United States Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra thinks that cutting off children’s genitals should be characterized as health care and funded by taxpayers.
In an exchange with Republican Sen. Mike Braun of Indiana on Wednesday, Becerra not only defended the White House’s support for experimentation on kids’ sex characteristics but also brushed off concerns that the so-called “gender-affirming care” promoted by the government causes irreversible damage.
“I believe that we should help those have the life-affirming care that they need,” Becerra, who along with the Biden administration has previously signaled support for using taxpayer dollars to fund genital mutilation surgeries, told Braun. “There are many transgender youth who have actually gone in the opposite direction, taking their life. If we can make a life better for someone in America, we should, especially if, in consultation with their physician, they approve of those procedures.”
Becerra’s comments come just weeks after the HHS’s Office of Population Affairs dangerously oversimplified the permanent and damaging effects that radical gender ideology, chemical castration, puberty blockers, and genital mutilation surgeries have on children and adults.
That same month, Rachel Levine, the male U.S. assistant secretary for health who masquerades as a female, falsely claimed, “There is no argument among medical professionals — pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, etc. — about the value and the importance of gender-affirming care.”
In his interrogation of Becerra, Braun pointed out that the puberty blockers and “grotesque” surgeries recommended by the Biden administration, specifically HHS, are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration and thus are often prescribed “off label,” but the secretary didn’t care.
“The FDA would raise alarms if they saw that a particular medicine or treatment were being misused. And at this stage, what we know is that for a drug to be out there available, it has to be safe and effective as FDA has found,” Becerra said. “So what I would simply say with regard to this particular subject is when individuals go in for care, it’s their physician who’s making that decision with them about what type of medicine or treatment they should receive.”
“You know, if you had used that same logic on what we’ve just navigated through Covid, it seems like there would have been a different point of view. And to me, for many parents across the country, this has more potentially tragic consequences, and it seems like it’s a double standard,” Braun replied.
Data from around the world suggests that these radical procedures disguised as “treatments” by the Biden administration have caused “sexual dysfunction, infertility, cardiac event[,] endometrial cancer,” and even transition regret among people who receive them. Yet the HHS leader stood by the White House’s lies and claimed that chemical castration and other such experiments are acceptable as long as a doctor signs off on them.
“In what case would it be appropriate to perform irreversible sex-change surgery on kids?” Braun asked.
“Those decisions are made by that individual in consultation with physician and caregivers, and no decision would be made without having consulted appropriately,” Becerra replied.
“I would say to you that many of our medical experts will tell you that we’ve explored this subject for a long time and what we find is that we are helping improve the lives of many Americans by providing them with the care that they have chosen with the informed consent of family and also with the consent and advice of their own physician,” he added.
