As legislatures around the country consider a raft of bills relating to transgender issues, Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine says that “gender-affirming care” has the “highest support” of the Biden administration. The president himself called Florida’s attempts to ban gender mutilation of children “almost sinful” and derided proposed state laws dealing with transgender issues as “cruel.”
The administration could not be more at odds with the American people on this issue. Summit Ministries/McLaughlin Group polling shows that less than 9 percent of Americans say minors should be encouraged to undergo permanent gender alteration. Of those with an opinion, 71 percent say they’re concerned by the efforts to expose children to the transgender agenda.
Yet controversies over women’s sports and school bathrooms are only the tip of the iceberg. Transgenderism is no longer about a tiny percentage of children confused about their gender. It has become a two-headed attack on common sense, with one head being a power-hungry ideology and the other being a profit-hungry industry eager to cash in on gender-insecure people, even children.
Our leaders ought to be protecting kids from this ideology and industry. Instead, they’re hiding behind them, advancing policies that victimize children while pretending to help them.
Let’s start with ideology. At issue is our very understanding of reality itself. There are more than 6,500 biological differences between males and females. But the transgender ideology insists that we ignore biology and focus instead on “gender”—an objectively undefined and undefinable term.
If gender means a self-perceived understanding of sexuality, then there are certainly many who struggle with it. Many of the most troubled ones, coaxed along by teachers and gender clinics, have come to believe that they’re “born in the wrong body.”
But it’s all a lie. Other Western nations help gender-insecure children through therapy designed to heal their underlying trauma and psychological comorbidities such as anxiety and depression. These treatments are highly effective, resolving 75 to 90 percent of cases of gender dysphoria by the completion of puberty.
The industry side of the coin is even more ominous. By categorizing gender alteration procedures as “medically necessary,” big medicine and big pharma are monetizing a highly choreographed regimen of drugs and surgery that will earn them billions in profits while risking irreparable harm to those who are treated.
Rather than dealing with these issues and the social media contagion surrounding them, this administration and its allies are fueling the fire through highly emotional interviews and even an International Women’s Day award for a biological male who identifies as a woman.
Concerned lawmakers in red states have introduced more than 300 transgender-related bills. But in many blue states, the battle has already been won by bureaucrats whose unclear rules and uneven enforcement have only added to the confusion. Case in point: the Mid Vermont Christian School’s women’s basketball team forfeiting a tournament game against a team on which a biological male was playing. In response, the Vermont Principals’ Association decreed that by not playing, the school had disrespected its “gender fair” policy and would henceforth be barred from the association’s activities.
What makes the Vermont decision especially concerning is that the term “gender” has no objective definition up against biological sex. The state is saying, in essence, “We can’t tell you what gender is, and we don’t care about biology, but we know that those who disagree with us must be punished.”
America’s founders understood that if legislative bodies could pass laws that would only ever be used to punish those who opposed the lawmakers’ political agendas, then no person’s right to life, liberty, or property would be secure. They abolished bills of attainder and ex post facto laws in the Constitution and passed a Bill of Rights to ensure that America’s legislative system wouldn’t revert to tyranny.
How all of this wrangling will turn out is anyone’s guess. But as states expand the statute of limitations for those harmed by transgender medicine and allow citizens and municipalities to sue schools and clinics as public nuisances when they target children, a decades-long legal battle is all but assured.
A healthy society would ignore the noise and focus on meeting their kids’ core needs for security, belonging, and purpose, and seek to address underlying issues such as childhood trauma. Instead, egged on by a powerful ideology and a profit-seeking medical industry, we face instead a bewildering pseudo-academic and pseudo-medical regime trying to convince gender-insecure kids that they can heal their minds by mutilating their bodies.
Some people will do almost anything for power and profit. But when they target children, it’s time for our leaders to stop hiding behind kids and start standing up for them.