Apparently, the Biden administration isn’t content to promote the trans-ing of kids in the United States. According to a leaked memo written by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the White House plans to push other countries to start promoting progressive transgender ideology as well.
Despite multiple studies showing that “gender-affirming care” among minors has a deleterious impact on their mental and physical health, the hard left insists on going full bore in its efforts to encourage transgenderism among children. Now, the White House seeks to make the U.S. an exporter of these vicious and devastating practices.
In a piece for City Journal, author Leor Sapir brought to light a memo written by Blinken that would turn “American consulates into global ‘gender affirming’ spies.”
The directive instructs embassies to “submit robust information on the so-called ‘conversion therapy’ practices” of their host countries “as part of the annual Human Rights Reports.”
After gathering this information, it will go to Jessica Stern, the U.S. Special Envoy to Advance the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Persons. She will then develop an “action plan to combat the practice across foreign policy and foreign assistance lines of effort.”
Blinken’s memo is part of the State Department’s effort to enact President Joe Biden’s Executive Order 14075, which requires federal agencies to put a stop to “conversion therapy.”
At first glance, the initiative to deal with conversion therapy, which has proven to be harmful to homosexual and bisexual individuals, might seem like a positive. But the administration’s definition of the term, especially as it pertains to children suffering from gender dysphoria, is problematic in that it designates any attempt to “suppress or change an individual’s … gender identity.”
As a way to obfuscate the White House’s true intentions, it includes “electric shock,” and “corrective rape,” in its definition of “conversion therapy.”
But it also includes “talk therapy,” meaning that if parents take their children to a therapist to help them move away from their gender dysphoria, they are engaging in conversion therapy. This is part of an overall effort from progressives to push “gender-affirming” treatments like puberty blockers and even surgical procedures on children instead of focusing on talk therapy.
In some areas, they have already been successful in this endeavor. I recently wrote about how Florida Medicaid reported that “the usage of puberty blockers and hormones greatly exceeds the number of therapy visits” between 2017 and 2021.
But now, the president and his team want to begin pressuring other countries to rely on “gender-affirming care” instead of other methods for helping children exhibiting symptoms of gender dysphoria. The fact that they are trying to portray this as a human rights issue makes the situation even more disturbing.
It is also worth noting that this directive comes after the United Kingdom, Sweden, and other countries have started moving away from “gender-affirming care” and are increasingly relying on therapy and other treatments.
A study conducted in Sweden analyzed the progress of people who received “gender-affirming care” over 30 years and tracked the state of their mental health. Researchers found that at about ten to 15 years after receiving surgical reassignment and other treatments, these individuals were about 19 times more likely to commit suicide.
The U.K. has also been studying the effects of puberty blockers and other treatments for children who suffer from gender dysphoria. Researchers found that “gender-affirming care” was “not a safe or viable long-term option” for these kids. As a result, it shut down its Tavistock gender identity clinic in July. A London-based law firm filed a class-action lawsuit representing 1,000 families whose “children and young adolescents were rushed into treatment” and “suffered life-changing and, in some cases, irreversible effects,” as a result.
The movement to trans the children appears to be growing even though “gender-affirming care” has been shown over and over again to be harmful to minors. There are several motivations behind this movement. Some of it is financial. There is much money to be made by pharmaceutical companies from the sale of puberty blockers and other medications.
But much of it is ideological. It is a classic example of progressives pushing “solutions” that only deal further damage to the people they are claiming to protect. To put it simply, these people must be stopped. The only way to shield our children from this brutal ideology is for our backlash to be stronger than their desire to target kids.
