On March 31st, President Biden issued the first presidential proclamation of Trans Visibility Day, in which he urged passage of the Equality Act. The act, which amends the 1964 Civil Rights Act, expands nondiscrimination protections for sexual orientation and gender identity (protections already enshrined in the Supreme Court’s 2020 Bostock v. Clayton County decision). It also expands the range of areas to which these protections apply; in addition to employment and housing (which the Civil Rights Act guarantees), the new provisions cover federally funded programs and public accommodations, including retail stores—both on and offline—and stadiums. If enacted, the law will also take priority over the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). Under the Equality Act, Americans could no longer point to RFRA to challenge the act’s provisions or use it as a defense. And the Equality Act would essentially end, among many things, the legal principle that allows Catholic hospitals to refuse to perform abortions and gender reassignment surgery. nu
On the same day that the House of Representatives was scheduled to vote on the Equality Act, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) was lambasted throughout corporate media for his “transphobia” (a word which is supposed to mean fear of transgender persons). During the Senate confirmation hearing for President Biden’s nominee for Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services, Dr. Rachel Levine, Paul’s crime was to ask Dr. Levine, a transgender woman who specializes in adolescent medicine, a question about a topic she should have expertise in.
“Do you support the government intervening to override the parent’s consent to give a child puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and or amputation surgery of breasts and genitalia?”
Generously, Paul did not ask whether these procedures should be performed on the developing minds and bodies of children at all. He did not even ask why, or under what circumstances—again, given Dr. Levin’s professional expertise—these procedures would be appropriate. Instead, referencing the UK High Court case of detransitioner Keira Bell (a 23-year-old woman who regrets going on puberty blockers and testosterone at age 16, and then getting a mastectomy), Paul merely asked whether these surgeries should be performed without parental consent.
This simple yes or no question was not answered. It was evaded—twice—with deliberately vague doublespeak from Dr. Levine about how “transgender medicine is a very complex and nuanced field.” Dr. Levine did not elaborate.
The Democratic Party is the party of an Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services who refused to say that children shouldn’t be able to choose breast and genital amputation surgeries without parental permission. The Democratic Party is the party whose deputy national health authority, a specialist in adolescent medicine, refuses to say that minors—who are not permitted to vote, smoke, or drink, and often not permitted to stand trial because of their distinct inability to thoroughly understand the consequences of their actions—should need the permission of a parent or guardian to undergo breast and genital removal surgeries.
THE WORLD WE LIVE IN
In January, Democratic Party mouthpiece CNN reported that “six states have proposed to restrict transgender minors’ access to gender reassignment treatments, including surgery and hormone therapy.” Predictably, the article presents the bills as part of the ongoing quest by conservatives, motivated by pure bigotry, to restrict civil rights. It’s paired with a three-minute video captioned “Transgender identity, in their words,” which features a series of transgender testimonials over somber piano music, including one trans-identified person in a roman collar for maximum emotional impact.
The Democrats and their masters on the cultural left have largely surrendered entirely to an unscientific transgender cult, and with that surrender, the possibility for debate and disagreement gets increasingly narrow.
The cultural left, it seems, is so deep down the hole of transgender ideology that the following quote was included to unmask the true visage of Republican villainy:
“‘The solution for children’s identification with the opposite sex isn’t to poison their bodies with megadoses of the wrong hormones, to chemically or surgically castrate and sterilize them, or to remove healthy breasts and reproductive organs,’ Rep. Fred Deutsch, the bill’s primary sponsor, said in a statement to CNN. ‘The solution is compassionate care, and that doesn’t include catastrophically and irreversibly altering their bodies.’”
Meanwhile, in Canada, a desperate father named Robert Hoogland is languishing in jail for referring to his fourteen-year-old daughter as a girl. Hoogland’s daughter is currently undergoing court-approved testosterone therapy over the objections of her parents. The doctor supplying the testosterone, Wallace Wong—who has provided treatment for transgender clients as young as three—recommends his clients threaten suicide to gain fast access to hormone treatment.
