SAUNDERS: What does science have to do with transgender politics? Nothing

WASHINGTON — The Biden White House put gender politics over children when a bureaucrat intervened in what was supposed to be a scientifically based process to determine standards of care for treating gender-dysphoric minors.

As the Daily Caller first reported, Admiral Rachel Levine, who is a transgender woman and assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, pushed an international panel to remove age-related recommendations for teens who want to undergo hormonal treatments or have their breasts removed, a procedure commonly known as “top surgery.”

Draft guidelines for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health released in 2021, The New York Times reported, had recommended lowering the minimum age to 14 for hormonal treatments, 15 for mastectomies, 16 for breast augmentation and 17 for genital surgeries or hysterectomies. But after Levine chimed in, the age-limit recommendations were dropped.

We only know about this because of litigation involving psychologist James Cantor, who warned that WPATH saw “evidence-based” medicine as a threat to its “policy goals,” as the Daily Caller reported.

“It’s clear that Levine asked them to drop the age requirements for explicitly political reasons,” Jay Richards, research fellow and director for the Heritage Foundation’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society, told me.

The good news: The phenomenon is rare. According to Reuters, 282 American teens had top surgery paid for by insurance in 2021 — even as the number of diagnoses for gender dysphoria among children ages 6 to 17 nearly tripled from 2017 to 2021.

If the same procedures were happening in Third World countries, Washington policy wonks would refer to the practice as “mutilation.” Here, advocates call it “gender-affirming care” — a classic example of doublespeak.

According to The New York Times, most transgender adolescents who receive medical interventions are prescribed puberty blocking drugs or hormones, not surgeries. So there’s that.

But it’s still an experiment — a medical experiment that is being performed on teenagers. For that reason, the U.K., Sweden and Norway are among the countries that have backtracked on allowing minors to receive puberty blockers.

Where’s the science? While the left prides itself on being pro-science, Team Biden acted without any serious research or reliable data. “The radical activists have been allowed to run the show while Biden’s been sleeping,” Richards observed.

It shouldn’t be this way. Hilary Cass, a pediatrician commissioned by the National Health Service of England to review treatments, told the British Medical Journal, “I can’t think of another area of pediatric care where we give young people potentially irreversible treatments and have no idea what happens to them in adulthood.”

“Things feel really urgent in your teens, but actually, when you get older, you realize they weren’t as urgent” as you thought they were, she added.

We all know this.

We also know, as Richards said, that “they are willing to change their guidelines based on politics.”

I don’t understand why the judgment-impaired Levine even has this job.

“What I hope happens next is there are congressional hearings and Rachel Levine is asked under oath” how the age guidelines disappeared, Richards added.

Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.