Viral video of mother having healthy boy transitioned into sterile neuter prompts renewed outrage

A video clip from an NBC News "Dateline" story about a young boy transitioned by his mother into a transvestite at the age of 6, then put on a cocktail of sterilizing chemicals just years later has gone viral once again, prompting renewed outrage about the medicalization of children and the insidious rhetoric used by sex-change advocates in support of child mutilation.

The video begins midway through a 2012 NBC News special entitled, "Living a Transgender Childhood," showing Johanna Olson-Kennedy of the Children's Hospital in Los Angeles discuss sex-change possibilities with Vanessa Romero and her young son Joey Romero — referred to in the video as Josie and who now reportedly goes by Sadie Croft.

"You are in the perfect place to begin on [puberty] blockers," says Olson-Kennedy, who runs the L.A. hospital's Center for Transyouth Health and Development.

The narrator indicates that Olson-Kennedy, who has elsewhere compared teen girls cutting off their healthy breasts to taking the SATs, "promises to begin giving [the boy] estrogen, female hormones, in two years."

"You're not going to develop breast buds on the blockers, but you're not going to wait until 16 to start, you know that," adds Olson-Kennedy.

The footage jumps ahead to the boy sobbing as sterilizing puberty blockers are surgically stuffed into his arm.

The boy's mother tells NBC News in an aside, "A lot of times it strikes me that had this happened just 20 years ago, I wouldn't have been able to give her blockers and she would have had to go through male puberty. That terrifies me. I don't know that she would have survived male puberty."

According to the mother's apparent LinkedIn page, she began work as a "TransParent Support Group Coordinator" in Tuscon, Arizona, "facilitating safe and healthy environments for gender creative children and their families through education and support," years before putting her son on puberty blockers.

In response to the renewed interest in the Romero case, Dr. Jordan Peterson noted that the "clinical literature shows the high probability that the parents of such children and often the mother are characterized by so-called Cluster B psychopathology."

"We're diagnosing and 'treating' the wrong people in such cases," continued the clinical psychologist. "It isn't that children are 'born in the wrong bodies' but placed in the hands of deeply confused and too-often narcissistic parents and the enabling professionals only too-willing to experiment on children. Unforgivable."

Libs of TikTok captioned the recirculated video, "What you're watching is one of the greatest medical scandals in modern history. Thousands of kids & adolescents sold the lie that they're born in the wrong body and if they permanently alter their body they can be be happy. This video should infuriate you."

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) wrote on X, "In some ways this video reminds me of German scientists who tortured victims to satisfy their own, cold curiosity. Some were even driven by a perverse belief that they were advancing the cause of humanity. Children have no capacity to consent to such things. Sheer cruelty."

Lee added in a subsequent post, "What civilized nation even allows for — much less celebrates — such barbarism?"

Sage Steele, the former ESPN "SportsCenter" anchor who drew the ire of radicals for her criticism of vaccine mandates, former President Barack Obama, and transvestites in women's sports, stressed that the so-called transitioning of children "is abuse and we must speak up."

Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R) similarly wrote, "This is child abuse!! Congress must pass my bill Protect Children's Innocence Act to make it illegal to perform this on children!!!"

The Idaho GOP wrote, "Deranged parents misguiding their own children, enabling mental instability and subjecting innocent kids to permanent lifelong mutilation. This must stop. This is criminal."

In the full "Dateline" episode, Vanessa Romero suggested that doctors told her Joey's "temper tantrums" at age 3 were indicative of depression. Their prescription: "14 different medications" including Prozac and drugs for sleeping issues, ADHD, Tourette syndrome, and anxiety.

The boy's mother apparently complied, subjecting her child to 17 doses of different pharmaceuticals every day.

"My child was broken and there was something really wrong," said Vanessa Romero. "I just wanted it fixed."

The idea that an entirely different set of pharmaceuticals could be the solution didn't occur to Vanessa Romero until a doctor told her Joey might have "gender identity disorder." The doctor apparently made his diagnosis solely off of a single instance when he saw the boy pretend to breastfeed a doll.

Once the seed was planted, Vanessa Romero told NBC News she turned to online "support groups" to learn more about her son's alleged condition. In short order, she replaced his wardrobe entirely with girls' clothing and encouraged him to cross-dress.

According to the NBC News report, after the boy began wearing girls' clothing, his parents took him off all the medication that he was previously taking, then concluded the transvestism had been the cure to his supposed depression.

This respite from pharmaceuticals was short-lived. As the boy began to mature into adolescence, he began to suffer renewed identity issues. After all, his male attributes were incompatible with the persona his mother championed.

Vanessa Romero claimed that the boy's mounting anxieties over his body prompted him to contemplate cutting off his penis. Apparently that job was best left to those Los Angeles surgeons paid to do it.

NBC News included shocking commentary from Dr. Margaret Moon, director of the department of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, that might not have been admitted on the network years later.

Moon indicated that puberty blockers might be helpful in "extreme cases" but was alarmed at Joey's age, especially as "the changes are irreversible and include rendering the child sterile," according to the report.

"Any change you make that is irreversible is harder to justify when the child is young," said Moon. "It's potentially an over-diagnosis issue."

Vanessa Romero ultimately took 9-year-old Joey to Los Angeles in September 2010 to start the process of his sex change, even though he admitted on camera, "I'm a boy inside and a girl outside. ... Sometimes I think I'm a boy, sort of."

Ahead of his irreversible transmogrification, Joey also hesitated on camera when his mother asked him whether he would admit to her that he wanted to grow up to become a man after all.

"Would you love me if I'm a boy?" he asked uncertainly.

Vanessa Romero told NBC News, "The thought of her having made such a huge decision in her life all based on what she thought I wanted, that would be traumatic for me."

The mother evidently took the risk anyway.

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