As I’ve noted elsewhere, way back in the day I volunteered at a telephone hotline, an experience that informs many of my views to this day, with one primary takeaway being people that have wallowed in their dysfunction for so long that it is woven into their self-image and identity tend to embrace that dysfunction rather than address it as addressing it requires change at a root level few are able to endure, with the take away on my end being that all the hours spent on the phone confronting dysfunction in all its many forms was basically wasted, with that revelation forming the basis for the curmudgeon I’ve blossomed into.
I note this as one of the phenomenas we confronted regularly at the ol’ hotline was self-destructive behaviors manifesting themselves as some sort of contagion, with young women forming the usual population wherein these behaviors manifested, with suicide and self-mutilation being the primary behaviors, though there were others.
All of the above amounts to a long way of saying that mutilation on the altar of transgenderism has a familiar feel, one that medical professionals should certainly be able to pick up on more aptly than the teenage do-gooder I was back in the day. Unless, alas, political and financial considerations are baked into any empirical examinations of the available data and expediency rears its head.
It’s worth noting the author is gay and generally an advocate for gay causes unless, as he states below connoting a slasher movie trope, the threat comes from inside the house. The fact that he is unambivalently speaking to the horrors embraced the trans-for-kids crowd to the point he is contemplating voting for Trump speaks volumes:
Rachel Levine Must Resign
A case study in politics and ideology overruling science. With children as victims.
ANDREW SULLIVAN
OCT 18, 2024
Rachel Levine speaks on stage during the "Tackling the Youth Mental-Health Crisis" panel for The Atlantic Festival 2024 on September 19. (Jemal Countess/Getty Images for The Atlantic)
“Knowing that there is little/no evidence about [the sex reassignment of] children/adolescents is helpful,” - a Biden administration HHS official.
I have to say that the news this week has made me reconsider voting for Kamala Harris.
What news? I’ve no doubt many of you will roll your eyes, think I’m off on another tangent, obsessed with something trivial — or, in Harris’ formulation, a “remote” issue. But the discovery from a lawsuit against the State of Alabama over its ban on the medical sex reassignment of children has left me reeling. It shows a staggering level of bad faith from the transqueer lobby, and, also, from Rachel Levine — the Assistant Secretary for Health at HHS. Read the amicus brief here. Everything in this piece is based on it.
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The broad contours laid out in the brief were already known. But, with discovery, the specific details of private, internal emails make this medical scandal even more vivid. We knew that the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) commissioned its own version of the Cass Review by asking a team at Johns Hopkins to conduct a systematic review of the evidence for “gender medicine” for children. But we now find the conclusion. An internal email from the Hopkins team concluded that there was “little to no evidence about children and adolescents.” Many WPATH members, we discover, also knew the studies would “reveal little or no evidence and put us in an untenable position in terms of affecting policy or winning lawsuits.”
In other words, WPATH knows full well that their transing of children has little to no medical evidence behind it. So when Johns Hopkins presented the review, WPATH instantly buried it, suppressing publication of all the studies but two. Other contributors drew on their experiences as expert witnesses to suggest removing “language such as ‘insufficient evidence,’ ‘limited data,’ etc.” that could ‘empower’ groups ‘trying to claim that gender-affirming interventions are experimental.’” SOC-8 — the latest Standards of Care from WPATH — was therefore knowingly based on concealing the truth, and written for lawsuits, not patients. Not medicine. Ideology.
And all along, this allegedly professional group, WPATH, conferred with Levine at HHS. They gave her an early embargoed version of SOC-8, with lower age limits for some treatments, and her office responded, horrified. They feared that the listing of “specific minimum ages for treatment … under 18, will result in devastating legislation for trans care”:
Levine “was very concerned that having ages (mainly for surgery) will affect access to healthcare for trans youth ... and she and the Biden administration worried that having ages in the document will make matters worse.”
So they removed the age limits! For these procedures, among others: removal of both ovaries; double mastectomy; turning a girl’s clitoris into a micro-penis; surgically removing a boy’s penis; surgical and chemical castration of boys; and permanent removal of the capacity for orgasm for both boys and girls. I repeat: permanent removal of the capacity for orgasm for both boys and girls.
But this never happens, we were told! Another lie. We now discover, from insurance claims, that at least 14,000 minors have been transed either chemically or surgically in the last five years. At a minimum.
Even WPATH (which considers eunuchs a gender identity requiring castration) balked at Levine’s intervention at first. One SOC-8 author wrote: “I don’t know how I feel about allowing US politics to dictate international professional clinical guidelines.” Another wrote: “I think it’s safe to say that we all agree and feel frustrated (at minimum) that these political issues are even a thing and are impacting our own discussions and strategies.” But they did it anyway. Marci Bowers, WPATH’s president at the time, privately confessed to putting ideology before science: “it is a balancing act between what I feel to be true and what we need to say.” Read that one more time. It really amounts to: “We need to lie to keep this transing industry going.” So they continued to deceive distressed parents and children.
