For the first time, public support for the rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people is in decline. The Biden administration’s latest radical transgender activism helps explain why.
Newly leaked emails show that top Biden officials pressured an outside group of transgender health activists to remove all age limits from their recommendations regarding medical gender transition treatments for adolescents. That’s right: No age limits at all.
In late 2021, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health put out initial draft guidelines that recommended a minimum age of “14 for hormonal treatments, 15 for mastectomies, 16 for breast augmentation or facial surgeries, and 17 for genital surgeries or hysterectomies,” according to the New York Times. But aides working on behalf of Rachel Levine, a top Health and Human Services official in the Biden administration who identifies as a transgender woman, lobbied WPATH to scrap all age requirements from its final guidelines, and it did. These minimum ages were nowhere to be found in its final report.
According to insiders’ emails, Levine reportedly “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.”
For context, while it is somewhat rare, minors do get these kinds of surgeries in the United States, despite the gaslighting denials of many liberal activists. Reporting from Reuters documented more than 750 “top surgeries” through which young girls aged 13 to 17 had their healthy breasts removed from 2019 to 2021. (And these are just the ones covered by insurance. Any surgeries paid out-of-pocket would not have been counted in this analysis.)
Think about this for a second.
It’s already quite a radical position to suggest that a 15 year old can consent to a double mastectomy, where her healthy breasts are removed in an irreversible, serious surgery. But, the position from top members of the Biden administration is that even requiring her to be 15 years old is unwarranted — suggesting, therefore, that Biden officials believe children as young as 12, 13, or 14 years old should be able to receive this surgery.
No matter that teenagers that young do not fully understand their own identities or concepts, such as biological sex, with anything close to the degree of certainty or complexity required to consent to this surgery in the manner an adult could.
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That is not just an indefensible position on the merits. It is breathtakingly radical and totally out of step with the public, a clear majority of whom oppose medical transitions for minors. This radicalism lies behind the recent fall in support for gay marriage and gay people more broadly.
Unfortunately, LGBT activists have successfully tied gay rights and gay acceptance not just to freedom and dignity for adults who identify as transgender but also to the movement to give children irreversible sex changes, something people with common sense are never going to support. If they continue to cling to the sinking ship, they have no right to be surprised when acceptance continues to plummet.
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is an independent journalist, YouTuber, and co-founder of BASEDPolitics.