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Jul 18, 2025  |  
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Haley Strack


NextImg:The Corner: Another Bout of Moral Clarity from Governor Newsom (Not)

Mutilating a third-grader’s genitals should be discouraged by government and health-care providers. Normal Americans agree.

At eight years old, kids like to build things and play outside. They start to read seriously and learn how to tie their shoes if they haven’t already. At eight, kids lose a few more baby teeth, get better at completing single-digit addition and subtraction problems, and work on critical-thinking skills as they enter third grade.

It’s an age for milestones but not maturity — a fact that, while obvious enough, must be repeated for California Governor Gavin Newsom, who had a hard time this week answering a simple question about taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries for children.

“What about for your values? I mean, is eight years old too young [to transition]?” podcaster Shawn Ryan asked the governor on a podcast.

“Yeah, I mean, look — now that I have a nine-year-old, just became nine — come on, man, I get it. So those are legit,” Newsom said. “You know, it’s interesting, just the issue of age. As someone that’s been so focused on equality broadly — LGBT rights, particularly gay marriage — the trans issue, for me, is also novel. It’s over the last few years, I’m trying to understand as much as anyone else, [the] whole pronoun thing, trying to understand all of that.”

Debating laws and ethics guiding transgender surgeries for children is “tough, man,” Newsom added.

It’s not all that tough for normal Americans, more than half of whom think it should be illegal for health-care professionals to provide minors with medical procedures to transition genders, according to Pew research polling. Most Americans also believe that doctors should not prescribe children under the age of 18 puberty blockers or hormones.

Newsom wants to appeal to his hyper-progressive base and appear reasonable to average voters. He’s not been successful. The former is mad at him for betraying the trans community he has long pledged to represent; the latter is confused as to why “Can an eight-year-old consent to having their genitals mutilated?” is a hard question to answer.

Whether or not Newsom’s confusion is sincere doesn’t matter. The policies he’s enacted and refused to rescind do matter: policies that allow men to participate in women’s sports and permit boys to enter girls’ intimate spaces; policies that force California taxpayers to foot the bill for medical transitions; and policies that allow school districts to conceal from parents a child’s gender dysphoria. It’s not “tough, man” to admit that mutilating a third-grader’s genitals should be discouraged by government and health-care providers. Normal Americans agree.