The Dispatch: More from CWR...

Standing up to the Biden’s administration’s transgender mandate

Government agencies including the HHS are poised to try to force Catholic doctors and hospitals, along with other dissenters, to chemically and surgically sterilize patients, including children.

(us.fotolia.com)

It is wrong to sterilize children. It is doubly wrong for the government to require doctors and hospitals to sterilize children. By definition, children are unable to consent to voluntary sterilization. Nonetheless, the Biden administration is moving forward with a plan that requires doctors and nurses to participate in sterilizing children.

The proposal, which adds new regulations under Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), is wending its way through the bureaucratic process, with the opportunity for the public to submit comments closing on October 3. The administration’s legal argument, such as it is, is that nondiscrimination law requires participation in so-called gender affirming care, even for minors. The theory is that performing a hysterectomy on a woman with ovarian cancer but not on a teenaged girl who identifies as a man is sex discrimination.

This position is ridiculous, even within the bizarre labyrinth of the regulatory state. However, the attempt is a predictable result of the aggressive campaign to compel assent to, and even participate in, the rainbow agenda. The promise that LGBT rights would not infringe upon everyone else’s rights was always a lie. And so now the Biden administration is poised to try to force Catholic doctors and hospitals, along with other dissenters, to chemically and surgically sterilize patients, including children.

The other big lie of the LGBT movement is that it was just about the rights of consenting adults. But as the transgender debates have made clear, the LGBT movement was always coming for the children. They have used the lie that children are born into the rainbow elect as cover for an aggressive campaign to groom children into LGBT identities. Children are being indoctrinated in gender ideology by everyone from teachers to Tik-Tok (and teachers on Tik-Tok). This is why the debate is now about trans toddlers, puberty blockers, and testosterone and mastectomies for teenage girls.

Transgender activists and their allies claim that transgender identities are innate and immutable, and therefore it is best that social and medical transition begin as early as possible. All of this is false, built on some of the shoddiest science that has ever disgraced the medical field, and then mixed with social media cohorts encouraging troubled youth to take themselves hostage.

The evidence for the early-intervention Dutch Protocol is weak at best. Yet it became standard in much of the Western world. And while some nations such as Sweden and Britain are pulling back from its early-transition model, in the United States even its frail guardrails are being dismantled. The medical establishment is largely subservient to the activists of WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health).

This ostensibly professional medical organization has now embraced “Eunuch” as a valid gender identity, after it was pushed by creeps with sexual fantasies about castrating children. WPATH is crafting its guidelines with an eye not to medical best practices, but to avoiding legal liability by eliminating minimum age recommendations for medical transition. None of this is about helping children. Rather, it is about validating the decisions and ideologies of adult activists. At the recent WPATH conference, a speaker even argued that children should transition without mental health treatment.

And yet this group is seen as the leading authority on transgenderism. It is a classic example of how motivated activists can capture a field and its institutions. Yet it undoubtedly helped that there is a lot of money to be made from transgenderism. Those who transition not only rack up huge surgical bills, they become patients for life, perpetually in need of follow-up treatments and hormone injections.

But the exponential increase in clinics and doctors offering medical transition isn’t enough for activists and their allies in the Biden administration. They will not be happy so long as anyone is able to refuse to participate in their charade, hence the pending transgender mandate.

In a concession to the conscience rights Americans possess, the administration promises that it will implement a process by which individuals and institutions will be able to register their objections, which HHS will review on a “case-by-case” basis. But this is just lip service to the First Amendment, not any actual promise to exempt Christian doctors and institutions. As my EPPC colleague Rachel Morrison has explained:

This process is seen by many as a sham since HHS under Secretary Xavier Becerra has systematically targeted or ignored conscience and religious freedom protections, such as by sidelining HHS’s Conscience and Religious Freedom Division, abandoning the case of a nurse illegally forced to participate in abortion, rescinding protections for faith-based adopted and foster care agencies in three states, and proposing to rescind conscience protection regulations. Indeed, HHS refused in federal court to “disavow enforcement” of Section 1557 to require medical professionals to perform gender transition surgeries or abortions in violation of their sincerely held religious beliefs.

