Last week, in the month of Pride (formerly known as June), President Biden signed an executive order directing his health and education departments to do everything in their power to encourage transgenderism among children and “promote expanded access to gender-affirming care.”
To justify this intervention, Biden warned of the alleged alternative: “so-called ‘conversion therapy’ — a discredited and dangerous practice that seeks to suppress or change the sexual orientation or gender identity of LGBTQI+ people.”
Biden is confusing a couple of things to be deliberately misleading.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, homosexuals were subjected to scandalous medical malpractice. Gays and lesbians were given sexual depressants, testosterone, estrogen, and electroshock therapy, and subjected to castrations, vasectomies, hysterectomies, and even lobotomies. Over time, such interventions were abandoned. By the latter half of the 20th century, the medicalization of homosexuality had ceased altogether, culminating in the American Psychiatric Association’s removal of it from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973.
No one wants a return to this so-called conversion therapy. But the term is also used to describe talk therapy designed to assist patients who wish to mitigate or redirect unwanted sexual desires. This form of therapy might be abused (and has long been viciously attacked by the Left), but it isn’t wrong as such. Regardless, conversations between therapists and patients are covered by the First Amendment, and the government has no compelling interest to intervene in this matter one way or another.
Finally, the phrase “conversion therapy” has now, for ideological purposes, been widened to include therapies designed to help gender-distressed patients feel more comfortable with their sex. This repurposing of the term is especially concerning when it relates to children, for whom watchful waiting and therapy are the best approaches. Instead, the advocates are pushing “gender-affirming care,” i.e., moving quickly to help “transition” patients to new genders.
One argument critics have traditionally made against trying to change a person’s sexual orientation through therapy is that doing such a thing is impossible. But the same people won’t apply their own logic to sex. We know with certainty that people are either male or female, “born that way.” Indeed, the methods of “gender-affirmative care” resemble the old conversion therapy. Experimental drugs and surgeries? Check. Sterilization and sexual dysfunction? Check.
Biden’s intervention comes as elements of the mainstream are beginning to acknowledge that all this might be a mistake, or at least that there’s a debate over it. Even the New York Times, after years of ignoring skeptics of transgender orthodoxy, has published a piece acknowledging that “gender affirmation” isn’t quite the medical consensus it was made out to be after all.
Rather than heed such doubts, Biden has doubled down. He promises to take “steps to address the barriers and exclusionary policies” throughout the states. He is referring to laws such as Florida’s move against medicalized gender transitions for minors and Governor Ron DeSantis’s ban of Medicaid coverage for transgender treatments such as cross-sex hormones, breast removal, and genital surgery. Never mind that the Obama-Biden administration concluded in 2016 that “the quality and strength of evidence [for gender-reassignment treatments] were low” and that “there is not enough evidence to determine whether gender reassignment surgery improves health outcomes for Medicare beneficiaries with gender dysphoria.”
Biden has, once again, allied himself with his side’s radical culture warriors, in this case in the service of a trans fad that, if there’s any justice, will come to be regarded as just as foolish and unwarranted as the long-abandoned practices that Biden used as a foil last week.