OPINION:
One of the most disturbing trends during the first year of the Biden administration has been the effort by the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services to engage children to push an extreme left-wing political concept known as “gender ideology.”
The Biden administration has bypassed parents to deliver extremely controversial messages to children about “changing” their gender through puberty blockers, chemical castration drugs and sex-change operations. In his short Transgender Day of Visibility message, President Biden mentioned “children” and “kids” five times.
Earlier this month, during a House Education and Labor Committee Hearing, I asked President Biden’s HHS secretary if he considers performing sex-change procedures on 12-year-old children to be child abuse. Secretary Xavier Becerra refused to answer the question. I then asked Mr. Becerra if he would confirm that parental consent would always be necessary for these life-altering procedures, and he once again refused to answer the question.
My questioning of Mr. Becerra was based on guidance titled “Gender-Affirming Care and Young People,” which was issued by the Biden administration as a guide for young children on procedures they could purportedly use to “change” their gender. Political officials issued this guidance to inject leftist politics into medicine, which was once respected as apolitical.
The Biden guidance recommends telling children that they can change their gender by changing their “hairstyles, clothing, name, gender pronouns, and restrooms,” which the Biden administration disturbingly recommends at “any age.” The Biden guidance states, “for transgender and nonbinary children and adolescents, early gender-affirming care is crucial to overall health and well-being.” The Biden administration engages in extreme “woke” politics by encouraging children to take chemical castration drugs and undergo surgeries. They lie to children by telling them puberty blockers are “reversible.”
I asked Mr. Becerra why he claims blocking puberty is “reversible,” but he once again refused to answer any questions about this guidance.
The concerns I raised to the secretary during the committee hearing were challenged by a left-wing media organization called “PolitiFact,” which claimed that puberty blockers are “reversible” and safe for children as young as 10 years old.
Horrified by PolitiFact’s agenda of encouraging 10-year-olds to experiment with puberty blockers, I explained to the left-wing reporter that blocking puberty is dangerous for young children and can lead to irreversible outcomes. I cited the Mayo Clinic’s guidance on puberty blockers, which states that using GnRH analogs can have long-term effects on growth spurts, bone growth and density, and future fertility. Shockingly, the Mayo Clinic guidance references starting puberty blockers on children as young as 10 years old and giving them injections or implants to prevent puberty for years. Purposely preventing a child’s physical development is child abuse. Leftists target young children with radical transgender politics in the classroom and on social media to push them toward a course that will permanently affect their lives.
The Los Angeles Times ran an extensive piece on this topic, citing practitioners who say many clinicians are rushing teens into medicalization and that “sloppy health care work” would result in “more young adults who will regret having gone through this process.” In a thorough follow-up study of sex-reassigned people, extending over 30 years, 10 to 15 years after surgical reassignment, the suicide rate of those who had undergone sex-reassignment surgery rose to 20 times that of comparable peers.
After admitting in its article that puberty blockers could cause irreversible effects and acknowledging that I cited the Mayo Clinic as my medical source, “PolitiFraud” still rated my claim as “false” because it is a leftist political organization, not a fact-finding organization.
Left-wing PolitiFact chose Easter Sunday, the holiest day of the Christian calendar, to advance their radical agenda of permanently harming young children with these procedures. As a mother and grandmother, I will never stop fighting to protect young children from the Biden administration’s woke political agenda, and I will never back down to the extremists in left-wing “media.”
Last year, parents showed up to school board meetings to voice their outrage at the leftist agenda infiltrating our schools. The Biden administration responded by mobilizing the Department of Justice and FBI to intimidate and harass parents who dared to show up to school board meetings in opposition to the Biden political agenda.
Despite these authoritarian tactics, parents voted in record numbers in Virginia and made history on election night. The radical left should never underestimate the power of parents or the love that we have for our children. Mr. Biden has made his agenda crystal clear, and while the left is “woke,” parents are now awake.
• Rep. Mary Miller represents Illinois’ 15th Congressional District.
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