Rachel Levine speaks on stage during the "Tackling the Youth Mental-Health Crisis" panel for The Atlantic Festival 2024 on September 19. (Jemal Countess/Getty Images for The Atlantic)
“Knowing that there is little/no evidence about [the sex reassignment of] children/adolescents is helpful,” - a Biden administration HHS official.
I have to say that the news this week has made me reconsider voting for Kamala Harris.
What news? I’ve no doubt many of you will roll your eyes, think I’m off on another tangent, obsessed with something trivial — or, in Harris’ formulation, a “remote” issue. But the discovery from a lawsuit against the State of Alabama over its ban on the medical sex reassignment of children has left me reeling. It shows a staggering level of bad faith from the transqueer lobby, and, also, from Rachel Levine — the Assistant Secretary for Health at HHS. Read the amicus brief here. Everything in this piece is based on it.
The broad contours laid out in the brief were already known. But, with discovery, the specific details of private, internal emails make this medical scandal even more vivid. We knew that the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) commissioned its own version of the Cass Review by asking a team at Johns Hopkins to conduct a systematic review of the evidence for “gender medicine” for children. But we now find the conclusion. An internal email from the Hopkins team concluded that there was “little to no evidence about children and adolescents.” Many WPATH members, we discover, also knew the studies would “reveal little or no evidence and put us in an untenable position in terms of affecting policy or winning lawsuits.”
In other words, WPATH knows full well that their transing of children has little to no medical evidence behind it. So when Johns Hopkins presented the review, WPATH instantly buried it, suppressing publication of all the studies but two. Other contributors drew on their experiences as expert witnesses to suggest removing “language such as ‘insufficient evidence,’ ‘limited data,’ etc.” that could ‘empower’ groups ‘trying to claim that gender-affirming interventions are experimental.’” SOC-8 — the latest Standards of Care from WPATH — was therefore knowingly based on concealing the truth, and written for lawsuits, not patients. Not medicine. Ideology.
And all along, this allegedly professional group, WPATH, conferred with Levine at HHS. They gave her an early embargoed version of SOC-8, with lower age limits for some treatments, and her office responded, horrified. They feared that the listing of “specific minimum ages for treatment … under 18, will result in devastating legislation for trans care”:
Levine “was very concerned that having ages (mainly for surgery) will affect access to healthcare for trans youth ... and she and the Biden administration worried that having ages in the document will make matters worse.”
So they removed the age limits! For these procedures, among others: removal of both ovaries; double mastectomy; turning a girl’s clitoris into a micro-penis; surgically removing a boy’s penis; surgical and chemical castration of boys; and permanent removal of the capacity for orgasm for both boys and girls. I repeat: permanent removal of the capacity for orgasm for both boys and girls.
But this never happens, we were told! Another lie. We now discover, from insurance claims, that at least 14,000 minors have been transed either chemically or surgically in the last five years. At a minimum.
Even WPATH (which considers eunuchs a gender identity requiring castration) balked at Levine’s intervention at first. One SOC-8 author wrote: “I don’t know how I feel about allowing US politics to dictate international professional clinical guidelines.” Another wrote: “I think it’s safe to say that we all agree and feel frustrated (at minimum) that these political issues are even a thing and are impacting our own discussions and strategies.” But they did it anyway. Marci Bowers, WPATH’s president at the time, privately confessed to putting ideology before science: “it is a balancing act between what I feel to be true and what we need to say.” Read that one more time. It really amounts to: “We need to lie to keep this transing industry going.” So they continued to deceive distressed parents and children.
Systematic reviews of medical practices abide by a simple rule: to limit conflicts of interest between the reviewers and the practices. That’s why the Brits asked Hillary Cass to review the evidence: she was a renowned pediatrician but had personally never practiced transing kids. But WPATH actually excluded almost anyone without a conflict of interest! One doctor admitted at his deposition that “most participants in the SOC-8 process had financial and/or nonfinancial conflicts of interest.” Bowers even believed it was “important for someone to be an advocate for [transitioning] treatments before the guidelines were created.” So it was rigged from the start.
The Johns Hopkins team also sent its data to the Biden administration. HHS, where Levine holds court, responded: “Knowing that there is little/no evidence about children and adolescents is helpful.” So the Biden-Harris people were told there was no evidence for it as well! And they then doubled down on “gender-affirming care.”
