The United States was an outlier on masking children in schools during COVID-19. Its policies caused irreparable educational and developmental harm to an entire generation of children. Now the U.S. is in danger of becoming an outlier again, this time on so-called “gender-affirming” healthcare, which is really just a politically correct way of saying “mutilating children.”
Another entire generation of children is at risk of real harm from the progressive movement. Worse, President Joe Biden wants to ship this radical gender ideology overseas.
Early in the COVID-19 epidemic, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control reasonably recognized that there was no science showing that the harms of masking children outweighed the health benefits.
Unfortunately, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention willfully ignored evidence showing that masking harmed children. There were studies showing that masking marginally helped slow the spread of COVID-19, and that was considered enough to make everyone, children included, wear a mask at all times — no exceptions. Now we know that was a big mistake. Masking does harm children, and the benefits from wearing a mask for children were never there.
Unfortunately, the progressive health establishment is far too arrogant to learn from such mistakes. It is now pushing an even more harmful, if more narrowly felt, form of “healthcare” that will irreparably harm children and lead to lawsuits down the line.
For young children who do not feel they fit the prevailing stereotypes of their sex, the Left is now prescribing immediate surgical mutilations and chemical castrations instead of patience and talk therapy. Again, Europeans are ahead of the U.S. right now in recognizing the danger of these new “treatments” to children’s health. The United Kingdom recently shut down its only youth gender clinic after it noticed a 1,000% increase in patient referrals over a decade, an inordinate number of whom were either girls seeking to become boys or boys on the autism spectrum.
Recognizing a dearth of long-term data on the safety outcomes of these irreversible procedures, the U.K., Sweden, and Finland have all halted such treatments for children, recognizing that they are definitely irrevocable and likely highly damaging.
The Biden administration is going in the other direction. This June, Biden issued Executive Order 14075, which among other things, directs the secretary of state to “develop an action plan” to “defend the rights and safety of LGBTQI+ individuals.” According to a State Department memo obtained by Manhattan Institute fellow Leor Sapir, that plan includes punishing countries, such as the U.K., Sweden, and Finland, that do not conform to the American Left’s agenda on “gender-affirming” care.
In other words, Biden wants to force all other countries to set a national standard that takes away from doctors the ability to diagnose their patients, instead handing the power of self-diagnosis to disturbed child patients.
The memo allegedly instructs embassies to “submit robust information” on the “conversion therapy practices” of other countries — a clear attempt to conflate treatments that purport to “un-gay” people with treatments that harm and mutilate children. For the far-left ideologues in control of the Biden administration, the term “conversion therapy” has been crafted to include any normal talk therapy that doesn’t immediately affirm whatever gender identity a confused youth believes himself or herself to have or that some other adult convinced him or her to adopt. So if a nation such as the U.K. decides that the best treatment for a girl who thinks she is a boy is patience and talk therapy, the Biden administration wants to label that “conversion therapy” and a human rights violation.
It is bad enough that Biden is using the power of Title IX to destroy women’s sports by forcing them to compete with stronger and faster biological men. To infect our nation’s foreign policy with this reality-denying filth is a threat to national security, not to mention children everywhere who face potential mutilation in the name of the U.S. taxpayer.
