WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — 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.”
Last December, U.S. Secretary of Health & Human Services (HHS) Xavier Becerra submitted written answers to Republican Rep. Mary Miller of Illinois stating that HHS “is focused on ensuring that care is not stigmatized or denied based on a youth’s gender identity as consistent with the law,” reiterating that “medical, surgical, mental health and non-medical” procedures to “affirm” patients’ gender dysphoria are “supportive form[s] of health care” by “aligning their outward, physical traits with their gender identity,” that “all children and adults” should be afforded these “treatments,” and declaring that “[p]ayers, both public and private, should cover” them. Becerra refused to disavow that stance in congressional testimony last week.
On Friday, following the murder of six Christians including children by a transgender radical, President Joe Biden claimed that a “wave of discriminatory State laws is targeting transgender youth, terrifying families and hurting kids who are not hurting anyone,” and that an “epidemic of violence against transgender women and girls, in particular women and girls of color, has taken lives far too soon.”
For years, left-wing activists have claimed that gender-confused Americans are the targets of an ongoing violence epidemic indicating systemic hostility to them. The LGBT pressure group Human Rights Campaign (HRC) claims that 2022 saw “at least 38 transgender people fatally shot or killed by other violent means.”
However, only two of the cases listed by HRC identify any possibility that the victim’s “gender identity” was a motivating factor; two others were victims in the Club Q shooting last November, which was initially presented as a hate crime before word got out that the perpetrator was himself “non-binary.” The rest of the deaths appear to be a mix of random violence, crimes motivated by unrelated issues, or the result of relationships and police altercations stemming from victims’ own mental-health issues.
For perspective, 38 is less than one percent of the 22,900 “murder and nonnegligent manslaughter cases” in the U.S. in 2021 — far lower than the numbers of murders broken down by victims’ specific races.