On Tuesday, the Republican-led Louisiana legislature overturned Democratic governor John Bel Edwards’s veto against banning puberty-blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries for trans-identifying minors. This makes Louisiana the 21st state to pass legislation of this kind, and the second to do so despite the obstructionist efforts of a Democratic governor.
In March, the Kentucky legislature’s GOP supermajority overturned Democratic governor Andy Beshear’s veto of Senate Bill 150. In June, the North Carolina legislature approved a bill banning medically transitioning minors, which, on account of state Republicans’ veto-proof stronghold, may likewise survive a recent veto from the state’s Democratic governor.
These are symbolic, as well as legislative, victories in the fight to protect children from clinical abuse. Nevertheless, it was shameful to see Louisiana’s Republican state senator Fred Mills join Democrats in opposing the legislation.
Those in favor of so-called gender-affirming care paint these bills as attacks on gender-distressed youth, as opposed to the protections they are. For instance, the Human Rights Campaign characterized Louisiana’s bill as “denying transgender and non-binary youth access to best-practice, life-saving medical care [that] puts their lives in very real danger.”
Or consider the recent remarks from Biden’s assistant secretary in the Department of Health and Human Services, Rachel (formerly Richard) Levine. Levine, who transitioned in middle age, completed his own puberty and fathered two children. Yet in a recent interview, he said that children in gender distress ought to be stopped from going through “the wrong puberty.”
Of course, there are young people in this country going through the “wrong” puberty. But they aren’t the ones going through their natural puberty. Rather they are those being made sick by a regimen of artificial hormones mimicking those of the opposite sex. These cross-sex-hormonal disruptions have serious, lasting effects on the human body and in many cases render those who take them both sterile and lifetime medical patients.
Just ask Prisha Mosley, a young woman who suffered sexual abuse, an eating disorder, and emotional and mental-health issues only to be told that the explanation for her misery was that her body was “wrong.” Mosley is now suing the clinicians responsible for fraud and medical malpractice. The suit alleges that her clinicians “lied when they told Prisha she was actually a boy; they lied when they told her that injecting testosterone into her body would solve her numerous, profound mental and psychological health problems.”
Of course, it did nothing of the sort. Rather, it left Mosley with the lasting damage of vaginal atrophy, unwanted hair growth, a permanently deeper voice, and dyspareunia. Mosley also had a double mastectomy and has no sensation in her chest.
The sad truth is we don’t know how many more young people like Mosley are being harmed. A Reuters investigation concluded that “no large-scale studies have tracked people who received gender-related medical care as children to determine how many remained satisfied with their treatment as they aged and how many eventually regretted transitioning.”
What children suffering from gender dysphoria need is not to be guinea pigs for the latest ideological fad but to be shown the compassion and care of time-tested therapies aimed at helping them accept their bodies.
It’s a sad reality that they also need legal protection from those who would inflict on them grievous clinical harm.