It’s hard to wrap your head around just how grotesque it is that many medical associations and the federal government have adopted the idea that it’s healthy to sterilize children in an attempt to “affirm” a stated transgender identity. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will shed much-needed sunlight on this medical scandal of epic proportions.
Tennessee Solicitor General Matt Rice will explain how activists conspired to flip the Hippocratic Oath on its head. Meanwhile, U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar and American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Chase Strangio—a female who says she identifies as male—will argue that Tennessee’s law banning Frankensteinian medical experiments on kids violates federal law by discriminating on the basis of sex.
The Supreme Court is hearing the case because of this discrimination argument. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit upheld Tennessee’s law, finding that it doesn’t entail discrimination. But the Biden-Harris administration appealed that decision, and the Supreme Court took up the case—now known as U.S. v. Skrmetti after Jonathan Skrmetti, the Republican attorney general of Tennessee.
I will briefly address the logic behind the pro-transgender case, then explain the medical scandal that will emerge in Wednesday’s oral arguments.
The Transgender Discrimination Logic
The Biden-Harris administration’s convoluted logic goes something like this: Males who claim to be female really are female on some metaphysical plane (never mind biology, tradition, and common sense), so taking experimental hormones and undergoing surgical removal of their male organs is healthy for them.
Any law preventing minors—who can’t possibly give informed consent for experimental “treatments” that may leave them stunted, scarred, and infertile—from accessing this “health care” constitutes discrimination on the basis of sex, the logic goes. Why? Because such a law theoretically applies only to males who express a desire to be female and females who express a desire to be male.
The discrimination angle is laughable on its face. Discrimination on the basis of sex entails different treatment based on a person’s sex, namely male or female.
Tennessee’s law bans experimental transgender medical interventions for all minors, regardless of their race, creed, national origin, or biological sex. “Transgender” is not a protected category under federal civil rights statutes—even though federal agencies in the Biden-Harris administration have attempted to redefine discrimination on the basis of sex to include discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation.
When previous Congresses crafted civil rights law, they did not mean—and could not have meant—to protect gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender individuals by barring discrimination “on the basis of sex.” Instead, the lawmakers meant to extend to women the rights enjoyed by men.
Democrats inherently understand this, and it explains why they support the Equality Act, a bill that would expand “discrimination on the basis of sex” in federal law to include gender identity and sexual orientation.
The Supreme Court majority in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) used convoluted logic to rule that federal civil rights employment law bars discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation, but the decision also painstakingly argued that this only applies to employment law, not other forms of federal civil rights law.
The Biden-Harris administration has attempted to twist Bostock, essentially rewriting federal civil rights law to include discrimination on the basis of gender identity. The Justice Department and Department of Education have established rules that aim to effectively enshrine the Equality Act into law without a vote by Congress, in the name of “implementing Bostock.”
As I explain in my forthcoming book “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government,” the Human Rights Campaign—a leading LGBTQ activist group—likely inspired this move.
The ACLU and the Biden-Harris administration want this Supreme Court case to be about “discrimination,” not the actual medical value of the procedures in question.
The Scandal of Transgender ‘Health Care’
So what, exactly, are the “treatments” that Tennessee sought to ban minors from accessing? Transgender advocates euphemistically refer to these interventions as “gender-affirming care” to cloak their true nature under a false pretense of compassion.
Some medical professionals prescribe gender-confused children who are nearing puberty GnRH agonists, which stands for “Gonadatropin-releasing hormone agonists.”
David Gortler, a pharmacologist and pharmacist who previously was a senior adviser to the Food and Drug Administration commissioner on policy and drug safety, previously told The Daily Signal that physicians developed GnRH agonists to help treat certain cancers that depend on estrogen or testosterone.
Removing estrogen and testosterone from cancer patients to prolong their lives makes sense, Gortler said, because it prevents the progress of an invasive, malignant disease. But giving these drugs to physiologically and genetically healthy kids is a completely different story.
“This drug was tested, designed, and FDA-approved for use in an older, cancer-afflicted population,” Gortler, a doctor of pharmacy, said.
He compared so-called puberty blockers to the outdated, dangerous Chinese custom of foot binding, in which a young girl’s feet would be tightly wrapped to keep them from growing naturally.
“Similarly, GnRH agonists block a normal, healthy development process from occurring,” Gortler said. “Just because it’s not something that isn’t directly and obviously visible doesn’t mean that it’s any less clinically, scientifically, or ethically dangerous.”
Activists claim that GnRH agonists, which they dub “puberty blockers,” are temporary and reversible, but those claims remain unproven.
Most patients who take these “blockers” will go on to take cross-sex hormones (estrogen for males and testosterone for females).
“The human body has around 100 trillion cells,” Gortler noted. “High school biology taught us that in each of those nucleated cells, there are either XX or XY chromosomes denoting a female or male sex, respectively. No drug or medical procedure will ever be able to fight 100 or so trillion cells, and trying to do so would be a fool’s errand.”