Those who believe it is essential to require doctors to participate in medical transition are unlikely to be sympathetic to conscientious objectors or fair judges of their claims. In essence, the government is saying is: Here’s our mandate. What are you going to do about it?

Over the next two weeks, regular Americans can do something about it. They can submit comments—including anonymous comments—urging the government to back off. And they can vote like they mean it.


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About Nathanael Blake 23 Articles
Nathanael Blake, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His primary research interests are American political theory, Christian political thought, and the intersection of natural law and philosophical hermeneutics. His published scholarship has focused on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Alasdair MacIntyre and Russell Kirk. He is currently working on a study of J.R.R. Tolkien’s anti-rationalism. He writes from Virginia.

34 Comments

  1. The Democratic Party is a death cult.

    To Democrats, sterilizing children is even better than aborting them. Because a woman who has an abortion might someday give birth again.

    But a child who is sterilized can never procreate.

    Legalizing drugs; gay “marriage”; the sexualization of children; the green new poverty; the open border fentanyl conduit; the denial of the biologically determined sexes; the racist, divisive CRT curriculum — everything the Democratic Party advocates is aimed at restricting life and promoting death.

    Death is the Democratic Party’s central tenet.

    • Democrats in USA have nothing else to do but to destroy us with those identities, Ideologies and other BS while other countries and people in this world are suffering to pay their high bills and put food on the table that democrats in USA created

  2. And Pilate said to the Pontiff Francis: “I have heard it reported to me that the President of the United States is a member of your religion, and that you count him in good standing in your faith, despite the fact that he rejects the commandments of your God Jesus, and has joined the empire in persecuting your members whi obey this God Jesus. What do you say about these reports?”

    And the Pontiff Francis answered Pilate: “When our co-religionists resist the decrees of the empire and the President Biden, it causes political problems. That’s all I can say.”

  3. Religion has *no* place in medicine. None whatsoever.

    If doctors refuse to perform procedures that are in the best medical interests of their patients, then they should lose their licenses.

    • Political ideology has no place in medicine, none whatsoever, which would include trying to exercise the sort of mindlessness that would characterize concern over the life destroying abuse of children, and adults for that matter, as religiously idiosyncratic rather than a moral imperative required of any human being with a shred of human decency.
      As a scientist, I would also caution you to learn enough about science to, at a minimum, understand that value judgments have no place in science whatsoever.

      • I agree that political ideology has no place either. All that should matter is the best possible outcome for the patient. Decades of research has shown that medical transitioning yields the best outcome for many transgender patients.

        • A very biased statement. No objective observer could fail to note the ongoing risk-vs-benefit debate within medicine, including at Johns Hopkins. I also understand that up to one-fifth of those who’ve had surgery eventually choose to be changed back to their former appearance. That’s a very high dissatisfaction rate. Even the flaming liberal Bill Maher is demanding a stop to gender-reassignment treatments for children, and you could hardly label him a religious fanatic. I’d have to conclude that you have a personal stake in the outcome.

    • And where is the oversight on ‘objective’ procedures?

      The only ‘positive’ studies to date that cheerlead the current practice of mutilative surgery are from doctors that profit from it and medical technology companies that supply the drugs…in the ‘best medical interest’ of these unaware patients.

      How is a politicized mental condition that finds a non-solution in a physical and sterile mutilation in the best interest of patients where there is no large scale study or credible data that supports such ‘procedures’ as evidenced by outcomes?

      On what basis is there a ‘morality’ or ‘ethic’ in medicine if religion is silenced? Strictly utilitarian under the guise of a radical, self-autonomy? Is the scientism you espouse determine that a secular doctor must only be the one to give a final solution and not be questioned? But a religious-minded doctor must be rhetorically questioned and immediately terminated?

      So, the State is the final authority on life and death ‘medical’ decisions as it determines through its licensing of medicine what outcomes it wants absent any consideration other than a biological humanism devoid of humanity?

      Weimar Germany circa 1921-1937 and in the ‘best medical interest’ of patients:

      Aktion T4

    • I fail to see how castrating a child or carrying out a double mastectomy on healthy breasts, and other irreversible, medically unnecessary surgery can be in anyone interest, much less the patient’s.

