North Carolina's second-largest hospital system to flood rural areas with child sex-change services

• Top doctors at the institution issue an urgent call to provide pediatric treatment and access to drugs and surgery across rural counties and urge patient recruitment in schools

• ECU Med School leaders training Family docs to treat "sexually diverse youth" using hundreds of millions in taxpayer funds

by: Sloan Rachmuth

East Carolina University (ECU) Brody Medical School is located in Greenville, North Carolina, surrounded by small cities and vast rural areas. It is the top school for training family medicine doctors in the state and produces doctors who practice rural medicine in Eastern North Carolina.

Medical school faculty and residents practice at ECU Health - a system that serves about 10% of the state's population across twenty-nine counties with nine hospitals and more than 100 clinics.

In an effort to quell North Carolina's doctor shortage, the General Assembly passed legislation in 2021 that gave ECU $215M to expand its medical school.

ECU Chancellor Philip Rogers said this at the time:

“This is a landmark moment for the future of rural health care and medical education in our state and region. We are grateful to state leaders for investing in our bold and innovative mission to ensure access to quality culturally competent care through a seamless delivery system and a better quality of life for people in the East.”

ECU Health's definition of "better quality of life" includes puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and gender-changing psychotherapy for children in the region.

With its "Pride Clinic" in Greenville, ECU Health treats "gender-related issues" for ages four and up. Treatments include puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and psychiatric "affirming" care.

The Directors of ECU's child sex change clinic just authored the blueprint for expanding child sex change treatments to rural populations.

In a paper called Rural Perspectives on Health Services for Transgender and Gender Diverse Youth, ECU doctors issued this call:

"Concerted effort is needed to make gender-affirming and inclusive care available to pediatric patients in rural areas."

In the paper, ECU Health's Drs. Colby Dendy and Angie Mathai called for the following:

• health care providers and staff to recruit young patients in schools

• use telemedicine to access children in remote areas

• train more family doctors to administer dangerous chemical castration and sterilization treatment to minors

• build a vast network of agencies to help expand child sex reassignment practices, including final surgery

Dangerous hormones are already being administered by several ECU doctors according to the school's gender-affirming provider directory.

Dr. Chelley Alexander

Chair of ECU's Family Medicine division, Dr. Chelley Alexander, treats patients of all ages and is specially trained to treat "sexually and gender diverse patients" according to the directory. So does Dr. Joe Pye who treats adolescents and touts his "decades" worth of experience treating Trans patients.

ECU Family Medicine brazenly boasted it hired a man posing as a woman named Jenna Whippen, PA-C who offers "Gender-affirming primary care, including gender-affirming hormone therapy, trauma-informed exams, and sexual health/STI testing."

Through ECU's medical school, rural health doctors will now focus on trans treatment for kids, as evidenced by key members of its faculty now involved in the practice:

Dr. Audy Grey Whitman

Rural Residency Program Director and Assistant Director for ECU's Family Medicine Center Audy Grey Whitman, MD also listed as having Specialized training in caring for sexually and gender diverse patients.

Dr. Justin Edwards

ECU Family Medicine training program's assistant residency director, Justin Edwards, MD treats patients of all ages for "gender-affirming care. Dr. Edwards graduated from The Brody School of Medicine At East Carolina University in 2006.

BAD MEDICINE

According to board-certified general surgeon Nancy Andersen, MD, family physicians may not be equipped to prescribe and manage medications used for puberty blockers or child sex changes:

While medical institutions like Stanford, Duke, and Yale have pediatric gender programs or centers, at least they are staffed by pediatric endocrinologists. Endocrinologists have additional training in diseases of hormone dis-regulation. Common diseases would be diabetes or growth hormone disorders. Pediatric endocrinologists also treat disorders of sexual development and pubertal disorders like precocious puberty.

Neither puberty blockers nor cross-sex hormones nor surgeries for transgender-believing youth have been proven safe and effective over the long term, according to the American College of Pediatrics.

From the organization:

Temporary use of puberty blocker Lupron has also been associated with and may be the cause of many serious permanent side effects including osteoporosis, mood disorders, seizures, cognitive impairment and, when combined with cross-sex hormones, sterility. In addition to the harm from Lupron, cross-sex hormones put youth at an increased risk of heart attacks, stroke, diabetes, blood clots and cancers across their lifespan.

In fact, many medical organizations around the world, including the Australian College of Physicians,3 the Royal College of General Practitioners in the United Kingdom,4 and the Swedish National Council for Medical Ethics5 have characterized these interventions in children as experimental and dangerous. World-renowned Swedish psychiatrist Dr. Christopher Gillberg has said that pediatric transition is “possibly one of the greatest scandals in medical history”6 and called for “an immediate moratorium on the use of puberty blocker drugs because of their unknown long-term effects.”7

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Rural Perspectives on Health Services for Transgender and Gender-Diverse Youth