Naturally, “puberty blockers” and cross-sex hormones lead to the most controversial intervention: the surgical removal of sex organs and the attempt to replace them with facsimiles of the organs of the opposite sex.
An activist organization masquerading as the authority on transgender health, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, doesn’t recommend “bottom surgery” for minors, but some minors do go under the knife. An estimated 3,678 minors have undergone surgical alterations in the past five years (including 405 minors between the ages of 12 and 18 who underwent genital surgery).
Transgender Exception to ‘Do No Harm’
Activists argue that minors undergo these interventions only if they really need them, and that doctors and therapists must diagnose children with gender dysphoria (the painful and persistent condition of identifying with the gender opposite their biological sex) before any interventions.
Yet many states ban “conversion therapy,” and many statutes apply such bans to a therapist who would counsel a male minor who thinks of himself as female from identifying with his biological sex (and vice versa). This prevents therapists from addressing the psychological roots of gender dysphoria and instead directs them to merely “affirm” gender confusion.
Furthermore, doctors know that medical interventions involve serious side effects.
Leaked documents from WPATH reveal that even pro-transgender doctors repeatedly acknowledged disturbing side effects of “gender-affirming care.” Doctors revealed that cross-sex hormones appeared to have caused liver cancer in teens and atrophy of sex organs that reduces sexual function.
Although some acknowledged that it is problematic to require informed consent from minors for procedures with lifelong impacts, others said the ideal time for removing female sex organs is 16 or 17 years old.
Even “puberty blockers” are far from safe. Gortler, the former FDA adviser, analyzed the federal agency’s Adverse Event Reporting System, or AERS, a database of reactions to certain drugs that users report to the Food and Drug Administration.
“GnRH agonists account for 70,000 adverse reports,” Gortler told The Daily Signal. “While these reports still need to be reviewed, it is a remarkable number of adverse events for what should be a niche, otherwise rarely clinically indicated, class of drugs.”
Yet the FDA often dismisses these reports as “not confirmed,” “not establishing causation,” “no definitive proof,” and “not establishing a rate of occurrence.”
Gortler slammed the FDA for hypocrisy, noting that the agency relied heavily on the reporting system’s data to declare that hydroxychloroquine was unsafe after finding only a few hundred reports of adverse events.
According to his analysis, AERS reports 70,000 adverse reactions to GnRH agonists, 2,510 of them involving children age 14 or younger.
Adverse reactions include hallucinations, bone disorders, cardiac arrest, abdominal pain, migraine, mood alterations, a clot in the heart, pelvic pain, seizures, abnormal skin odor, and blindness. Among patients ages 4 to 13, a total of 21 had thoughts of suicide.
An FDA official admitted that a study found “puberty blockers” led to increased thoughts of suicide among minors, but the official recommended approval for the drugs, anyway.
Eunuchs
As if these side effects weren’t enough, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s Standards of Care 8—the document activists present as the gold standard for transgender “health care”—endorses the idea of “eunuch” as a gender identity and claims that castration is “medically necessary” for those who identify as eunuchs.
WPATH describes “eunuchs” as “individuals assigned male at birth” who “wish to eliminate masculine physical features, masculine genitals, or genital functioning.” Because eunuchs “wish for a body that is compatible with their eunuch identity,” WPATH recommends “castration to better align their bodies with their gender identity.”
The state of Alabama submitted a “friend of the court” brief highlighting this issue in the Skrmetti case now before the Supreme Court. The brief notes that WPATH leaders admitted “that no diagnostic manual recognizes ‘eunuch’ as a medical or psychiatric diagnosis'” and that many authors of the Standards of Care 8 didn’t even read the chapter and some criticized it internally.
“No matter: The guideline the United States says States must adopt officially recommends castration for men and boys who identify as ‘eunuch,'” Alabama’s brief notes.
Where does the idea of “eunuch” as a gender identity come from? SOC-8’s own archive includes thousands of stories that “focus on the eroticization of child castration” and “involve the sadistic sexual abuse of children.” Yes, it seems this “gender identity” traces back to the most disgusting forms of pedophilia.
Perverse Incentives of ‘Gender-Affirming Care’
How did such a horrific ideology capture the American medical establishment?
Jennifer Bilek has done yeoman’s work unearthing how billionaires who made their fortune in medicine have backed the LGBTQ movement, particularly the “T.”
Transgender “treatments” also reap rewards for Big Pharma. When a male patient takes cross-sex hormones to appear female, that’s a lifelong prescription. When patients get surgery to remove their sex organs and replace them with a facsimile of the opposite sex’s organs, that’s not just a one-and-done surgery. Not only are there often complications—which can be deadly—but these new organs often require grotesque forms of maintenance. All of this keeps patients coming back.
Although Tennessee’s law should have gone into effect without a legal battle in the courts, the oral arguments at the Supreme Court will shine a spotlight on this horrific scandal.
According to recent polling, 72% of Americans oppose these grotesque medical experiments on kids. This case gives Rice, who will argue it as Tennessee’s solicitor general, the chance to show why most Americans are right.
Correction: This article has been updated to correctly reflect the gender identity of the ACLU lawyer.