The Biden administration released a series of documents this week endorsing “gender-affirming care” for transgender minors, which includes irreversible gender reassignment procedures and hormone treatments. This care is both “crucial” and compassionate, the administration said, citing studies in which young transgender adults said gender-affirming care improved their quality of life.
Let’s be clear: There is nothing compassionate about indulging a mental illness, which is what gender dysphoria is. Neither is there anything remotely right about selling a lie to impressionable, young children who would do anything to escape the uncomfortable and awkward phases of life that many of us can still remember.
But that’s exactly what the Biden administration is doing.
“To parents of transgender children, affirming your child’s identity is one of the most powerful things you can do to keep them safe and healthy,” President Joe Biden said this week, adding that state laws preventing medical professionals from performing gender reassignment surgeries or administering hormone treatments to minors are “wrong.”
“This administration is standing up for you against all these hateful bills,” Biden continued.
The Department of Health and Human Services also released guidance downplaying concerns about gender-affirming care, arguing that it is “neither child maltreatment nor malpractice.” The agency went on to claim that “evidence-based interventions such as puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormones” are actually essential for “transgender and nonbinary children and adolescents” and should be followed up with “‘top’ surgery — to create male-typical chest shape or enhance breasts” or “‘bottom’ surgery — surgery on genitals or reproductive organs, facial feminization, or other procedures.”
What makes this so disturbing is that the vast majority of children and young adults to whom this guidance applies are not even suffering from severe gender dysphoria. Rather, they’re victims of an intense social campaign led by gender ideologues who want the youngest generation to believe that nature is not permanent and that truth is subjective — that a boy can become a girl, or can be both genders at the same time, and be more empowered for it.
Unfortunately, this campaign is working. In her book Irreversible Damage, author Abigail Shrier writes about the explosion of transgenderism and how gender dysphoria went from being a mental illness that afflicted less than 0.01% of the population, and almost exclusively boys, to a widespread phenomenon in the past several years, especially among young girls. Between 2016 and 2017, she writes, the number of gender reassignment surgeries for girls in the United States quadrupled.
It is no coincidence that the Left was also busy mainstreaming gender ideology during this time.
Take, for example, a mother interviewed by ABC News this week who claimed her infant son started to communicate that he was actually a girl “at the earliest moment that she actually had words and language.” No one believes this is true. Toddlers are barely capable of understanding what makes a boy a boy or what makes a girl a girl. All he knows is that he likes playing with toys we’d consider feminine, like dolls. That doesn’t make him transgender; it makes him a child.
But because of parents like this mother, who are now being encouraged by the highest level of our federal government, this child has been transformed into a completely different person — and he’s too young to even know it. That’s not compassionate; it’s cruel.
It is also cruel to teach young women and men that mutilating their bodies or chemically changing them will get rid of the anxiety and distress they feel. Girls who are self-conscious and uncomfortable in their bodies, who reject the typical gender stereotypes and consider themselves tomboys instead, are now being led to believe that the problem is their gender identity — when really, they’re just experiencing the normal growing pains of maturation and change. Even those diagnosed with severe gender dysphoria in childhood tend to work things out for themselves if given enough time. Indeed, nearly 70% of all childhood gender dysphoria cases resolve on their own, according to Shrier. Now, however, those children would be lucky to make it through their teenage years without having done permanent damage to their bodies.
Apparently, that’s what the Biden administration wants.
We do not treat any other form of mental illness this way. We do not look at girls who struggle with anorexia or bulimia and tell them that they’re right to think their bodies need fixing. We do not tell a schizophrenic person that the voices in his head are real and he should act on them. We do not agree with a bipolar person that his mood swings are normal. And we certainly do not tell any of these individuals that they should undergo an invasive, physically-altering procedure to make themselves feel better.
So, why are we treating transgenderism differently?
There are a few reasons. Culturally, those on the Left want to use gender ideology to turn our values upside down and replace the truth with a subjective free-for-all that they get to govern. Politically, they are also using gender ideology to sever the youngest generation from the traditional principles still held by many families and turn them into a new army of activists.
But for those of us who believe in a higher power, there’s also a much simpler explanation: The transgenderism craze is really just an attempt to deny and distort human nature, and ultimately the God who created it. It is a rejection of the truth and the One in whom that truth is found. And it will have severe, long-term consequences — not just for the children and adolescents being swept away and harmed by this trend, but for every one of us who now has to live in a society in which facts don’t matter and dishonesty is disguised as compassion.
