Millions of Americans have been horrified by the saga of James Younger, the 8-year-old boy who is being “transitioned” to a girl named Luna by his mother. Texas Judge Mary Brown recently allowed James’ transition to continue, and ordered the boy’s father, Jeffrey Younger, to pay $5,000 a month to support it.
Plenty of conservative outlets have bemoaned the Younger tragedy; even National Review has acted appalled. But few are willing to admit that this tragedy is the product of right-wing cowardice just as much as left-wing insanity.
There is actually a very straightforward way to prevent children from being subjected to transgender insanity by their parents: Ban it. Sex change treatments are never medically necessary, many are irreversible, and the most aggressive are actively harmful. So if the right wants to keep vulnerable and impressionable children from receiving a harmful treatment they don’t need, they should fight to ban the procedure. Yet with many states solidly controlled by the Republican Party, none of them have.
The only state that has even come close to protecting children from this insanity is South Dakota. In February, the state house voted to ban the use of puberty blockers and other sex-change treatments on children under 16. But then the state’s Chamber of Commerce raised a howl about the danger to the state’s businesses, Governor Kristi Noem voiced “concerns” about the bill, and it promptly died in the state senate. The state’s businesses, in the end, mattered more than the state’s children.
The left doesn’t act this way when it runs into a medical treatment it abhors. Twenty U.S. states ban gay conversion therapy for minors, and that doesn’t involve invasive, irreversible surgeries. But the Republican Party never makes the same choice. It’s another symptom of something Revolver has criticized repeatedly: The right’s submission to moral imperialism by the left. Republicans believe that banning sex changes for children is too extreme, even though such treatments were utterly unthinkable just a few decades ago. They believe it, because that is what the left believes, and so the right dutifully complies, as it does on countless other issues. That’s a decision the Republican Party has made over and over again.
This submission isn’t based on science. Just the opposite: It’s a craven refusal to loudly say what the science is, even when saying it could protect children from irreversible harm.
One of the major puberty blocking drugs, Lupron, was originally developed to treat advanced prostate cancer in old men. It was later repurposed to treat precocious puberty, a rare condition where children prematurely go through hormonal changes, which can cause health problems if not delayed.
But now, Lupron is being used to block puberty for years on children who, other than “gender dysphoria,” have no reason to do it. Activists say the drug’s effects are “fully reversible.” This is a lie. One of Lupron’s side effects is lowering bone density, and today there are thousands of young adults who took Lupron for valid reasons and are now suffering from bone and joint problems usually seen in the elderly. There are also some small studies that Lupron can lower children’s IQ by a significant amount, as many as nine points. While this finding isn’t proven, it wouldn’t be a shock: Hormonal changes during puberty help complete the brain’s development.
In early August, the American Journal of Psychiatry had to retract a study’s finding that sex change surgery improves the mental health outcomes of recipients. Even before the retraction, the study had already found that mere hormone treatments did nothing to improve mental health: Gender-dysphoric individuals were just as likely to need mental health treatment, and just as likely to attempt suicide, after going on opposite-sex hormones.
These effects could be even more intense in children. Earlier longitudinal studies have found that about 80 percent of gender-dysphoric children outgrow their dysphoria by adulthood. This number could easily grow, because the number of children with “gender dysphoria” is growing rapidly as well. In 2009, the U.K.’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) had 77 referrals for child gender dysphoria. Last year, they had almost 2,600. While in the past, most gender dysphoric children were boys, now a majority are girls, often teenage girls whose “dysphoria” seems to have manifested abruptly. Already, studies have found what is obvious to observers: At least some of the surge in “gender dysphoria” is a social contagion, sucking in people who are already struggling with mental illness or simply the difficulties of growing up. GIDS staffers in the U.K. described the situation they saw over and over at the clinic:
“They say they are seeing girls with a panoply of other issues — anxiety, depression, self-harm, undiagnosed autism, victims of homophobic bullying and sexual abuse — for whom transition to a male body was presented online as the universal panacea. Often a normal, tom-boyish disgust at their new breasts, eliciting sudden and unwanted sexual attention from men, is interpreted as a certainty that they are in the ‘wrong body.’ Yet instead of interrogating these underlying issues, clinicians are told to ‘affirm’ a young person’s ‘trans identity’ and prescribe the puberty blockers that trans campaigners fiercely insist are their right.”
There is more than enough evidence that the right would be fully justified in passing a very simple law: Restrict sex change treatments, like hormone therapy or transition surgery, those old enough to know exactly what they are doing. It is sick to let ideologically-motivated adults inflict sex changes on children who in many cases are simply going through a phase, or trying to please their parents, or trying to cope with mental illness or the ordinary difficulties of growing up. It’s a virtual certainty that, ten or twenty years from now, there will be thousands of miserable young adults, living with (or committing suicide over) mutilations inflicted on them by parents and psychiatrists who were simply buying into the transgender fad.
But so far, not a single Republican jurisdiction has had the courage to do what ought to be done, and protect children from this insanity. Because ultimately, no matter what they say, the Republican establishment cares more about the Chamber of Commerce, and the approval of liberals, then they do about boys like James Younger.
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