The Wall Street Journal’s lead letter on Tuesday, from a Canadian endocrinologist called Roy Eappen, praises the Trump administration’s humane acknowledgement in its report on gender medicine that transgender ideology harms “a particular kind of victim: children who are gay and lesbian.”
Four in five gender-confused children grow up and out of their dysphoria naturally, and the majority turn out simply to be gay. This is surely one reason why the multibillion-dollar “gender-affirming care” industry rushes to surgical or chemical intervention. That way, it can collect its lucre before children and parents have time to change their minds.
Eappen, a member of Do No Harm, an organization established to “protect healthcare from the disastrous consequences of identity politics,” notes that “transgender treatments [force children] to be something they aren’t,” adding with incisive and crystal clarity, “the better name for this is gay conversion therapy.”
It is an issue on which leftists demonstrate the howling hypocrisy of their circumstantial ethics. The Left has made a U-turn on the matter, or perhaps twisted itself into an S-bend, and it reveals today’s radicals and their elected Democratic representatives as being everything they previously condemned.
They excoriate and challenge conversion therapy because it aims to persuade gay minors they can be straight, yet they demand gay minors be converted into members of the opposite sex from the one into which they were born. These incompatible ideologies exist side by side, treating temporary sexual or gender confusion as immutable but insisting that permanent physical biology is a correctable mistake.
About half of the 50 states in the union ban conversion therapy on minors because the state governments believe or claim to believe such therapy is an abomination for treating same-sex attraction as an ailment.
Yet that is precisely what “gender-affirming care” does. Where there is gender dysphoria, which is a common marker of same-sex attraction in children or pubescent teenagers, the transgender movement insists that minors be irreversibly altered physically rather than being allowed to grow up gay.
A boy attracted to members of his own sex must be turned into a simulacrum of a girl, and a girl attracted to the same sex must be forced to identify as a boy. It should never be forgotten, however, that there is a huge difference between the extent of damage done by conversion therapy and transgender therapy. The former may be wrong, but whether it is or it isn’t, it intervenes only with words — with counseling. The latter, by contrast, uncorks chemicals and unsheathes scalpels and uses them to inflict irreversible harm.
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear two cases this term that bear directly on these difficult and deeply troubling matters.
The justices will weigh the question of whether the Constitution permits a Colorado law to ban licensed mental health professionals from uttering even a word that might dissuade a child from identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender.
Colorado Attorney General Philip Weiser, a Democrat, naturally, says the law protects “unscientific and cruel” therapies. But does deep-blue Colorado acknowledge that chemical or surgical sex changes are unscientific and cruel? Of course not.
The Supreme Court has also agreed to hear a case at the other end of the spectrum, U.S. v Skrmetti, which challenges a Tennessee law banning “gender-affirming care” on people under 18. The question in this case is whether the state may deny a particular group of people, in this case minors, the same care that is available to others, such as hormone therapy. Perhaps in arguing its case, Tennessee should quote Colorado’s Weiser, who points out that “states have long regulated medical practices to protect patients from harmful professional conduct.”
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Although the two cases hinge on different legal principles — the Colorado case has been brought on the issue of First Amendment free speech, whereas the Tennessee case rests on the application of 14th Amendment equal protections — their underlying substance is the same. Both are about how our morally confused society must regard the sexual nature of perhaps its most vulnerable and sympathetic category of people.
If the court decides it is constitutional to ban gay conversion therapy in one state, Colorado, shouldn’t it also mean that a different form of gay conversion therapy — that is, “gender-affirming care” — can be banned by the government of another state, Tennessee? If it is wrong to redirect a minor’s sexual nature with therapeutic words in one part of the country, isn’t it wrong to redirect it with chemicals and surgery in another?
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
