Minnesota children’s hospital offers ‘gender-affirming’ care to minors, even toddlers

Children’s Minnesota hospital offers gender treatments for minors, from toddlers on up.

The hospital is among a number of institutions across the U.S. recently exposed for offering the highly controversial gender treatments to children, The Post Millennial reports.

“Like all kids, transgender youth deserve to grow up happy, healthy, safe and strong. We’re here to help them every step along the way,” the hospital’s website proclaims, offering, “gender health care for kids and teens.”

Advertised services include gender consultations, mental health evaluations and treatments such as puberty blockers, gender-affirming hormones, menstrual suppression and fertility preservation consultations.

While the website claims the hospital aims to help transgender children “grow up happy, healthy and safe,” some studies have found puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to be dangerous, potentially causing bone density issues, brain swelling and permanent vision loss, as well as an elevated risk of cancer.  

The director of the hospital’s Gender Health Program, Angela Kade Goepferd, goes so far as to claim children may know they are transgender by the time they are able to speak, also asserting that not all boys have penises, and not all girls have vaginas. 

In a video clip shared online, Goepferd explains that children begin understanding the differences between genders around age 2, and by ages 3 or 4 they develop a “sophisticated understanding of physical characteristics and anatomy.” 

Goepferd, who reportedly considers herself “non-binary,” claims to be neither the mother nor father of her three children, but their “mapa.” In the video she says her three children, ages 4-6, were, “assigned male at birth” and “continue to identify as males.”  

The gender program director also uses a crayon analogy to illustrate her beliefs: Imagine the difference if children are only given a pink or blue crayon to draw themselves compared to a box of 64 crayons, she says, according to The Post Millennial. “If we open the box of crayons, they will tell us who they are.” 

In response to another Post Millennial report about a transgender health conference session moderated by an employee of Children’s Minnesota, the hospital sent the publication a legal demand to delete it, citing a lack of consent. Although the event was live-streamed, The Post Millennial took down the full video of the panel, replacing it with a three-minute clip. 

Critics of transgender ideology have expressed concerns about the secretiveness around treatments and policies involving minors, from schools to hospitals.