Systematic reviews of medical practices abide by a simple rule: to limit conflicts of interest between the reviewers and the practices. That’s why the Brits asked Hillary Cass to review the evidence: she was a renowned pediatrician but had personally never practiced transing kids. But WPATH actually excluded almost anyone without a conflict of interest! One doctor admitted at his deposition that “most participants in the SOC-8 process had financial and/or nonfinancial conflicts of interest.” Bowers even believed it was “important for someone to be an advocate for [transitioning] treatments before the guidelines were created.” So it was rigged from the start.
The Johns Hopkins team also sent its data to the Biden administration. HHS, where Levine holds court, responded: “Knowing that there is little/no evidence about children and adolescents is helpful.” So the Biden-Harris people were told there was no evidence for it as well! And they then doubled down on “gender-affirming care.”
Bowers — who famously performed multiple surgeries on Jazz Jennings — publicly insists that “gender affirming care” for children is settled science and the only opponents are bigots. But in a private email to other WPATH members, we find she knows only too well the human cost of her abuse of children. Discovery in a lawsuit is a powerful thing.
I’m still absorbing the contents of this email from Bowers:
Like my [female genital mutilation] patients who had never experienced orgasm, the puberty blockaded kids did not know what orgasm might feel like and most experienced sensation to their genitalia no differently than if it had been a finger or a portion of their thigh....
My concern culminated during a pre-surgical evaluation on a young trans girl from a highly educated family whose daughter responded when I asked about orgasm, “what is that?” The parents countered with, “oh honey, didn’t they teach you that in school?” I felt that our informed consent process might not be enough.... It occurred to me that how could anyone truly know how important sexual function was to a relationship, to happiness?
It isn’t an easy question to answer.
It is, in fact, very easy to answer. Bowers did so herself:
Every single child who was — er, adolescent — who is truly blocked at Tanner stage 2 [aged 9-11] has never experienced orgasm. … It’s important in relationships. And I know that from my work with female genital mutilation survivors, that the lack of being able to be intimate with a partner is very important. And so this is what really raised the red flag for me.
Let me offer my answer to the question Bowers raised. It is despicable to take a child who has never gone through puberty and remove from them any possibility of orgasm for life — before they can possibly know what an orgasm feels like. Evil. Bowers admits it’s no different than FGM in its effect. With FGM, much of the pressure to mutilate a child comes from the parents’ religion. The difference between Iran — where they trans young gays and lesbians en masse — and America, is that in one, the parents’ religion is fundamentalist Islam, and in America, it’s wokeness.
And that wokeness overwhelmingly targets gay kids. In Britain they became the vast majority of the children sent for sex reassignment, before it was banned outside a clinical trial. And we know that these “doctors” have no way of objectively knowing whether a child is actually trans or gay or depressed or autistic — and yet they also oppose any broad mental health assessment of a child, if that child has simply declared himself or herself the opposite sex.
This is not forgivable. It demands accountability. These “doctors” know full well that their experiments have no basis in science, that thousands of gay detransitioners have had their lives and bodies destroyed, and yet continue to experiment on children, without knowing if they are actually trans, of if they are gay, or bi, or autistic, or in a social contagion. Worse, every allegedly gay group — GLAAD, HRC, Trevor Project, Lambda Legal, ACLU, et al. — supports this as an ideological transqueer “necessity” and will allow no debate and no dissent. Most gays have no idea what’s actually going on — by design. The reason GLAAD tries to intimidate reporters on this subject is because they know that the truth would devastate their arguments. They can count on the gay press to be silent. But the MSM rattles them.
Levine should resign. She intervened in a medical process for entirely political reasons, putting children at risk, destroying all safeguards for them. So should the heads of every so-called gay group that have pushed and lied about “gender-affirming care.” WPATH’s former president, Marci Bowers (she was replaced on October 1) is another matter. It seems to me that a doctor who privately doubts if her child patients can give meaningful consent and operates on them anyway is not a doctor, but a sociopath. She has violated the Hippocratic oath and admitted practicing the equivalent of FGM on children. FGM is illegal in federal law and in 41 states if the girl is under 18. “Gender-affirming” FGM, thanks to Rachel Levine, is fully legal without any lower age limits.
I remember very well how all my gender insecurities as a gay kid vanished after puberty. So I urge any gay man or lesbian who, as a child or teen, was barred from this basic human right to be brave and start the lawsuits. It’s the only way. No gay men or lesbians will come to your aid. Kamala Harris and the gay groups sure won’t. “LGBTQIA+” billionaires will sacrifice any number of gay kids if it means not being called “transphobic” at a dinner party.
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I look around what was once my community and see such incredible cowardice and indoctrination that it makes me despair at what we have become. A movement that began as a crusade for sexual liberation is now sterilizing gay and trans children and removing their capacity for orgasm forever. A movement that began with defending gay men and lesbians is now sacrificing a generation of gay kids at the behest of trans extremists and critical gender theory.
Forgive me for the passion. But this amicus brief set my head and heart aflame. What has happened — what is still happening — is the worst attack on gay kids since Anita Bryant.
But this time, the danger is coming from inside the house.
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/rachel-levine-must-resign-2d7
