My fellow Democrats should be ashamed that they allowed Donald J. Trump to beat them to it when it came to taking aggressive action against one of the most outrageous scandals of the 21st century in the West. Its fancy name is pediatric gender medicine, a term so opaque as to be a sleazy euphemism on a par with "top surgery." That's why it is fitting that Trump ripped off the fig leaf and called it what it is: the chemical and surgical mutilation of children.
Now, the Democratic Party has spent decades branding itself as the party of science, the party that is fiercely committed to women's rights, the champion of sexual minorities and the protector of vulnerable children. And for a long time it was. Then came trans activists with their topsy-turvy pills and, overnight, Dems said no to science and yes to quackery and lies; sided with fake women over real ones; threw gays and lesbians under the trans bus; and abandoned real at-risk children for the new darlings of the moment: "trans kids."
Considering that the mainstream media have abandoned journalistic objectivity on the trans beat in favor of parroting the activist line, it is almost astonishing that public sentiment is broadly opposed to applied gender identity ideology or, more simply, the trans agenda. The fact is that only the true believers in the transubstantiation of sex are surprised (and incensed) that the rest of us haven't fallen into line.
Regular folks aren't taken in by the trans newspeak that elite reporters wield as expertly as Judith Butler. Thus, when the New York Times reports that one "Fatima Goss Graves, the president of the National Women’s Law Center" proclaimed that "Access to gender-affirming care enables trans youth to live authentically and is often life-saving,” [1] parents of youth who are estranged from their sex [2] will see red, and the non-snowflakes among us will hear "blah blah blah." It doesn't matter that the Times is keeping that demographic in the dark about the existence of a centrist gender critical movement or censoring that movement's well reasoned and fact-based objections to gender ideology. Knowing that doctors are performing sex changes on kids is enough to turn them off trans for good. The sames goes for all the other abuses that are being committed in furtherance of gender ideology.
Even so, elite publications such as the New York Times have a duty to report fairly on the major stories of our day such as youth gender medicine even if doing so would offend the sensibilities of their progressive reporters and their progressive social circles. What follows is an example of what happens when a newspaper breaches that duty. The article is quoted in full. See if you can spot the one-sided reporting. How many examples can you find?
Trump Signs Order Restricting Gender-Affirming Treatments for Minors
The directive built on a string of recent actions to roll back federal protections and services for transgender people.
By Zach Montague
Reporting from Washington
Jan. 28, 2025
President Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday taking steps to end gender-affirming medical treatments for children and teenagers under 19, directing agencies to take a variety of steps to curtail surgeries, hormone therapy and other regimens.
The order continued to chip away at social protections for transgender and intersex people, coming one day after Mr. Trump directed the Pentagon to re-evaluate whether anyone who received gender-related medical treatments should be permitted to serve in the military.
The most recent order set as official policy that the federal government not “fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another.”
It directed the Department of Health and Human Services to review the terms of insurance coverage under Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act to end some gender-affirming care. It also gave the department 90 days to release a new set of best practices, meant to revise guidance from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which was written to set standards for transgender medical care, and which the order called “junk science.”
It tasked agencies providing federal research or education grants to medical institutions, including medical schools and hospitals, with ensuring that those institutions were not carrying out any gender-related procedures.
And it directed the Federal Employees Health Benefits and Postal Service Health Benefits programs to exclude similar types of coverage starting in 2026.
Civil rights groups have issued increasingly dire statements criticizing the administration for a stance they say widely demonizes and marginalizes transgender people.
“Access to gender-affirming care enables trans youth to live authentically and is often life-saving,” Fatima Goss Graves, the president of the National Women’s Law Center, said in a statement. “The Trump administration’s continued assault on the rights and dignity of trans people is deplorable.”
Demand for gender-affirming medications and hormone therapy among transgender youth has not been studied extensively, but only a small fraction of minors who identify as transgender currently receive gender-transition treatments, according to researchers at the Williams Institute at the U.C.L.A. School of Law, which conducts demographic studies about the L.G.B.T.Q. population.
The language from the White House surrounding gender-affirming medical treatments and their effects on the body has grown increasingly severe and disdainful since Mr. Trump took office.
On his first day, Mr. Trump signed an order describing transgender identity as an “ideology” from which women required institutional protection and restricted single-sex spaces.
The order directing the Pentagon to evaluate whether transgender troops could serve in the military cast aspersions on the mental and physical health of anyone who has experienced gender dysphoria or has had a gender-related medical procedure. On Tuesday, civil rights groups filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging any ban on transgender service members as unconstitutional.