Bowers — who famously performed multiple surgeries on Jazz Jennings — publicly insists that “gender affirming care” for children is settled science and the only opponents are bigots. But in a private email to other WPATH members, we find she knows only too well the human cost of her abuse of children. Discovery in a lawsuit is a powerful thing.
I’m still absorbing the contents of this email from Bowers:
Like my [female genital mutilation] patients who had never experienced orgasm, the puberty blockaded kids did not know what orgasm might feel like and most experienced sensation to their genitalia no differently than if it had been a finger or a portion of their thigh....
My concern culminated during a pre-surgical evaluation on a young trans girl from a highly educated family whose daughter responded when I asked about orgasm, “what is that?” The parents countered with, “oh honey, didn’t they teach you that in school?” I felt that our informed consent process might not be enough.... It occurred to me that how could anyone truly know how important sexual function was to a relationship, to happiness?
It isn’t an easy question to answer.
It is, in fact, very easy to answer. Bowers did so herself:
Every single child who was — er, adolescent — who is truly blocked at Tanner stage 2 [aged 9-11] has never experienced orgasm. … It’s important in relationships. And I know that from my work with female genital mutilation survivors, that the lack of being able to be intimate with a partner is very important. And so this is what really raised the red flag for me.
Let me offer my answer to the question Bowers raised. It is despicable to take a child who has never gone through puberty and remove from them any possibility of orgasm for life — before they can possibly know what an orgasm feels like. Evil. Bowers admits it’s no different than FGM in its effect. With FGM, much of the pressure to mutilate a child comes from the parents’ religion. The difference between Iran — where they trans young gays and lesbians en masse — and America, is that in one, the parents’ religion is fundamentalist Islam, and in America, it’s wokeness.
And that wokeness overwhelmingly targets gay kids. In Britain they became the vast majority of the children sent for sex reassignment, before it was banned outside a clinical trial. And we know that these “doctors” have no way of objectively knowing whether a child is actually trans or gay or depressed or autistic — and yet they also oppose any broad mental health assessment of a child, if that child has simply declared himself or herself the opposite sex.
This is not forgivable. It demands accountability. These “doctors” know full well that their experiments have no basis in science, that thousands of gay detransitioners have had their lives and bodies destroyed, and yet continue to experiment on children, without knowing if they are actually trans, of if they are gay, or bi, or autistic, or in a social contagion. Worse, every allegedly gay group — GLAAD, HRC, Trevor Project, Lambda Legal, ACLU, et al. — supports this as an ideological transqueer “necessity” and will allow no debate and no dissent. Most gays have no idea what’s actually going on — by design. The reason GLAAD tries to intimidate reporters on this subject is because they know that the truth would devastate their arguments. They can count on the gay press to be silent. But the MSM rattles them.
Levine should resign. She intervened in a medical process for entirely political reasons, putting children at risk, destroying all safeguards for them. So should the heads of every so-called gay group that have pushed and lied about “gender-affirming care.” WPATH’s former president, Marci Bowers (she was replaced on October 1) is another matter. It seems to me that a doctor who privately doubts if her child patients can give meaningful consent and operates on them anyway is not a doctor, but a sociopath. She has violated the Hippocratic oath and admitted practicing the equivalent of FGM on children. FGM is illegal in federal law and in 41 states if the girl is under 18. “Gender-affirming” FGM, thanks to Rachel Levine, is fully legal without any lower age limits.
I remember very well how all my gender insecurities as a gay kid vanished after puberty. So I urge any gay man or lesbian who, as a child or teen, was barred from this basic human right to be brave and start the lawsuits. It’s the only way. No gay men or lesbians will come to your aid. Kamala Harris and the gay groups sure won’t. “LGBTQIA+” billionaires will sacrifice any number of gay kids if it means not being called “transphobic” at a dinner party.
I look around what was once my community and see such incredible cowardice and indoctrination that it makes me despair at what we have become. A movement that began as a crusade for sexual liberation is now sterilizing gay and trans children and removing their capacity for orgasm forever. A movement that began with defending gay men and lesbians is now sacrificing a generation of gay kids at the behest of trans extremists and critical gender theory.
