidence supporting their policies.
Following Republicans’ efforts to expose the harm being done to children, more medical institutions dropped their programs to perform unnecessary and dangerous surgeries on children. As just one example, earlier this year, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons also concluded that there was insufficient evidence to establish a favorable risk-benefit ratio for endocrinological and surgical interventions in children and adolescents.
Meanwhile, radical leftist activists continue to advocate for on-demand surgeries on children, regardless of the consequences.
That is why Prisha Mosley’s case matters.
I watched her sit in that North Carolina courtroom this week, asking for the opportunity to have her claims heard. The questions raised by her experience reach far beyond Raleigh, and will no doubt help to establish more oversight of the medical community’s reckless disregard for children’s well-being in this area.
The midterm elections will determine who controls Congress and, with it, who writes federal law, controls congressional investigations, and exercises oversight over the agencies responsible for children’s health policy. The two political parties have pursued markedly different approaches to gender “transition” surgeries for minors. Republicans have consistently defended commonsense principles that children should be protected and that gender-transition surgeries are based on a series of lies about the malleability of gender, whereas Democrats have almost universally taken the side of the transgender agenda, prioritizing its objectives over the simple moral requirement to look after children.
Protecting children is one of society's oldest obligations. It should also be one of our simplest. The Democrat Party has proven fundamentally unable and unwilling to handle a matter as clear-cut and morally simple as safeguarding children’s health and welfare.
November’s elections are about so many contrasts, but voters would do well to remember the Democrats’ insistent disregard for human dignity and children’s welfare.
Jenny Beth Martin is Chairman of Tea Party Patriots Action.