(LifeSite) The Biden administration hosted a White House roundtable Friday on “affirming” gender-confused children, amid ongoing controversy about subjecting minors to life-altering chemical and surgical mutilation.
The “Roundtable on Affirming Transgender Kids” was held to “hear directly about the joys, hopes, and challenges that transgender children are experiencing” and commemorate the April 1 “Transgender Day of Visibility,” according to the White House. “Transgender kids and their parents shared their experiences living in states that have attacked their rights, discussed how these laws have impacted their mental health, and highlighted how parents are protecting their children.”
The event was hosted by Biden administration Domestic Policy Advisor Ambassador Susan Rice and U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, according to a White House release following the event. “As one round table participant shared, it feels scary when the politicians elected to represent you don’t care about your wellbeing.”
The evidence, however, indicates that the “affirming” camp are the ones putting disregarding the wellbeing of gender-confused young people.
Studies find that more than 80% of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide — and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
On top of those issues, experts outside the medical establishment further warn that surgically or chemically reinforcing gender confusion imposes irreversible harm on children such as infertility, impairment of adult sexual function, and reduced life expectancy, as well as the psychological toll of being “locked into” physical alterations regardless of whether they change their minds when they mature.
The issue is grimly illustrated in the story of Yaeli Martinez, a 19-year-old to whom “gender transitioning” was touted as a possible cure for her depression in high school, supported by a high school counselor who withheld what she was going through from her mother. The troubled girl killed herself after trying to live as a man for three years.
Many oft-ignored “detransitioners,” individuals who attempted to live under a different “gender identity” before embracing their true sex, attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject.
Even so, the Biden administration has not only taken a hardline stance in favor of “transitioning” minors, but condemned leaders who disagree as “close to sinful.”
In April 2022, the administration issued documents through the HHS Office of Population Affairs and HHS Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration’s National Child Traumatic Stress Network endorsing “gender-affirming care” for “transgender and nonbinary children and adolescents.”