      Removing religion and morality from medicine sounds like something that Unit 731, Joseph Mengele and Wouter Basson would say.

    • Mutilating teenagers to make them look like something they are not is crime against humanity, and an embrace of the “New Frankenstein” ideology, which conducts experiments on vulnerable young people, for money and self-aggrandizement.

    • Where does religion come into it? Pseudoscience is pseudoscience with or without religious beliefs.
      Pseudoscience is fueled by ideology. We saw that in the eugenics movement also. Every era seems to have its own variety of dangerous hysteria that the following generation disowns.

    • You are totally wrong to dismiss this as a “religious issue;” it is an issue of morality and scientific validity. A religion with any integrity wants always to elect the more moral path but the reason you don’t mutilate patients is not because a particular religion discourages it but because it is NOT in the “medical interest” of the patient, but rather precisely the opposite. Destruction of healthy tissue and physiology in favor of a cultish delusion is moral depravity, not “health care.” Likewise, abortion is not in the medical interest of either patient, mother or child.

  4. I see big class action lawsuits in the near future by adults who were sterilized as children. Lawsuits against parents, doctors, hospitals, the government, schools, psychotherapists, advocacy groups … they will have a wide array of targets to go after. It’s the only thing that is going to stop this insanity. In the UK it’s already happening and causing a backdown by the “health care providers.” Of course, this is all after the irreversible damage is done. Pity the ones whose lives are being destroyed.

  5. Here we go yet again. Sigh. Despite having some impressive academic credentials and meaning well, N. Blake uses the social engineering terminology and nonsense meanings behind those terms favored by the wokies and fellow travelers to refer to “transgender/s” and “transition” and so on without quotation marks or otherwise making it clear that such things are mere fantasies that deny God’s creative order of male and female.

    Always keep in mind and don’t give an inch on any of the following:

    1. There are no people who are a different gender than what they are created with at conception. [NB: Gender and sex are synonymous terms recognized as such since at least the 12th century, so don’t get fooled by the efforts to separate the terms in support of the malevolent agenda.] This also includes the extremely rare cases of individuals who manifest some characteristics of both sexes at birth and for a time thereafter. Also, people who believe they can change their gender are delusional, and so, too, are those who also believe such utter absurdity is possible and actually takes place. Accordingly, to refer to such people as “transgenders” without the use of quotation marks or otherwise making it crystal clear that such is a fantasy play right into the hands of this false anti-God movement.

    2. Nobody has “transitioned” from one sex/gender to another sex/gender. Accepting that this occurs as is done by N. Blake by referring to “transition” without quotation marks, etc. in his article also denies reality as established by God.

    3. It is not a matter of courtesy, kindness, and so on to confirm people in their harmful fantasies, but this is precisely what is done whenever the false terminology that promotes such fantasies is accepted as if such things are real.

    4. No matter the circumstances, to properly defend God’s definitive creative order, do not accept or use any of the terminology and the claims arising from this terminology promoted by those who defy God’s creative order without making it clear by way of quotation marks and further explanation as needed that such claims are objectively false and rejected. Not only in writing is this approach necessary, but in speaking as well with anybody who promotes this anti-God agenda.

    CWR should also use quotation marks around “transgender” in any titles of articles where the word is used, but, alas, CWR also plays along with the malevolence of the “transgender” movement by accepting and using its bogus terminology without any qualification. This is sadly ironic, as well, in light of recent articles in CWR lamenting the problems with the abuse of language and terminology in this day and age while abusing some terminology in their own practices. Kettle: call your friend the Pot.

    • “Thank you” for your “lecture” disguised as a “comment”.

      I’ll just address Point #2: It’s blatantly false, as anyone with any common sense can see. Just look at the author’s use of the terms “transgenderism” and “transgender” and tell me that the author accepts any of this insanity.

      • Thanks for the cheap shot, Carl, but once again you have missed the point in order to render a false charge against yours truly. Nowhere do I claim that Blake “accepts any of the insanity,” so why the false attack?

