Voters Side with GOP against Gender-Transition Treatments for Minors

F lorida governor Ron DeSantis gets a lot of flak for his vigorous prosecution of “right-wing culture wars,” and not just from the Left. “Culture wars are not solved by the government,” said New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu in a recent jab at DeSantis. That is true, but a consistent conservatism that rejects the heavy hand of authority in the conduct of private affairs is not opposed to the application of state power in matters that are the proper province of even a limited government. Nor is conservatism always forced to choose between doing what’s right and doing what’s popular. DeSantis’s hostility toward what the press euphemistically calls “gender-affirming care” for children, to take one example, is both.

In August of last year, Florida became the eighth U.S. state to prohibit surgical or hormonal remedies designed to facilitate a transition in minors experiencing gender dysphoria. The outcry among transgender activists was deafening, but the general public doesn’t seem to share their concerns.

A Reuters/Ipsos online survey published Thursday testing the popularity of the “DeSantis agenda” found that 82 percent of Republican voters are “somewhat” or “much less likely” to support a candidate who backs “medical treatment related to gender identity or gender transitioning” for minors. Only 37 percent of Democrats said the same, but theirs is a minority point of view. Sixty-one percent of respondents nationwide take the Republican position on the issue, including roughly two-thirds of self-described independent voters.

The results of Reuters’ survey comport with the findings of other polls on the subject. A Deseret News/HarrisX poll conducted in January found that a majority of voters believe hormone-treatment therapy should be off limits to children. More than 60 percent of respondents said gender-reassignment surgeries should be proscribed for pediatric patients. Once again, the majority view is not the Democratic view. Sixty-eight percent of Democratic voters backed the provision of hormone treatments to children who want them, and 57 percent said surgical remedies for gender dysphoria should be available to kids.

A growing public distaste for the practice of transitioning children isn’t happening in a vacuum. Research conducted by Reuters in 2022 found that gender-dysphoria diagnoses tripled between 2017 and 2021, and there has been a corresponding increase in so-called “gender-affirming care” treatments, which the Biden administration’s Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services notes are “considered a standard level of care” by, among other medical associations, the American Academy of Pediatrics. Only nine states exclude pediatric gender-transitioning treatment from eligibility for publicly funded Medicaid reimbursements, which are also on the rise.

We find ourselves in the midst of a sweeping, taxpayer-funded social experiment. But enough time has passed since the onset of this experiment that we can now see how the children who transitioned early in life are faring as they approach adulthood. Some of the results are quite tragic.

As PJ Media’s Megan Fox observed, one of America’s most famous transgender youths — reality-television star Jazz Jennings — appears to be struggling publicly with an identity crisis her transition was meant to cure. Understandably so, too, because the onset of adulthood has been permanently arrested by her transitional treatments. One of the features of this existence not just for Jennings but for any child who transitions before puberty is that their condition precludes sexual function or even sexual arousal. It therefore imposes artificial limits on the intimacy these individuals will ever experience with a partner later in life.

“Every single child or adolescent who is truly blocked at Tanner stage II,” one of the earliest stages of pubescent development, “has never experienced orgasm. I mean, it’s really about zero.” That’s the verdict rendered by Marci Bowers, the president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and the surgeon who performed the operations that removed and inverted Jennings’s penis (a process that was complicated by hormone blockers, which stunted the growth of Jennings’s sex organs). Bowers herself said this discovery was a “red flag” that should lead the transgender-health community to explore the ethicality of pre-Tanner stage III or IV hormonal treatments and surgeries.

That’s all well and good, but it might have been valuable to think through some of these what-ifs before American physicians began conducting experiments on children.

There is no conflict here between the ideals of limited government and the promotion of the general welfare. Children do not have the same constitutional rights as adults. They cannot vote. They are not subject to bail requirements, nor can they be tried by a jury of their peers. At the state level, perfectly constitutional laws restrict children’s access to firearms, motor vehicles, and intoxicating substances. Even if their parents or guardians believe their charges are mature enough to safely access these things, the law says otherwise. And for good reason.

The psychological anguish Jennings describes is not uncommon among those who undergo a prepubescent transition, and the medical community is finally beginning to speak out about the ethical dubiousness of pediatric-transition treatments at a decibel level that can be heard over the activist class. A study of de-transitioning youth found that many rued the irreversible medical treatments they’d received, and the mental-health problems that attracted them to those treatments did not improve as a result. More disturbingly, some of the study’s subjects were ashamed of their “regret,” believing they had failed to meet the expectations imposed on them by the social structures that reinforced their dysphoria.

“I can’t think of any other examples where you’re not allowed to speak about your own health-care experiences if you didn’t have a good outcome,” said Dr. Kinnon MacKinnon, himself a transgender male and the lead researcher on a study that upended his assumptions about transitioning youth. “People are terrified to do this research,” added Dr. Laura Edwards-Leeper, a WPATH member. “We cannot carry on in this field that involves permanently changing young people’s bodies if we don’t fully understand what we’re doing and learn from those we fail.”

The sudden application of scientific rigor to a process that alters forever the natural lives of its child subjects is welcome, but it comes too late. These admissions concede what conservatives have long understood: Social and political considerations trumped medical ethics in the rush to transition children. What’s more, there are no guarantees that professional standards will triumph over the activist class’s attack on emerging best practices in this field. Elected officials have the legal authority and social responsibility to intervene.

Democratic voters apparently object to the notion that children should not be allowed to make permanent medical alterations to their bodies. It will be discomfiting for them to be confronted with the tragedies their favorite social contagion has produced, but that is precisely why they must be confronted with those tragedies. Voters dislike the practice of transitioning minors, and their reaction is informed by the empirically observable harms associated with it.

Because none of this has been a matter of science so far, it is fair to say that DeSantis is fighting a culture-war battle — as long as you note that he’s on the right side of it.