The order on care for minors, which referred to procedures as “chemical and surgical mutilation,” predicted that “countless children” who received gender-affirming procedures would soon regret the “horrifying tragedy that they will never be able to conceive children of their own or nurture their children through breastfeeding.”
Gender-affirming surgeries on minors are exceedingly rare in the United States, a Harvard Chan School of Public Health Study found last year. The study’s lead author, Dannie Dai, said legislation banning gender-affirming care among youth “is not about protecting children, but is rooted in bias and stigma” and “seeks to address a perceived problem that does not actually exist.”
More than two-dozen states have passed some form of restriction on gender-affirming medical procedures, according to data compiled by the Human Rights Campaign. And many states already have laws on their books prohibiting public funds from covering gender-transition treatments for state employees and Medicaid recipients.
While Mr. Trump campaigned on promises to do away with some programs supporting transgender people, he tended to home in on specific cases, such as U.S. prisons offering gender-affirming care to prisoners — something many prisons did, as required by federal law, during Mr. Trump’s first term.
But in excluding transgender people from certain jobs and facilities, and officially recognizing only two genders — male and female — the Trump administration has gone much further in recent days by essentially placing the federal government in opposition to a wide variety of gender-related therapies and to anyone who seeks them. And it has justified those moves with progressively dark — and factually disputed — descriptions of what those procedures entail.
Amy Harmon contributed reporting.
Zach Montague is a Times reporter covering the U.S. Department of Education, the White House and federal courts. More about Zach Montague
[2] I am proposing the phrase "estranged from [his/her/their (plural)] sex" as an alternative to "trans identified," "gender confused," "trans" or other similar terms for individuals who are suffering from the delusion that they are or should be a member of the opposite sex or gender.
Example, instead of writing "She is the mother of two trans-identified children," one would write "She is the mother of two children who are estranged from their sex."
It has the advantage of not employing any genderqueer newspeak words or phrases like "trans identified." It completely avoids the term "gender." Instead, the emphasis is on the individual's sex in a way that doesn't buy into the notion that sex can be changed. The word "estranged" denotes that a relationshio is out of balance. That's the crux of the matter with people who are trans or, rather, estranged from their sex.
My fellow Democrats should be ashamed that they allowed Donald J. Trump to beat them to it when it came to taking aggressive action against one of the most outrageous scandals of the 21st century in the West. Its fancy name is pediatric gender medicine, a term so opaque as to be a sleazy euphemism on a par with "top surgery." That's why it is fitting that Trump ripped off the fig leaf and called it what it is: the chemical and surgical mutilation of children.
Now, the Democratic Party has spent decades branding itself as the party of science, the party that is fiercely committed to women's rights, the champion of sexual minorities and the protector of vulnerable children. And for a long time it was. Then came trans activists with their topsy-turvy pills and, overnight, Dems said no to science and yes to quackery and lies; sided with fake women over real ones; threw gays and lesbians under the trans bus; and abandoned real at-risk children for the new darlings of the moment: "trans kids."
Considering that the mainstream media have abandoned journalistic objectivity on the trans beat in favor of parroting the activist line, it is almost astonishing that public sentiment is broadly opposed to applied gender identity ideology or, more simply, the trans agenda. The fact is that only the true believers in the transubstantiation of sex are surprised (and incensed) that the rest of us haven't fallen into line.
Regular folks aren't taken in by the trans newspeak that elite reporters wield as expertly as Judith Butler. Thus, when the New York Times reports that one "Fatima Goss Graves, the president of the National Women’s Law Center" proclaimed that "Access to gender-affirming care enables trans youth to live authentically and is often life-saving,” [1] parents of youth who are estranged from their sex [2] will see red, and the non-snowflakes among us will hear "blah blah blah." It doesn't matter that the Times is keeping that demographic in the dark about the existence of a centrist gender critical movement or censoring that movement's well reasoned and fact-based objections to gender ideology. Knowing that doctors are performing sex changes on kids is enough to turn them off trans for good. The sames goes for all the other abuses that are being committed in furtherance of gender ideology.
Even so, elite publications such as the New York Times have a duty to report fairly on the major stories of our day such as youth gender medicine even if doing so would offend the sensibilities of their progressive reporters and their progressive social circles. What follows is an example of what happens when a newspaper breaches that duty. The article is quoted in full. See if you can spot the one-sided reporting. How many examples can you find?
=======================================================================
Trump Signs Order Restricting Gender-Affirming Treatments for Minors
The directive built on a string of recent actions to roll back federal protections and services for transgender people.
