Biden Administration Ends Support For Trans Surgeries On Minors
What will it take for Democrats to ban puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for children and adolescents?
For years, leading medical organizations, the mainstream news media, and Democratic politicians have argued that surgeons should be able to operate on the bodies of minors who identify as transgender. They argued that it would be immoral to prevent adolescents from removing and modifying body parts so they resemble those of the opposite sex. Indeed, they claimed, doing so could end up causing them to commit suicide.
Sure, some of those young people might regret it later, acknowledged The New York Times’s Lydia Polgren in an extended essay last December. But she said, “We allow children to make irreversible decisions about their lives all the time,” and “sometimes they regret those decisions.” Wrote Polgren, “how is it different, really, from the decision I made to quit competitive swimming?”
Gender medicine doctors, therapists, and activists have described such surgeries as part of a “gender journey.”
The Biden administration’s Department of Justice recently indicted whistleblower Eithan Haim, a surgeon at Texas Children’s Hospital, who leaked documents showing that the hospital was secretly performing transgender medical treatments on minors.
And a US Department of Health and Human Services fact sheet on “Gender-Affirming Care and Young People” promotes “gender-affirming care” including “surgery on genitals or reproductive organs.” At the same time, supporters of such procedures insist that they are too rare to be very worried about.
But now the Biden administration has abruptly reversed its position and come out against so-called “gender-affirming surgeries” for minors.