OAN Commentary by: Kenin M. Spivak
Friday, June 27, 2025
Anyone who requires a lifetime of mutilating surgery and hormone treatments to avoid depression, self-harm, or suicide, is both ill and worthy of compassion. Yet the approximately 1-2% of Americans who suffer gender dysphoria – along with and their progressive allies – continue to pummel the 80% who reject the edict that a person’s sex may be determined by thoughts. An upcoming Supreme Court decision may address the legal issues in this contentious struggle, if not the attendant moral and ethical questions.
In January, Donald Trump issued the executive order “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.” Its policy is a tribute to clear thinking: “Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions. This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation’s history, and it must end.”
Trump’s order encompassed a wide range of actions designed to restore common sense by ending government funding, sponsorship, promotion, assistance, and support for the “transitioning” of a child from one sex to another, and by “rigorously” enforcing all laws that prohibit or limit these “destructive and life-altering procedures.”
A White House fact sheet criticized former president Joe Biden for promoting “a grotesque social and scientific experiment” on American children motivated by “junk science,” and observed that during the first three years of the Biden administration 7,000 children were administered puberty blockers and hormones, and more than 4,000 were castrated or underwent mastectomies. Biden issued multiple executive orders supporting what is euphemistically referred to as “gender-affirming care,” including an order that parental consent not be required, and seeking to end therapy aimed at dissuading children from transitioning (see here, here, here, and here).
In response, 15 Democratic state attorney generals advised hospitals and doctors in their states that they would be subject to liability if they failed to provide puberty blockers and genital mutilation to children.
Numerous lawsuits sought to block Trump’s order. Federal district court judges appointed by Biden blocked enforcement in Washington, Minnesota, and Oregon, and issued a nationwide preliminary injunction against funding restrictions. The administration’s appeals were stayed pending the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Skrmetti. That case will decide whether Tennessee’s ban on surgical procedures and hormone therapies for minors with gender dysphoria violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The court’s decision is expected this week.
In ruling on Skrmetti, the high court should consider that until just a few years ago, all major medical associations viewed gender dysphoria as a serious mental illness, and sex reassignment surgery and hormones for children was child abuse. In 23 states, it still is.
Society should have compassion for the infirm and the troubled, and within financial reason, make accommodations. Those who suffer from psoriasis, peptic ulcers, hypertension, cancer, and dysphoria can live full and productive lives. However, those who deny they are ill, or seek to impose their politically motivated will on others, forfeit their right to special accommodations. That typifies too many sufferers of gender dysphoria. They seek to feel better by physically or emotionally humbling those who are not similarly afflicted.
Against this setting, citing serious health risks and a lack of supporting evidence, Sweden, France, and England reversed course and imposed restrictions on puberty blockers and genital mutilation. Then, last month, the Department of Health and Human Services reported that puberty blockers, hormone therapies, and sex-change surgeries are “associated with significant risks” that cause “irreversible physical or physiological effects.” HHS also concluded that there is “very weak evidence” that the procedures offer any benefit for children.
Previously, the American College of Pediatricians reported that about 98% of gender-confused boys and 88% of gender-confused girls naturally resolve their confusion, and that rates of suicide are nearly 20 times greater among adults who use cross-sex hormones and undergo sex reassignment surgery. Suicide rates also are significantly higher in states that permit minors to obtain sex-reassignment treatments without parental consent.
Our society has pledged to protect children and to respect individual freedoms. The most recent research shows that doing so would mean ending all or nearly all sex reassignment procedures for minors, keeping pre-op transgender people in their biological lane, and balancing the needs of transgender people, particularly after surgery, against the rights of the 98% of Americans who do not suffer from gender dysphoria.
Our ability to achieve the right outcome may depend on the Supreme Court’s ruling in Skrmetti.
(Views expressed by guest commentators may not reflect the views of OAN or its affiliates.)
Kenin M. Spivak is founder and chairman of SMI Group LLC, an international consulting firm and investment bank. He is the author of fiction and non-fiction books and a frequent speaker and contributor to media, including RealClearPolitics, The American Mind, National Review, television, radio, and podcasts.