More than 400 Illinois youth have had gender transition since 2019, database reveals

A newly released database of gender transition procedures on children reveals at least 418 patients in Illinois received such treatment since 2019. Billing to insurance companies totaled at least $644,000.

The Stop The Harm Database from the national group Do No Harm analyzed billing codes from insurance companies in regards to gender transition and youth. Nationwide, they found nearly 14,000 minors underwent sex change treatments. Of that, more than a third had surgeries and more than half had hormones or puberty blockers for a total of $120 million in submitted charges.

“These practices are not based in well-established science and present unknown health risks to children,” the group said. “However, the public has not had an easy means of understanding just how widespread these practices are, or to identify which of their local healthcare facilities is medically transitioning children.”

The state-by-state analysis also lists medical providers engaged in such practices by name.

Shannon Adcock, with parents’ rights group Awake Illinois, said what Do No Harm has provided is crucial for parents.

“Where parents can finally learn who are the practitioners engaging in this medicalizations of children that has already been stopped in Europe,” Adcock told The Center Square.

Adcock said the numbers Do No Harm provides are a good start, but is not the whole story.

“They wanted it to be proven, they wanted it to be good, but out of pocket is not covered and anything before 2019 is not covered either,” she said. “So, again, this is very conservative.”

Data for Illinois show Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago with the most number of child sex transition patients at 145 with $274,000 in submitted charges.

In 2022, a post from Lurie Children’s Hospital Gender Development Program said “gender-affirming care” does not equate to child abuse.

“Inappropriately involving a state child protection agency and subjecting transgender patients and their families to investigations that can result in civil or criminal penalties is damaging and will result in negative consequences,” the post said. “Lurie Children’s Hospital has long supported gender-affirming care for transgender youth, which includes the use of puberty-suppressing treatments when appropriate.”

Lurie’s Gender Development Program touts in the 2022 post that they’ve provided care and support to over 2,000 transgender and gender diverse children and their families since its inception in 2013.

Adcock said there’s a lot of money invested under the guise of “gender affirming care” for youth.

“So there’s a lot of profit to be made, there’s a lot of money that rolls into this and oftentimes patients are on treatment for life because of how disrupted their endocrine function is,” she said.

Adcock argued such treatments, which could include surgeries, are doing real harm and people are waking up to it.

“There are growing bodies that deserve to be protected and to go through normal puberty and to grow into adulthood without medicalization and sterilization and all of these harmful applications that are being done by these clinics,” Adcock said.