Forgive me for the passion. But this amicus brief set my head and heart aflame. What has happened — what is still happening — is the worst attack on gay kids since Anita Bryant.
But this time, the danger is coming from inside the house.
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a paid subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: a really fun chat with Tina Brown on the election, media, and so much more; my take on Sinwar’s death; reader dissents over my views on the presidential race; seven notable quotes from the week in news; 19 pieces on Substack we recommend on a variety of topics; a Mental Health Break of butterflies; a bucolic window from California; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
From a new subscriber:
I’ve been a fan of yours since the Daily Dish was a source of comfort in the days after Sept 11th. Ever since, there have been many twists in the trail as your political views evolved. There were many times where your lost me, especially your passion for Obama, but I always returned. The draw is always the intimacy — your honesty, and the working out of your views in real time.
Sinwar And Proportionality
Read my reaction to the death of the fundamentalist sociopath here, for paid subscribers.
Back On The Dishcast: Tina Brown
The inimitable Tina Brown revived Tatler, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, before turning to the web and The Daily Beast (where I worked for her). She’s written three books, the latest of which we covered on the Dishcast a few years ago, The Palace Papers. This week she launched a substack, Fresh Hell: Tina Brown’s Diaries — “observations, rants, news obsessions, and human exchanges.” And yes, this chat really is unplugged. We had a lot of fun.
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on the personal cruelty of Donald Trump, and why politicians in the UK are tougher than American ones. That link also takes you to commentary over last week’s episode with Walter Kirn, and many readers keep debating the presidential race. I also touch on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ treatment of Israel — and me at The Atlantic.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Sam Harris for our quadrennial chat before Election Day, the return of the great John Gray, Damon Linker on the election results, Anderson Cooper on grief, Christine Rosen on humanness in a digital world, and Mary Matalin on anything but politics. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
If there is anything more embarrassing than Howard Stern and Stephen Colbert “fan-girling” over Harris in their interviews, it’s you fan-girling over a candidate you say you’re voting against. Like when Trump describes his word salads as “the weave.” You really think that’s clever? When I think of “the weave” in relation to Trump, I think of something else coming off the top of his head. It’s like a thatched-roof cottage up there.
Is Trump really that popular and Harris really that unpopular? I wouldn’t doubt it. After all, Trump was unpopular enough that he lost to Biden even though Republicans made some down-ballot gains in 2020. But she’s certainly not as repellent as Hillary Clinton, and neither is Joe Biden, though you seem to be actively repelled by both of them while you almost seem to admire Trump’s skill (or chutzpah) and obviously admire Vance.
Read my response to that dissent, along with a few others, here (for paid subscribers). More are on the pod page. As always, please keep the criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as a less-racialized electorate, tax credits for kidneys, and subsidized IVF. Below are a few examples, followed by a brand new substack:
A reader whose emails we post frequently, John McMillian, gets published in Persuasion by reviewing Am I Racist? — “acontroversial film that makes its points but fuels polarization.”
Mega-selling author James Patterson makes the move to Substack.
Here’s a list of the substacks we recommend in general — call it a blogroll. If you have any suggestions for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The deadline for entries is Wednesday night at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a free month subscription if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the contest). Contest archive is here. Happy sleuthing!
The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. From a sleuth in last week’s contest:
I know only two things about Slovenia. One is that Melania Trump is from there ... so perhaps this is one of those occasional tie-ins between the VFYW and the news (i.e. her new book).
A bronze replica depicting US First Lady Melania Trump, made by US artist Brad Downey, is seen after its unveiling in a field near her hometown of Sevnica, Slovenia on September 15, 2020. The statue of Melania is a replica of an original wooden statue made by Slovenian artist Ales “Maxi” Zupevc, which was inaugurated on July 4, 2019 and later burned by unknown perpetrators on July 5, 2020. (Ales Beno/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
The other thing I know is that the contractor who gut-renovated our kitchen a few years ago was also Slovenian, as were nearly all his workers (primarily family members). And they were amazing: on time, on budget, no drama, delightful to work with, and all work approved by both the condo board and the NYC Department of Buildings. It’s hard to fully appreciate the enormity of that accomplishment if you don’t live in Manhattan!
