Rachel Levine, the United States assistant secretary for health, has become a lightning rod for attention and controversy in the Biden administration.
Levine is a nonbinary transgender woman who, as a biological male, was married with two children. Levine was named Woman of the Year by USA Today. When the Christian satire website Babylon Bee published an online post calling Levine “Man of the Year,” Twitter suspended the Bee’s account, which was then unsuspended under new Twitter owner Elon Musk.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration has put Levine front and center in the cultural and medical fight over treatment for minors under eighteen who claim they are trans. Out of this fight surrounding the use of medical puberty blockers and permanent surgeries has emerged “gender-affirming care” — a new progressive term that’s entered the lexicon to obfuscate what these treatments actually involve.
Levine has been at the forefront of pushing this new terminology into the public sphere. And much like the debate around abortion, or so-called “feminine healthcare,” “gender-affirming care” is meant to dehumanize the real process and the grisly details involved in such procedures. Levine has labeled criticisms of these procedures, including permanent puberty blockers and surgeries, as “medical misinformation.”
“There is substantial misinformation about gender-affirming care for transgender and gender-diverse individuals,” Levine said in a video from earlier this year that resurfaced on social media last week.
Levine was addressing the Federation of State Medical Boards in New Orleans when she blamed data associating treatments and surgeries on transgender youth to higher risks of death and suicide on an “onslaught of anti-LGBTQIA+ actions at the state level across the United States.” Levine also labeled this so-called “misinformation” as “dangerous to the public health.”
Levine is using semantics and hyperbole to effectively control and shutdown the debate around quite graphic and irreversible treatments for minors, just as the progressive left has done with abortion. We as the taxpaying public must support these procedures. We must even pay for them; however, we must never speak of what is actually involved (surgery and irreversible hormone treatments) with them because people will die, or something.
Levine must be held accountable — in front of Congress, on the record — and answer how exactly and specifically the American public is being “misinformed” about physical and mental medical treatments of minors who believe they are non-binary. What does transition involve, exactly? Levine needs to be specific. How are irreversible hormone and puberty treatments being mischaracterized? Does Levine believe in top or bottom surgery for minors, and are medical centers that perform such procedures misinforming the public writ large about what those surgeries involve (such as the removal of premature breasts or genitals) and how the human body functions afterwards?
This is a debate that is not going to go away, but what Levine, the Biden White House, the media and the progressive left are hoping for is that this debate goes the same way the debate over abortion went. Before those who oppose these treatments for minors know it, they will be subsidizing radical medical procedures and being demonized for standing up and simply asking what their money is funding.
If the public is, in fact, being misinformed about what is actually involved with these treatments, then Levine should be champing at the bit for the chance to explain how.
