(Daily Caller) Last month, President Joe Biden’s Assistant Secretary for Health, Dr. Rachel Levine, said there is no debate among healthcare providers about whether gender-confused children should be provided with so called “gender-affirming” care, which is varying degrees of chemical or surgical sex changes.
Despite Levine’s insistence, a number of mainstream healthcare providers and Western governments disagree.
Levine, the first openly-transgender American to serve in a Senate-confirmed government position, blasted allegedly anti-LGBTQ legislation passed in some red states that restricts the promotion of sexual materials in schools, such as Florida’s parental rights law. Levine also claimed that there is no debate about “gender-affirming” care for kids.
“There is no argument among medical professionals — pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, etc. — about the value and the importance of gender-affirming care,” Levine said. (RELATED: New Jersey Middle Schoolers Shown Video Endorsing Hormone Therapy)
Gender-affirming care is a euphemism for medical treatments, oftentimes irreversible, that put a child on a life-altering path to change gender from their biological birth sex. It can include puberty-blocking hormone treatments, surgeries and mental health treatment that “affirms” a child’s belief that they are the wrong gender.
There is plenty of disagreement within the medical community about whether this method of treatment is right for minors, whose brains aren’t yet fully formed and who may not be prepared to make permanent decisions about their reproductive health.
“Levine’s categorical statement is another example of the politicization of this clinical issue,” Dr. Marcus Evans, a psychotherapist who has worked with transgender patients, told the Daily Caller. “Clinicians need to be free to look at clinical issues from different points of view. This is what helps develop our understanding and helps protects patrons from harm.”
Evans was previously on the board of the Tavistock Centre, a major gender clinic in London. He became a whistleblower when he raised concerns about internal policies at the clinic that he felt were mistreating young people who had questions about their gender.
