Normal people understand that it’s a bad idea to let children make decisions that can only be understood by adults.
There’s a minimum age for drinking. There’s a minimum age for driver’s licenses.
But for Joe Biden’s administration, medical professionals establishing a minimum age for girls to have surgery to remove her still-developing breasts or a healthy uterus is just too political.
That’s the message from a New York Times report Tuesday on emails that showed the Biden administration’s Department of Health and Human Services pressured the World Professional Association for Transgender Health to get rid of age restrictions on life-changing surgery in its latest guidelines on treating sexually confused teenagers.
Biden Officials Pushed to Remove Age Limits for Trans Surgery
Emails show that Biden’s administration lobbied to remove age minimums for surgery in “minors” because of “concerns over political fallout.”
They’d rather abuse & destroy children’s lives than lose a single woke vote pic.twitter.com/zIZIEL2AcU
— Paul Hookem (@PaulHook_em) June 26, 2024
In 2021, the Times reported, the organization known as WPATH (which is already stained with credibility problems) released draft guidelines on transgender surgical procedures that would have set age limits for patients at “14 for hormonal treatments, 15 for mastectomies, 16 for breast augmentation or facial surgeries, and 17 for genital surgeries or hysterectomies.”
But apparently, even declaring that teenage girls need to be at least 15 years old before deciding to have their breasts removed, or that boys and girls at least reach the age of legal adulthood before having their genitals surgically tampered with, was too much for HHS Assistant Secretary Rachel Levine, a man who lives as a woman.
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The emails are part of court filings submitted by Dr. James Cantor, a psychologist and outspoken critic of transgender surgery on children, according to the Times. They were filed in support of a 2022 law signed by Alabama Republican Gov. Kay Ivey that bans transgender treatment for minors that is being challenged by “civil rights groups including the National Center for Lesbian Rights and the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the Times reported.
The Biden Justice Department is also challenging the law.
According to the Times, one email from a member of WPATH guidelines board stated that Levine — the Biden administration’s “top point person on transgender issues,” as the Times put it — “was very concerned that having ages (mainly for surgery) will affect access to care for trans youth and maybe adults, too. Apparently the situation in the U.S.A. is terrible and she and the Biden administration worried that having ages in the document will make matters worse. She asked us to remove them.”
Right. The “situation in the U.S.A. is terrible” because a representative government operates based on the will of the people. And the will of the people in the United States — the sane ones, anyway — is very much divided over the wisdom of letting children mutilate their bodies on the basis of teenage hormones or the fads of social media trends.
Judging by the emails, some WPATH members didn’t like the political involvement.
“If our concern is with legislation (which I don’t think it should be — we should be basing this on science and expert consensus if we’re being ethical) wouldn’t including the ages be helpful?” one wrote, according to the Times.
“I need someone to explain to me how taking out the ages will help in the fight against the conservative anti-trans agenda.”
It wasn’t clear if that explanation ever came (though “if we’re being ethical” sounds almost quaint under the circumstances).
What is clear is that the finalized document that makes up WPATH’s most recent version of its “standards of care” bowed to the Biden administration’s desires.
Interestingly enough, a “frequently asked questions” document WPATH has published doesn’t make any mention of the Biden administration, its “top point person” or the “terrible” situation in the United States when it discusses the lack of ages in the standards for medical procedures.
Instead, it resorts to medico-bureaucratic gobbledygook:
“A previous version of the WPATH Standards included specific ages for medical procedures. Why were those ages removed in the SOC-8?
“Minimum ages for providing gender-affirming medical care were removed from the SOC-8 and replaced by strengthened criteria to help codify the framework that enables every TGD [‘trans and gender diverse’] adolescent the opportunity to get their appropriate medical needs met at the appropriate time; these changes to the SOC-8 reflect the fact that one-size-fits-all health care models, especially transgender care, are not accurate or appropriate for every individual person.”
In light of the emails reported by the Times, that “explanation” — omitting the crucial role of the Biden Department of Health and Human Services in shaping a document with obvious political implications — comes across as a snowjob.
It’s also eerily reflective of discussions about the origin of the COVID pandemic where health officials publicly disparaged the idea that the coronavirus was leaked from Wuhan Institute of Virology while privately conceding the possibility.
And it’s reminiscent of the hidden role played by the American Federation of Teachers in formulating federal Centers for Disease Control guidelines on reopening (or not reopening) schools during the pandemic.
Those were bad. But playing games like this when it comes to the sexual mutilation of boys and girls too young to even know what their sexuality is is worse.
At a time when the whole concept of “transgenderism” is just getting study for long-term results, and evidence is growing that individuals will grow out of the destructive state of confusion, a development like this is sickening.
A Times quote from Cantor, the psychologist who submitted the filings with the emails, put it best:
“What’s being told to the public is totally different from WPATH’s discussions in private,” he said.
It’s a damning statement, but when it comes to the Biden administration, normal people have known that for more than three years now.
