Welcome to Wellness on Mass. I'm Dr. Nicole Sapphire, and we're going to talk about today

one of, in my opinion, the most urgent and controversial topics in modern medicine, the intersection

of parental rights and gender medicine for minors. Now, I am a physician, I'm a women's health

breast radiologist, but I'm also a mother of three. And so this is

something that is deeply personal to me. The question is no longer, you know, what doctors believe is

medically appropriate. It's about who gets to decide what's best for the child, the parents,

the doctor, the government, or is it the child themselves? Now, in recent years, we've seen a

growing number of cases where parents are being sidelined from key medical decisions, whether it's

school-based vaccine programs without parental consent to gender identity transitions facilitated

by counselors and physicians. Many parents feel that they are losing their seat at the table.

For me, it was the

handling of the COVID vaccines and kids that was eye-opening. I don't know how it went for you,

but prior to COVID, I always felt that I was in control of my child's well-being. I spoke with

the doctor, I spoke with their teachers, and I listened to the the CDC and I took them all as recommendations.

But I never felt that they were dictating what happens to my child.

It wasn't until COVID when the masking and the keeping them out of school when it was obviously doing harm to the children.

But yet they continued to say, no, this is what's best for them. They were

neglecting all of the science, and they were saying, this is what's best. I had lawmakers telling me

what was better for the mental and physical health for my child when I'm a physician and I'm a

parent. They had no idea what they were talking about. Yet all of a sudden, they were dictating

what happened to my child.

If you remember, you had pediatricians who were refusing care for kids if they weren't vaccinated.

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