By Zach Montague
Reporting from Washington
Jan. 28, 2025
President Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday taking steps to end gender-affirming medical treatments for children and teenagers under 19, directing agencies to take a variety of steps to curtail surgeries, hormone therapy and other regimens.
The order continued to chip away at social protections for transgender and intersex people, coming one day after Mr. Trump directed the Pentagon to re-evaluate whether anyone who received gender-related medical treatments should be permitted to serve in the military.
The most recent order set as official policy that the federal government not “fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another.”
It directed the Department of Health and Human Services to review the terms of insurance coverage under Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act to end some gender-affirming care. It also gave the department 90 days to release a new set of best practices, meant to revise guidance from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which was written to set standards for transgender medical care, and which the order called “junk science.”
It tasked agencies providing federal research or education grants to medical institutions, including medical schools and hospitals, with ensuring that those institutions were not carrying out any gender-related procedures.
And it directed the Federal Employees Health Benefits and Postal Service Health Benefits programs to exclude similar types of coverage starting in 2026.
Civil rights groups have issued increasingly dire statements criticizing the administration for a stance they say widely demonizes and marginalizes transgender people.
“Access to gender-affirming care enables trans youth to live authentically and is often life-saving,” Fatima Goss Graves, the president of the National Women’s Law Center, said in a statement. “The Trump administration’s continued assault on the rights and dignity of trans people is deplorable.”
Demand for gender-affirming medications and hormone therapy among transgender youth has not been studied extensively, but only a small fraction of minors who identify as transgender currently receive gender-transition treatments, according to researchers at the Williams Institute at the U.C.L.A. School of Law, which conducts demographic studies about the L.G.B.T.Q. population.
The language from the White House surrounding gender-affirming medical treatments and their effects on the body has grown increasingly severe and disdainful since Mr. Trump took office.
On his first day, Mr. Trump signed an order describing transgender identity as an “ideology” from which women required institutional protection and restricted single-sex spaces.
The order directing the Pentagon to evaluate whether transgender troops could serve in the military cast aspersions on the mental and physical health of anyone who has experienced gender dysphoria or has had a gender-related medical procedure. On Tuesday, civil rights groups filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging any ban on transgender service members as unconstitutional.
The order on care for minors, which referred to procedures as “chemical and surgical mutilation,” predicted that “countless children” who received gender-affirming procedures would soon regret the “horrifying tragedy that they will never be able to conceive children of their own or nurture their children through breastfeeding.”
Gender-affirming surgeries on minors are exceedingly rare in the United States, a Harvard Chan School of Public Health Study found last year. The study’s lead author, Dannie Dai, said legislation banning gender-affirming care among youth “is not about protecting children, but is rooted in bias and stigma” and “seeks to address a perceived problem that does not actually exist.”
More than two-dozen states have passed some form of restriction on gender-affirming medical procedures, according to data compiled by the Human Rights Campaign. And many states already have laws on their books prohibiting public funds from covering gender-transition treatments for state employees and Medicaid recipients.
While Mr. Trump campaigned on promises to do away with some programs supporting transgender people, he tended to home in on specific cases, such as U.S. prisons offering gender-affirming care to prisoners — something many prisons did, as required by federal law, during Mr. Trump’s first term.
But in excluding transgender people from certain jobs and facilities, and officially recognizing only two genders — male and female — the Trump administration has gone much further in recent days by essentially placing the federal government in opposition to a wide variety of gender-related therapies and to anyone who seeks them. And it has justified those moves with progressively dark — and factually disputed — descriptions of what those procedures entail.
Amy Harmon contributed reporting.
Zach Montague is a Times reporter covering the U.S. Department of Education, the White House and federal courts. More about Zach Montague
[1] Montague, Zach. "Trump Signs Order Restricting Gender-Affirming Treatments for Minors." The New York Times. 28 January 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/28/us/politics/trump-trans-gender-affirming-care.html?searchResultPosition=1
[2] I am proposing the phrase "estranged from [his/her/their (plural)] sex" as an alternative to "trans identified," "gender confused," "trans" or other similar terms for individuals who are suffering from the delusion that they are or should be a member of the opposite sex or gender.
Example, instead of writing "She is the mother of two trans-identified children," one would write "She is the mother of two children who are estranged from their sex."
It has the advantage of not employing any genderqueer newspeak words or phrases like "trans identified." It completely avoids the term "gender." Instead, the emphasis is on the individual's sex in a way that doesn't buy into the notion that sex can be changed. The word "estranged" denotes that a relationshio is out of balance. That's the crux of the matter with people who are trans or, rather, estranged from their sex.
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