In addition to handing over his daughter’s care to Dr. Wong, the Supreme Court of British Columbia declared last year that if either of the girl’s parents referred to her “as a girl or with female pronouns,” that parent would be considered guilty of family violence. Thanks in part to a lengthy police report compiled by the Vancouver Police Department’s Cybercrime Unit, the attorney general of British Columbia Daniel J. Pruim was able to argue that Hoogland should be denied bail while he awaits trial on criminal contempt charges.
Dr. Levine and President Biden should be asked about this flagrant human rights violation in Canada.
We live in a world where a longtime UK trans rights activist James Caspian, an expert in the field of transgender psychotherapy, has been tied in up in court for years because Bath Spa University refused to allow him to research people who reverse their gender reassignment (detransition). We live in a world where gender dystopian Canada can decree Bill C-6, which was introduced in October to amend the Canadian Criminal Code to criminalize “conversion therapy.” Alarmingly, the bill places a criminal ban on something it defines in a broadly and ambiguous way: any “practice, treatment or service designed to change a person’s sexual orientation to heterosexual or gender identity to cisgender, or to repress or reduce non-heterosexual attraction or sexual behaviour.” Under Bill C-6, therapists exploring mainstream treatments that don’t automatically affirm a child’s trans identity might be accused of “conversion therapy” and handed a five-year jail sentence. We also live in a world where a Planned Parenthood “clinic manager” with no medical experience whatsoever, can hand out life-altering cross-sex hormones to any teen who asks for them, as reported in an exposé by Abigail Shrier, author of the best selling book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (2020).
Dr. Levine and President Biden, again, should be asked to weigh in on this.
But they won’t. The Democrats and their masters on the cultural left have largely surrendered entirely to an unscientific transgender cult, and with that surrender, the possibility for debate and disagreement gets increasingly narrow. In March, CNN ran a story claiming there is no “consensus” for how to determine a baby’s sex at birth. That same month, corporate behemoth Amazon, under false pretenses, removed Ryan T. Anderson’s book because he advocates counseling over surgery for those experiencing gender dysphoria. In the Democrat’s world, teenage breast and genital mutilation are the fulfillment of true personhood—and anyone who pauses to question this is called a monster.
PUTTING IDEOLOGY BEFORE THE WELLBEING OF CHILDREN
Professional gaslighting service Reuters—who, back in 2016, explained to parents the benefits of transitioning children as young as three—ran a grossly misleading “fact check” piece following the Senate hearing entitled, “Dr. Rachel Levine, during hearing, did not confirm or deny support for children having gender reassignment surgery without parental consent.” The article claims that Dr. Levine had not answered Paul’s question in the affirmative or negative, while making sure to note that the Senator had been “criticized” for his questions. For good measure, Reuters added that puberty blockers are “fully reversible.”
Democrats are the party of mastectomies for teenage girls who want them; Republicans are not.
This is not true, according to recent findings from the UK’s National Health Service’s Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service, findings that also led to revised NHS guidelines on standards of care for gender dysphoric children. The Tavistock study found that puberty blockers cause reduced bone density and flatlined growth, while failing to provide psychological benefit. The UK’s National Institute of Health and Care Excellence says there is almost no evidence they provide any benefits.
Laughably, the Reuters “fact check” piece assuaged readers that they weren’t, in fact, recommending unchecked surgical procedures for minors by including a 2016 report co-written by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, American College of Osteopathic Pediatricians, and the American Academy of Pediatrics. (That report recommends gender reassignment surgeries for “older adolescents” and adults only—regardless of what Dr. Levine did or did not say.) Though Reuters claims that “gender reassignment surgery is widely restricted to adults over the age of 18,” the evidence says otherwise.
A May 2018 study from the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that children as young as 13 were given mastectomies at the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. According to National Review’s Madeline Kearns, director Johanna Olson-Kennedy personally recommended over 200 mastectomies to adolescent females in 2019 alone. In March 2017, a Journal of Sexual Medicine study by Christine Milrod and Dan H. Karasic (University of California-San Francisco) detailed vaginoplasties (removal of the penis followed by its inversion to form a vaginal canal) being performed on males under 18 by 11 of 20 surgeons interviewed.