        Now back to the main point: You must have simply overlooked the following statement (among many) in Blake’s article:

        Blake: “Those who transition not only rack up huge surgical bills, they become patients for life, perpetually in need of follow-up treatments and hormone injections.”

        Nobody has “transitioned,” but Blake sloppily writes as if they have done so by the lack of quotation marks, etc., and that they face more problems as a result. Also note that I state at the outset that Blake and people like him mean well, but the serious problem with their writing is using the woke-favored terminology without quotation marks or appropriate qualifications AT ALL TIMES to make it crystal clear that such things are fantasies that violate God’s creative order.

        Next, my comment is not a lecture (yet another false comment by you), but a call to arms that sets forth the basic realities involved and what’s needed to defend God’s creative order. Hopefully, Blake and CWR learn from my commonsense approach and stop using the terminology favored by the wokies. We shall see. A first step would be to post this reply that defends my actions against your false charges, but given that my defense casts you in a negative light where you freely placed yourself, I have a feeling this comment will be deemed inappropriate and not published here. Prove me wrong.

        • Kudos for letting the defense of my remarks get published. I don’t mind being proven wrong…regarding the publishing of challenging remarks. Besides, the most important thing here is the recognition and correction of the serious problem of well-meaning people using woke terminology without proper qualification that includes quotation marks and so on to help combat this abuse of language that helps bring about the abuse of people.

          Battle on, Culture Warriors!

    • Well, sadly we all can end up adopting engineered language from the media and popular culture. If I see “termination of pregnancy ” one more time…
      🙁
      But that’s how it works when we hear terms repeated over and over again.
      I’d like to see real medical terminology used for surgical castration and direct abortion.
      To say that young people are being sterilized is not specific enough. They are being castrated. If we’re not comfortable with the language we shouldn’t be comfortable with the procedure. But that’s the point isn’t it? Verbal engineering always proceeds social engineering, per Orwell.

  6. I thought I read that a judge removed the requirement for doctors and other medical personnel to participate in these surgeries on the basis of religious objection. The alphabet agenda violates natural law at every turn. Pretending that anyone could “trans” is pure fantasy. The natural law, even for those who leave God out of the equation, determines that DNA is immutable. Anyone who surgically mutilates the bodies of humans is working against the natural law and is destroying their victims.

    • Agree, Gilberta; only way to stop this intrinsic evil promoted by a quisling catholic president endorsed and praised by Francis.

    • Yes, Gilberta.

      And how tragic it is we reflexively dismiss even the remotest possibility that half of American Catholics will rise to the occasion and vote the truth of our faith rather than going mindlessly to the polls and pulling the same groupthink lever some of us have pulled for our entire lives.

      If American Catholics voted their faith just one time, abortion, the trans madness, and all the rest of the left’s satanic recipe for misery would be over.

      Instead, we have to wait hopefully for decades for lawsuits to materialize.

      How pathetic are we.

  7. Dianne S. obliges that religious and moral obligation are not obliging. She then puts it as concluded that medical transitioning is a “medical outcome” that at the same time is “the best” once it was taken; which then becomes obligatory when sought. None of which makes sense.

    That way of arguing is typical of adolescents; it is indicative of adolescent mentality. Even though a medical doctor can prescribe antibiotics, cast a broken limb or successfully excise a benign tumour, it does not mean everything is permissible and canonizable.

    It’s not a new way of arguing. Hippies used to do it and they could argue that way when stoned brainless doing handstands on a unicycle.

    Decades of practice in deliberate physical deforming, called transitioning, have proved nothing other than that it is mutilation that can not be reversed. It’s voluntary engagement is criminal and can oblige nothing except the application of criminal law prohibitions and punishments.

    Dianne S. makes the distinction between religion and morality that is incomplete. Not only do they oblige, they are related, they are part with each other. But since she had first ruled out both of them, making them “different things” is superfluous to what she is advocating.

    What she is putting forth in effect, is, another obligation: you are supposed to help her solve how they are different. This lets out more of the same intellectual dishonesty.

3 Trackbacks / Pingbacks

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