It may prove to be one of the most consequential issues of our time. An entire generation of children is being subjected to a gender ideology exploiting adolescent and teenage insecurity to convince them to reject their bodies. The resulting procedures inflict irreversible damage, leaving many permanently sterilized and foreclosing any future opportunity for family formation. And all this is happening to those who aren’t even old enough to drive.
Unfortunately, it is fairly common for young people to experience intense and upsetting thoughts about themselves, their identities, or the perceived “flaws” of their appearance. But it is only with gender dysphoric children that the supposed proper course of action is to tell them that these thoughts and feelings are correct and they were born wrong.
To make matters worse, they’re told the solution lies in a life-long regimen of experimental hormone injections to suppress the typical functions of their healthy body, and even undergo surgeries to carve their bodies into the likeness of the opposite sex.
The rate of transgender identification among children and teenagers is acknowledged to be growing steadily every year for still unclear reasons. According to some tallies, clinics targeting children now constitute the majority of gender conversion facilities in the United States. What is clear, however, is that this movement boasts powerful cheerleaders.
Ever eager to search out despair and convert it into profit, Planned Parenthood is now one of the largest providers of cross-hormone treatments in the country — in some instances over the objections of psychiatrists. Amazon, too, has recently taken to banning books that question the wisdom of such treatments from their platform.
Presumably out of loyalty to extreme LGBT activists and the pharmaceutical industry — which stands to make vast sums of money at the expense of these newly minted “transgender” children — Democrats appear fully behind the effort, even though the vast majority of the country opposes any sort of sex change treatment or procedure for children under the age of 18.
In February, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee held a nomination hearing for Rachel Levine, President Biden’s pick for assistant secretary of Health at Health and Human Services. Levine is radical about gender ideology, publicly advocating puberty-blocking drugs for “pre-pubertal children” as young as eight, and cross-sex hormones for children as young as 14.
Understandably, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., took issue with this and asked Levine point-blank if Levine supported sex changes for minors. Levine dodged the question twice, insisting both times that “transgender medicine is a complex and nuanced field.” Levine then proceeded to earn the vote of every single Democrat to move out of committee.
Levine’s argument that the science is settled in supporting these types of experimental procedures on children simply isn’t true. The drugs in question — typically used to address medical problems — are instead being used to unnaturally express characteristics of the opposite sex, resulting in often irrevocable changes which are often regretted later in life.
The Food and Drug Administration has not approved the use of any of these drugs for sex changes. In the United Kingdom, following a court order, the National Health Service stopped prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children under the age of 16 late last year, proclaiming, “little is known about the long-term side effects of hormone or puberty blockers in children with gender dysphoria.” To put it mildly, the treatment is, in essence, a massive medical experiment.
An additional critical question is this: Can children even consent to such a thing? The case in Britain describes girls as young as 12 being counseled over whether they want to freeze their eggs before their “treatments” sterilized them forever. Levine has even previously cited examples of transitioning children too young to know what parts of their reproductive system are called.
Levine will be confirmed by the Democrat-held Senate, and as part of the Biden administration, will no doubt continue to promote puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children. Thankfully, there’s increasing evidence that some Republicans will speak out.
On Mar. 16, Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., introduced a pair of bills to push back: The End Taxpayer Funding of Gender Experimentation Act would ban federal funding of “gender reassignment medical interventions,” and the Protecting Children from Experimentation Act would prohibit doctors from performing such interventions on minors.
Republicans will face opposition on this from the usual suspects — Democrats, the media, Big Pharma, corporate America — but they should recognize that standing up against this is both a moral necessity and politically advantageous. If Republicans can successfully point out the ideological extremism the Democratic Party is currently implementing, they have a chance to do well in 2022.
More importantly than mere politics, however, is the fact that the lives of thousands of children hang in the balance. If Republicans can’t bring themselves to mount serious opposition to the mutilation of children — which is, again, opposed by the vast majority of the country including Democratic voters — then it’s unclear whether the GOP will be able to protect anything worth conserving.