In Democrat-run California, thanks to law AB 2119, foster children as young as twelve have had access to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones without permission from a guardian since 2018. The bill was passed over the strenuous objection of the American College of Pediatricians, who noted that 98% of gender dysphoric boys and 88% of dysphoric girls return to their natal gender. The American College of Pediatricians warned that “passage of this legislation [AB 2119] will allow emotionally disturbed children to consent to dangerous life-altering procedures that will not reduce their risk for suicide in the long term” and that “this would be a criminal outcome.” Last year, Democrats in Washington state passed a law granting children as young as 13 access to puberty blockers and hormone therapy, again, without the permission of parents or guardians, but billable to their parent’s insurance plans. This has been the case in Democrat-dominated Oregon since 2015, for those 15 and up, where treatment options include taxpayer-funded surgical procedures.
We know Dr. Levine won’t answer questions about this.
For all the ways the two parties have become diametrically opposed, representing two incompatible cultural worldviews, there is no starker difference between them right now than this. Democrats are the party of mastectomies for teenage girls who want them; Republicans are not.
THE PARTY OF FAMILIES, CHILDREN, SCIENCE, AND HEALTH
Fanatical postmodern leftist dogma around “identity,” “lived truth,” “marginalization,” and “equity” rules the discourse in the federal government, in our educational system, our mainstream media, and in our major corporations. This propaganda snakes through modern life, aided by omnipresent advertising and tech companies, inserting itself into every formerly apolitical realm of our lives, on a quest for more marginalized “folx” to justify its expansion. There is no more colossal absurdity than the fact that, in 2021, this fanatical religion of identity has produced a Democratic Party whose number two health official cannot say whether children should be able to choose genital removal surgeries without their parents’ permission.
[A] Democratic Party whose number two health official cannot say whether children should be able to choose genital removal surgeries without their parents’ permission.
Whether your average big-government Democratic politician actually believes that the true definition of a woman is an idea in a man’s head, and that four-year-olds can freely consent to hormone replacement therapy, or whether the party rank and file are just using transgender persons as yet another grievance group in their ever-expanding coalition atop intersectional oppression Olympus, I can’t say. Either way, it remains true that the Democratic Party is the party that cannot, from a position of authority, say whether minor girls ought to be able to have their breasts removed without their parents’ permission. That feels ridiculous to type out, even more dystopian to say out loud. Debates about infrastructure spending seem awfully small when confronting this morally and metaphysically vexing vicissitude that has occurred in the Democratic Party.
It’s more than fair, I’d say, for Republicans to tie every Democrat possible to the yoke of Dr. Levine and her inability to articulate whether little girls should have the right to choose breast amputation over parental objection. Democrats should similarly be taken to task for laws passed in California, Washington, and Oregon, making it easy for kids to permanently alter their healthy bodies without parental knowledge.
Most issues of grave importance, especially those involving bodily autonomy, have a complicated, nuanced middle ground—and transgender issues are no different. But it would be hard to think of a single issue that is less nuanced and more clear-cut than whether children should be given the legal right to castrate themselves without parental permission.
Reality and common sense can prevail—again, see the case of Keira Bell in the UK (the land of the 4000% uptick in trans children from 2009-2018). Or, look at Missouri, where in March, the House Judiciary Committee held hearings on making it a crime to perform sex change operations on children.
But unti it does, the Republican Party should make it clear at every possible juncture to every possible demographic that it is the party of families, children, science, and mental and physical health. The GOP should set out to inform every American that it is the party that opposes double mastectomies for confused teen girls awkwardly growing into healthy adult bodies. Print some of that campaign literature, buy those online ads, and get some of those billboards—in Spanish and English—up now.
The lives of children are at stake.
Democrats Are the Party of Mastectomies for Teen Girls. | Human Events
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