Biden Officials Pushed to Remove Age Limits for Trans Surgery

[IwantToRetire]

Newly released emails from an influential group issuing transgender medical guidelines indicate that U.S. health officials lobbied to remove age minimums for surgery in minors because of concerns over political fallout.

Email excerpts from members of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health recount how staff for Adm. Rachel Levine, assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services and herself a transgender woman, urged them to drop the proposed limits from the group’s guidelines and apparently succeeded.

The email excerpts released this week shed light on possible reasons for those guideline changes, and highlight Admiral Levine’s role as a top point person on transgender issues in the Biden administration.

The excerpts are legal filings in a federal lawsuit challenging Alabama’s ban on gender-affirming care.

One excerpt from an unnamed member of the WPATH guideline development group recalled a conversation with Sarah Boateng, then serving as Admiral Levine’s chief of staff: “She is confident, based on the rhetoric she is hearing in D.C., and from what we have already seen, that these specific listings of ages, under 18, will result in devastating legislation for trans care. She wonders if the specific ages can be taken out.”

Another email stated that Admiral Levine “was very concerned that having ages (mainly for surgery) will affect access to care for trans youth and maybe adults, too. Apparently the situation in the U.S.A. is terrible and she and the Biden administration worried that having ages in the document will make matters worse. She asked us to remove them.”

Full article here https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/25/health/transgender-minors-surgeries.html

Can also be read at https://archive.ph/4i25G

And that's from the New York Times! I wonder if, as a result, the Guardian will feature it too. What is an trans-identified Admiral in a uniform doing in the US Health and Services department as opposed to the Navy anyway?..oh wait! Of course..ensuring transactivist demands are embedded in social and health policy!

Thank you for link.

What’s really awful about that are the age minimums were already too low imo. They wanted to allow a child of any age to have a mastectomy, I started puberty at 11, by 12 I had started developing a chest, I knew girls at school who had to wear proper bras by year 7 (11yr olds). Who in the hell thinks performing a mastectomy on an 11yr old barring for medical reasons would be fine. Most parents avoid surgery for their children like the plague unless they really need to.

It’s revolting and it’s sinister, the complete lack of interest in the wellbeing of children who have literally no clue what they are doing is sickening.

Just for the record -- this is simply how the US government works. Dr. Levine isn't in the Navy, but the commissioned corps of the Public Health Service. The surgeon-general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, is a vice-admiral in the PHS.

@Litterpicking

What is an trans-identified Admiral in a uniform doing in the US Health and Services department as opposed to the Navy anyway?

The answer to this is that Levine never served in the navy, or any branch of the military in a sense that people would recognise.

Levine was a member of a branch of public health advisors that happens to be "uniformed".

Thank you for enlightening me.

There’s more to this:

What the NYT left out:

WPATH prevented Johns Hopkins from publishing these reviews because they didn’t come to WPATH’s preferred conclusions. WPATH hid this very important information from the entire world, then published standards of care saying an evidence review was impossible. And a government agency knew this!

https://www.broadview.news/p/the-scandal-goes-all-the-way-to-the

Don’t be so mean to Rachel. She is just being her true self, and that’s a good thing, right? If a few kids get hurt in the process, well, that’s collateral damage, they know all about that in the Armed Forces, why do you think they invented the term ‘friendly fire’.

Acceptance without question, please. No debate.

Yesterday re the transing of children, on the David Tennant thread,
another poster posted this important observation by Helen Joyce;

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2023/07/19/helen_joyce_the_parents_of_trans_children_will_not_be_able_to_move_on.html

HELEN JOYCE: Something you may not have thought of is that there are a lot of people who can't move on from this. And that's the people who have transitioned their own children. So those people are going to be like the Japanese soldiers who were on Pacific islands and didn't know the war was over. They've got to fight forever. This is another reason why this is the worst, worst, worst social contagion that we'll ever have experienced.

Helen spoke very movingly about this, I thought. Her distress on this point is very evident.

Jesse Singal has an article about this in The Economist; the usual archive sites have nothing so thought I’d ask does anyone have a share token for this?

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/06/27/research-into-trans-medicine-has-been-manipulated

Article can be read here https://archive.ph/pnDOZ

Thanks for the link Retire but sadly it just brings me to saved versions of the same paywalled article as before.