House Republicans are opening an investigation into top officials within the Department of Health and Human Services over the influence they exerted on recommendations for gender-transition surgeries performed on minors.
In June, email excerpts between the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and staff for Adm. Rachel Levine, the HHS’s assistant secretary for health, showed that Levine’s office pressured the group to drop its age requirements for minors to obtain transgender surgeries in its September 2022 Standards of Care update.
Rep. Lisa McClain (R-MI), chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee’s subcommittee on health, wrote to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra on Tuesday requesting all email documentation on the “political interference by HHS” into recommendations for treating youth gender dysphoria.
“The Biden Administration’s advocacy for expanding the pool of vulnerable children subjected to life-altering procedures they may later regret is reprehensible,” McClain wrote to Becerra. ”Emails indicating that this advocacy was done for political advantage — possibly to satisfy extremist elements of its base — is even more outrageous.”
Draft guidelines from WPATH, published in December 2021, recommended lowering the minimum age for cross-sex hormone treatments to 14, transgender mastectomies to 15, breast augmentation and facial surgery to 16, and transgender genital surgeries to 17.
Following the release of the draft guidance, members of Levine’s staff, including chief of staff Sarah Boateng, contacted WPATH officials to ask them to remove the new age minimums from the recommendations.
One specific email from an unnamed WPATH member documents a conversation with Boateng, in which she said Levine “is confident, based on the rhetoric she is hearing in D.C., and from what we have already seen, that these specific listings of ages, under 18, will result in devastating legislation for trans care.”
Other emails, which came to light as part of litigation regarding state-level bans on transgender medicine for minors, indicated that Levine and HHS staff were “keen to bring the trans health agenda forward.”
Levine, a biological male who identifies as a woman, underwent a medical gender transition in 2011. In 2019, Levine expressed having “no regrets” about transitioning later in life, after being married and fathering two children.
Following the surfacing of these various emails in June, a White House spokesperson told Fox News that the Biden administration “does not support surgery for minors.”
“Despite WPATH’s initial minimum age recommendations, Admiral Levine and Boateng’s clear, concise instructions to remove age recommendations from SOC-8 led to their ultimate removal, notwithstanding the Biden Administration’s now public statement that it opposes providing such surgeries to minors,” McClain wrote.
McClain is specifically requesting all communications between Levine and relevant HHS staff with the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and several other prominent children’s health organizations that have promoted transgender medicine for minors.
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Since 2021, more than 20 states have enacted some form of age restriction on gender-transition medicine for minors due to a lack of long-term evidence for the efficacy of reducing adverse mental health conditions.
Although surgery is not the first line of treatment for adolescents with gender dysphoria, there have been several high-profile cases of teenagers who underwent surgeries as part of their medical transition process and have come to regret surgical intervention.