VICTOR JOECKS: Child castration ban goes before SCOTUS

Castrating and sterilizing healthy children is child abuse, not medical care. Tragically, many Democrat politicians and leftist activists support it.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in U.S. v. Skrmetti. At issue is a Tennessee law that outlaws gender mutilation surgeries, puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for children. It applies to boys and girls who say they are transgender.

In other words, if a 12-year-old boy claims to be a girl, Tennessee doctors aren’t allowed to prescribe him drugs that prevent him from going through puberty. Taking these drugs can cause infertility and hurt bone density. Nor can Tennessee doctors cut off his penis and testicles to form a fake vagina. That’s castration.

If the government conducted such surgeries on a convicted rapist, it would be considered cruel and unusual punishment. Yet, many Democrats want doctors to be free to perform that butchery on a confused child.

This position isn’t just held by a few people on the fringes of the Democratic Party. The ACLU is running point on this lawsuit. President Joe Biden’s Justice Department filed suit against the law.

“Efforts to criminalize supportive medical care for transgender kids (and) to ban transgender children from playing sports … corrode our nation’s values,” Biden said in a 2022 proclamation.

“Biden officials pushed to remove age limits for trans surgery, documents show,” The New York Times reported in June. They worried that age minimums “could fuel growing political opposition to such treatments,” the Times wrote.

Read that again. Biden officials aren’t worried that a 15-year-old is having her healthy breasts cut off. They’re worried the public may oppose a 15-year-old having her healthy breasts cut off.

This is all so extreme that it’s hard to process, especially when the propaganda press regurgitates deceptive euphemisms such as “gender-affirming care.” In October, Park MacDougald wrote in Tablet Magazine about something he aptly labeled “Democrats’ insanity defense.” A GOP staffer on a congressional campaign told him “that aspects of Democratic governance are simply too insane for voters to find credible, even when they are documented as official U.S. government policy.”

The source told MacDougald, “When you outline the Democratic agenda, you have to water it down, because in both polling and focus groups, people just don’t believe it. They are critical of things like boys in girls’ sports, but they tune out stuff about schools not informing parents about transitioning their children. They just don’t believe it’s true. It can’t be.”

It is. In October, the group Do No Harm released a database tracking the number of sex-change related procedures in the United States. From 2019 to 2023, nearly 14,000 children received them, it reported. That included “5,747 sex change surgeries performed on children,” with 39 of them in Nevada. Those numbers are likely an undercount, too.

To the many reasonable Democrat voters who oppose this barbarism, please speak up. And stop voting for candidates who support allowing these irreversible procedures for children and men competing in women’s sports.

No one should want to live in a country where opposing child castration is a partisan issue. But as this Supreme Court case shows, that’s what it has become.

Victor Joecks’ column appears in the Opinion section each Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Contact him at vjoecks@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4698. Follow @victorjoecks on X.