Government subsidies are resulting in lots of unnecessary, harmful sex changes — “transgender lunacy,” according to the Washington Examiner.
This week, a video surfaced from Vanderbilt University Medical Center in which a Dr. Shane Taylor was caught on tape saying in 2018, “Starting January 1, 2017, according to the Affordable Care Act, insurance carriers are mandated to cover medical expenses for trans folks.” Taylor went on to note that some of Vanderbilt’s “financial folks” looked at how much each transgender patient could bring into the hospital and found that, just looking at “top surgery” (not even including “bottom surgery”), each transgender patient would be extremely profitable.
“It’s a lot of money,” Taylor said. “These surgeries make a lot of money.”
So much for children’s well-being.
Some doctors at Vanderbilt might object to the mutilation and chemical castration of minors for profit. But Vanderbilt’s leadership thought of this problem and made clear to doctors that they would face reprisals and potentially dismissal if they were to object.
“If you are going to assert conscientious objection, you have to realize that that is problematic,” Dr. Ellen Clayton warned in a separate video. “What I want you to take home is that saying you are not going to do something because of your religious beliefs is not without consequences. And it should not be without consequence. If you don’t want to do this kind of work, don’t work at Vanderbilt.”
Clayton’s message was clear: Either get on board with the mutilation of children for profit or leave. That’s illegal.
That is probably why Vanderbilt removed the video from its website after it was exposed on social media. Vanderbilt later denied that the institution ever punished anyone for objecting to the mutilation of children for profit. But no one accused them of doing so, and no one had to. What Clayton was caught on tape doing, threatening to punish any objectors, may have prompted objectors to leave before they could be retaliated against by this unethical hospital’s leadership.
It is bad enough that the federal government ever subsidizes completely unnecessary, elective sex-reassignment surgery by mandating that insurance companies cover such procedures through Obamacare. It means that every single person in America is subsidizing transgender surgeries just by paying monthly health insurance premiums.
But what is far worse is that taxpayers and rate-payers are also subsidizing the mutilation of children for profit through the exact same mechanism.
Young people’s brains and bodies are not fully formed when they are going through adolescence. Not liking your body is completely normal for an adolescent, but most people eventually become comfortable in their own natural skin.
It is morally wrong to let children completely alter their bodies before their judgment is even fully mature. It is doubly wrong that hospitals are making money off of these mutilations. It is triply wrong that the government is subsidizing this form of child abuse by mandating insurance coverage for it.
As the New York Post notes, many girls who get sex changes will “struggle for the rest of their lives with the irreversible medical consequences of a decision they made as minors.” They temporarily identify as transgender boys, then get sex changes before realizing they are really just girls.
The number of girls temporarily identifying as “transgender” has skyrocketed. Dr. Lisa Littman, a former professor of Behavioral and Social Sciences at Brown University, coined the term “rapid onset gender dysphoria” to describe this subset of transgender youth, typically biological females who become suddenly dysphoric during or shortly after puberty. Littman believes this may be due to adolescent girls’ susceptibility to peer influence on social media.
A variety of studies suggest that as many as 80% of dysphoric children could ultimately experience “desistance”— or coming to terms with their biological gender without resorting to transition. Which is why many professionals like Evans think it’s wise to hold off on potentially irreversible medical intervention for as long as possible….All these treatments run the risk of side effects that critics argue are too serious for children to fully understand. In the short term, puberty blockers can stunt growth and effect bone density, while the long-term effects are still unknown since they were only approved by the FDA in 1993. Side effects of testosterone include high cholesterol, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, blood clots and even infertility.
Being “gender affirming” shouldn’t be an excuse for a doctor to commit medical malpractice. But that may be happening in many cases.
The National Review provided a possible example. Doctors affirmed a man’s false belief that he had a female gender identity, and then mutilated his body by giving him a sex change he came to regret.
Plagued by self-hatred, he “heard about transgenderism” in college, and “seized on it as the solution.” A gender-affirming free clinic “immediately affirmed” his female gender identity. He was then given an “incomplete informed consent document to sign.” Later, his doctor told him that he “should really get surgery.” He was given an orchiectomy, but not told that it was castration. After being castrated, he “developed a drug habit” and began “ejaculating blood.” He said that “the gender clinic kept telling me, ‘Oh, it gets better.’” But it didn’t.
He says he was never given an independent psychological evaluation before getting surgery. After surgery, a different therapist diagnosed him with a different condition than gender dysphoria. But by then, he had already been castrated.
Getting a sex change caused havoc in the lives of thousands of people. The National Review gave an example of a woman who transitioned to being a man, and ended up with negative health consequences, “no hair,” and a “body mutilated.”
It’s not just doctors and psychologists who have made mistakes in their zeal to be “gender affirming.” So have judges.
Jamie Shupe gave an example in “I was America’s first ‘nonbinary person.’ It was all a sham.” Shupe is male, as he noted in the Daily Signal. But he wanted in vain to be a woman, due to a condition known as “autogynephilia.” When his therapist expressed skepticism about whether he would actually benefit from trying to change his sex, he filed a “formal complaint” against her, and found a new therapist, who affirmed his new “identity as a woman.” But eventually he changed his mind and declared he was nonbinary, not female:
When the fantasy of being a woman came to an end, I asked two of my doctors to allow me to become nonbinary instead of female to bail me out. Both readily agreed….To escape the delusion of having become a woman, I did something completely unprecedented in American history. In 2016, I convinced an Oregon judge to declare my sex to be nonbinary—neither male nor female.
As a result of this ruling, a “nonbinary option” now exists in many states, even though Shupe’s “sex change to nonbinary was a medical and scientific fraud.” The judge’s ruling was not based on any evidence. As Shupe observes, “the judge didn’t ask me a single question. Nor did” the judge ask “to see any medical evidence….Within minutes, the judge just signed off on the court order,” even though he did “not have any disorders of sexual development.” But three years later, “unable to advance the fraud for another single day,” he “reclaimed” his “male birth sex.”
