Biden’s Transgender Mandate Goes Down in Flames

Biden’s Transgender Mandate Goes Down in Flames

– By Howard Sierer –

Last year I excoriated the Biden administration for its controversial and anti-scientific “transgender mandate” requiring doctors and hospitals to participate in gender transition on demand. I’m happy to report that the courts have shot down this latest progressive fad, which espouses irreversible changes to the bodies of minor girls without their parent’s consent or even knowledge.

Kowtowing to woke progressive activists, Pres. Biden signed an executive order on June 15th affirming federal support for gender transition for underage children. He parroted the activist line: “Let’s be clear: Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time. There is no room for compromise regarding basic human rights.” His administration claims that using puberty blockers and sex-change hormones on children is “evidence-based.”

This claim is completely at odds with the Dutch Protocol also used by national health authorities in Sweden, the UK, France, Finland, Australia, and New Zealand, all of whom have years more gender transition experience and who require lengthy psychological prescreening of children before prescribing puberty-blocking drugs.

What the Dutch experts knew then, and what researchers worldwide know now with even greater confidence, is that minors seeking transition tend to have extraordinarily high rates of mental health problems, including anxiety, depression, attention deficit and eating disorders, and autism. Earlier this year, the UK announced it would shut down its government-run youth gender transition clinic following a report identifying the risks of its “unquestioning affirmative approach.”

The usually-woke New York Times recently broke from progressive ranks, observing “emerging evidence of potential harm” caused by the puberty blockers that are typically prescribed as the first step to gender transition. The Times noted that they can lead to dangerously low bone density and commit children to the transition path, even when they otherwise would choose to stop.

For the last six years, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has been ignoring the science, ignoring European experience and ignoring common sense by pushing its controversial “transgender mandate.” HHS threatened religious doctors and hospitals with multimillion dollar penalties unless they performed gender transitions in violation of their conscience and medical judgment.

A Catholic hospital system and the Christian Medical and Dental Associations fought back by filing a lawsuit, Franciscan Alliance v. Becerra. A Texas federal judge found for the doctors. The Biden administration appealed but the doctors won again with a unanimous verdict in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in August 2022.

The administration’s next step would have been to head to the Supreme Court. But the deadline to appeal to the Court passed in November 2022. Have the progressive bureaucrats in HHS given up? Hardly.

To avoid a Supreme Court ruling that would apply nationwide, the Biden Administration has proposed a new rule that would apply the transgender mandate only to healthcare professionals not covered by the Fifth Circuit’s injunction or that of any other future circuit’s ruling.

This legal maneuver may require doctors to incur the expense of filing and litigating cases in each of the country’s thirteen circuits, pitting them against the federal government’s seemingly inexhaustible resources. For example, a similar case, Sisters of Mercy v. Becerra, involving other religious doctors and hospitals is pending in the Eighth Circuit.

Medical professionals who refuse to participate in gender transition should enjoy the same protections as those who refuse to participate in abortions under a law known as the Church Amendments. Interestingly, the Department of Health and Human Services issued rules to implement abortion protections for medical personnel and hospitals but is now threatening those who refuse to participate in gender transition.

HHS ignores the fact that applying its gender transition mandate to unwilling doctors and hospitals is a violation of their civil rights. If the bureaucrats persist, it’s time for Congress to safeguard underage young women who are being lured into gender transition as a solution to their anxieties and to protect medical professionals who refuse to participate in the travesty.

I’m on board with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat who predicted, “Within not too long a span of time, not only conservatives but most liberals will recognize that we have been running an experiment on trans-identifying youth without good or certain evidence, inspired by ideological motives rather than scientific rigor, in a way that future generations will regard as a grave medical-political scandal.”

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