The Wall Street Journal reports that “Monday [January 1st], the Pentagon began welcoming transgender service members after the Justice Department withdrew its appeals Friday of lower court rulings.” The courts had blocked President Trump’s order that transgender individuals may not serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military.
Rogue courts again usurp the president’s constitutional powers
On October 30th, a district court judge in DC, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, ordered a return to the Obama policy welcoming them in the service, according to the Associated Press.
“The lawsuit was filed in August by the National Center for Lesbian Rights and GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders on behalf of eight transgender individuals,” the AP added.
On November 21st, U.S. District Judge Garbis in Maryland followed up with a ruling that “prevent[s] the administration from denying funding for sex-reassignment surgeries,” reported The Washington Post.
Evidently, a policy set forth by the previous administration cannot be reversed by a subsequent administration, in the opinion of the radical lower federal courts. These courts have effectively nullified Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution, which says, “The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” Since the DOJ (inexplicably) withdrew its appeals the SCOTUS will not get to rule on the constitutionality of this new legal overreach.
We must now presume that no power supersedes that of the Judiciary Branch. But having that power does not render the courts wise enough to use it. Both district courts alluded to the suffering uncertainty wreaks on the transgender individuals, who don’t know if they will be allowed to serve or allowed to continue serving and continue with reassignment treatments in the case of those already in the service. But what about the viability of the military, which must pay for costly transition surgery—and often, detransition surgery?
Creating more transsexuals
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More important is the portion of the transgender iceberg that lies below the surface. Why are we hearing about transgender individuals so often if they’re only a tiny segment of the population? Well, it seems the Left has come up with a new way upend the world: increase the number of transgenders in society.
Nothing could be more deranged and depraved than the Left’s drive to confuse our children about their sexuality, and to push an irrevocable, devastating solution to that confusion.
Board certified pediatrician Michelle Cretella writes in The Daily Signal that she has “witnessed an upending of the medical consensus on the nature of gender identity. What doctors once treated as a mental illness, the medical community now largely affirms and even promotes as normal.
“Pediatric ‘gender clinics’ are considered elite centers for affirming children who are distressed by their biological sex.” That means giving hormones to physically healthy children, with zero scientific proof of safety and efficacy. Known side effects range from cognitive decline to testicular cancer.
Medicine takes a turn toward the Mengelesque
The transition-affirming “experts” believe parents should treat their children as the gender they self-identify with, “and place them on puberty blockers around age 11 or 12 if they are gender dysphoric”—the so-called Dutch protocol.
“If by age 16, the children still insist that they are trapped in the wrong body, they are placed on cross-sex hormones, and biological girls may obtain a double mastectomy,” Dr. Critella reveals.
Genital reassignment surgery is not advised before the age of 18 although, she says, “some surgeons argue against this.”
This is by no means settled science. Dr. Critella reveals that in the summer of 2016, the federal government said it “would not require Medicare and Medicaid to cover transition-affirming procedures for children or adults because medical experts at the DHS found the risks were often too high, and the benefits too unclear.” Organizations like the American College of Pediatricians and others also disagree with the approach.
Nevertheless, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health claims “—without any evidence—that these procedures are ‘safe,’” she writes.
Two leading pediatric associations, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Pediatric Endocrine Society “have followed in lockstep,” she says, though the PES admits “the transition-affirming protocol is based on low evidence.”
Dr. Critella asserts that “Gender identity is malleable, especially in young children. Even the American Psychological Association’s Handbook of Sexuality and Psychology “admits that prior to the widespread promotion of transition affirmation, 75 to 95 percent of pre-pubertal children who were distressed by their biological sex eventually outgrew that distress.”
Dr. Kenneth Zucker, a Toronto child psychologist, conducted a study of 109 boys ranging in ages 3 to 12 who were suffering from gender identity disorder. By age 20, only 12% of study participants wanted to continue identifying as female.
Dr, Critella presents more inconvenient facts. The notion that a person can be “trapped in a body” of the opposite gender has no basis in science. Identical twins have identical DNA, yet when one twin is uneasy with its gender, 72/% of the time, the other twin is at home with its sex, according to the largest study of transsexual identical twins.
But, thanks to the campaign to popularize the protocol, “the number of children claiming distress over their gender—and their persistence over time—has dramatically increased.” In the UK, she reports, the Gender Identity Development Service alone “has seen a 2,000 percent increase in referrals since 2009.”
In America, Sign of the Times.net reports, “The American Society of Plastic Surgeons found a nearly 20 percent increase in vaginoplasties, phalloplasties, top surgery and contouring operations in just the first year of reporting.
Potential for serious side effects
The authors of a study in The New Atlantis report that puberty blockers can cause testicular cancer in males. The researchers state that “the evidence for the safety and efficacy of puberty suppression is thin, based more on the subjective judgments of clinicians than on rigorous empirical evidence…. It is, in this sense, still experimental.
Refuting the selling point that puberty blocking is fully reversible, they also revealed that “there are virtually no published reports … of adolescents withdrawing from puberty-suppressing drugs and then resuming the normal pubertal development typical for their sex.”
