It’s amazing how fast your life can change.
Like many professionals, I’ve spent most of my life honing my skills — through study, practice and experience — to become the best I can possibly be at what I do. After decades of such dedicated medical and academic effort, the University of Louisville hired me to lead its Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychology.
Then, in 2017, after almost 15 years of richly rewarding service in that role — and generous recognition by university officials of what I’d accomplished — an odd, disappointing and terrible thing happened.
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The school that had for so long celebrated my hard-earned expertise abruptly demoted me — for that same expertise. Then, in 2019, it fired me. Here’s how that happened.
I’d been invited to join a think-tank panel discussion on gender dysphoria and how to treat it most effectively. I suggested that the best approach was also the one with the most common sense. Rather than hurrying to put kids on the path to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and radical surgeries, medical professionals should simply endeavor to understand the psychological issues at the root of a child’s confusion.
I also said that, based on my 35 years of child and adolescent psychiatric practice, I didn’t believe children and teens were emotionally mature enough to decide difficult questions of gender identity. (This may be why studies show 80-95% of children who struggle with gender dysphoria eventually come to accept their biological sex, as long as children aren’t pushed down the path of social transition, drugs, and surgeries that alter the natural course of puberty.)
All that seemed clear and straightforward enough, but the nationwide wave of cultural enthusiasm for gender transition was already building, and I quickly learned that what I said was not what some politically correct educators and medical professionals wanted to hear.
Facts, it turned out, didn’t matter. Research wasn’t necessary. Professional experience was irrelevant. Transitioning was the new approach. My university had embraced this ideology, and it would tolerate no dissent. It also ignored the irreparable, horrific damage this ideology inflicted on vulnerable children.
In short order, I was demoted, gradually banished from the classroom, and finally, a little over a year later, terminated. My hard-earned professional career was over — simply for sharing, on my own time, my personal and professional opinion.
For an educational institution, it seemed the University of Louisville had very little interest in the free exchange of ideas.
With the help of Alliance Defending Freedom, I filed a lawsuit against the university, as its actions violated my First Amendment free-speech rights. After years of litigation, and facing the prospect of trial this summer, university officials recently agreed to settle the case, paying out a total of nearly $1.6 million for the mistreatment I endured, the reputation they tarnished, and the career they brought to such a premature close.
That settlement goes a long way toward undoing some of the injustices done to me and will hopefully discourage other universities from violating the constitutional rights of other professors.
Even more satisfying is the fact that, over the past six years, so many have come to share my concerns. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled that schools can maintain separate restrooms for boys and girls.
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Tennessee and Kentucky — among other states — have passed laws that protect children from harmful and unnecessary medical procedures, laws the 6th Circuit upheld. And a growing consensus of international medical groups (including England’s Cass Report) affirms the dangers I warned about.
But tragically, that surge of legal, scientific, and popular support hasn’t stopped—and can’t undo—the crippling physical, emotional, and spiritual damage still being inflicted on children every day by a medical industry too often fixated on a certain ideology rather than good medicine.
As men and women who’ve taken an oath to do no harm, doctors owe their patients thoughtful treatment unbiased or encumbered by social pressures and political orthodoxy. They owe the children and teens struggling with gender dysphoria — and the families who care about them—all the medical alternatives available for understanding and dealing with emotional distress.
Withholding that information is more than unfair. It’s a brutal betrayal of the patient’s trust—and their own best interests.