That’s because these adolescents generally take the next step, of receiving the sex hormones of the opposite sex at age 16. They are also likely to proceed to surgical reassignment two years later.
Plus, Dr. Critella states what should be obvious: “There is a serious ethical problem in allowing irreversible, life-changing procedures to be performed on minors who are too young themselves to give valid consent.”
These procedures can have dire consequences.
She asserts that “taking puberty blockers at age 12 or younger, followed by cross-sex hormones, sterilizes a child.” And that studies of adults show that “the risks of cross-sex hormones include, but are not limited to, cardiac disease, high blood pressure, blood clots, strokes, diabetes, and cancers.”
Critella charges that medical professionals “are using the myth that people are born transgender to justify engaging in massive, uncontrolled, and unconsented experimentation on children who have a psychological condition that would otherwise resolve after puberty in the vast majority of cases. She brands transition-affirming protocol “child abuse.”
People who undergo gender reassignment often want to change back
Walt Heyer, a writer who is himself a transgender, wrote an article titled, “Pushing Kids into Transgenderism Is Medical Malpractice” in The Federalist. He reveals:
In Washington state, public schools will begin teaching gender expression to kindergarteners in fall 2017, under newly approved health education learning standards. The gay advocacy network GLSEN received a grant from the federal Centers for Disease Control in 2011 for $1.425 million over five years to promote the LGBT agenda in public schools at taxpayers’ expense.
He accuses LGBT activists of “infiltrating the curriculum in our nation’s public schools,” in order to “groom the next generation of participants.”
In the article, he quotes an email from a man in his thirties relating that he “began transitioning to become a female in [his] early teens.” After ten years—and receiving therapy to “overcome some childhood trauma issues”—he realized he had been sold a bill of goods: that “transgender feelings were permanent, immutable, physically deep-seated in my brain and could NEVER change.”
He told Heyer he no longer had those feelings and was positive he wanted to transition back to being a male.
“My story is similar,” Heyer writes. “Changing my gender was an empty promise, a temporary reprieve that didn’t fix anything. After much psychological counseling, I came to see that my dream of becoming a girl had simply been an escape to cope with deep pain from childhood events.”
After spending eight years as a woman and “much psychological counseling,” Heyer detransitioned back to being male. He reveals that many transgenders are disillusioned after surgery, and realize that gender cannot be changed, no matter how many operations one has.
The New Atlantis study quoted above also noted that “there … have been no controlled clinical trials comparing the outcomes of puberty suppression to the outcomes of alternative therapeutic approaches.”
Shouldn’t there have been, before subjecting children to what is essentially experimental and irreversible treatment?
In another Federalist article, Heyer says “The attempted suicide rate for transgender people has remained above 40 percent for many years.” He goes on to say that doctors give children puberty blockers, followed up by cross-gender hormones, then “irreversible genital surgery”— “all without having long-term systematic studies of the effectiveness of such invasive treatment.”
That’s because transgender research is biased in favor of reporting success, he says. He reveals that it’s common for long-term transgender studies to lose track of those being monitored—as many as 90 percent are “lost to follow-up,” according to reviewers. He cites the University of Birmingham’s “aggressive research intelligence facility (Arif), which advises the UK’s National Health Service about evidence-based treatments.
Arif found no robust scientific evidence that gender reassignment surgery is clinically effective” and that “most of the medical research on gender reassignment was poorly designed, which skewed the results to suggest that sex change operations are beneficial.”
In a review of over 100 medical studies of post-op transsexuals, which was reported on in The Guardian, Arif “warned that results of many gender reassignment studies are unsound because researchers lost track of more than half of the participants.” The review supplied a shocking example: “In a five-year study of 727 post-operative transsexuals published last year, 495 people dropped out for unknown reasons.”
Yet LGBTQ activists claim post-op remorse to be very rare.
The Guardian states that “research from the US and Holland suggests that up to a fifth of patients regret changing sex.” Walt Heyer’s website sexchangeregret.com features a number of such people.
He also wrote an article in The Daily Signal, titled, “I Was Once Transgender. Why I Think Trump Made the Right Decision for the Military.” In it he wrote: Transitioning can be expensive up to $130,000 per person…. Failed “sex change surgeries” are not uncommon and will drive up the cost to care for the military transgender population above the projected $3-4 billion 10-year cost.”
Sedition by lawfare
The legal decisions usurping the Commander in Chief from running the military are only the latest in an avalanche of lawsuits by blue states that have triggered a constitutional crisis.
In the Garbis decision cited above, 15 states filed amici briefs. Washington State’s AG Ferguson has sued 18 times. California sued the Admin 24 times over immigration, sanctuary cities and more. New York’s Gov. Cuomo even plans to sue over the Tax reform bill, which is now law. Dozens of states have sued the Administration over changes it has made—even its ending Obama’s DACA, which an appeals court ruled was beyond the president’s power.
It was not the Framers’ intent for the Judiciary Branch to systematically undo policy changes of a new president after an election.
What will it take for Congress to use its plenary powers over the federal courts to bring them to heel? The president should call on Congress to do that, or he—and the voters—will continue to be stymied at every turn.
Tip: Be sure to read the article linked in the last paragraph.
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