President Joe Biden’s health team wants to completely eliminate age limitations so that children can receive care to help them transition gender.
Email excerpts reveal that Biden’s point person on transgender issues urged the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) to remove age requirements for transition and gender-affirming care.
The revelations come just as the Supreme Court said this week it would take up a case in its next term examining whether Tennessee’s ban on transgender treatment and surgeries for minors is constitutional.
Health and Human Services Undersecretary Admiral Rachel Levine, who is a trans woman, is leading Biden’s efforts to address transgender issues.
Draft guidelines released in late 2021 recommended lowering the minimum age for certain treatments, but now Levine wants to eliminate the age requirements entirely because she worries it will affect access to care.
Health and Human Services Undersecretary Admiral Rachel Levine (pictured) wants to completely eliminate age requirements for gender reassignment treatments and surgeries because she is “very concerned that having ages (primarily for surgery) affect access to care for trans youth and perhaps adults
The previous draft already relaxed restrictions by lowering the minimum age to 14 for hormone treatments, 15 for mastectomies, 16 for breast augmentation and facial surgeries, and 17 for genital surgeries or hysterectomies.
This means that minors could now have their sexual organs permanently and irreversibly removed.
Email excerpts this week, first reported by The New York Times based on unsealed court documents, he recalled conversations a member of WPATH’s guidelines development group had with Sarah Boateng, who at the time was serving as Admiral Levine’s chief of staff.
“Based on the rhetoric she is hearing in DC and from what we have already seen, she is confident that these specific lists of ages under 18 will result in devastating legislation for trans care,” the email reads. .
“Wondering if the specific ages can be removed,” the anonymous individual added.
Another email stated that Levine “was very concerned that ageing (primarily for surgery) would impact access to care for trans youth and perhaps adults as well.”
‘Apparently the situation in the US is dire and she and the Biden administration are concerned that having ages on the document will make things worse. She asked us to remove them,’ they wrote.
The Supreme Court will take up a case in its next term that would address a Tennessee law banning transgender treatment and surgeries for minors.
Allowing teenagers to undergo transgender treatments and surgeries has always been controversial in the American political world.
Opponents claim that teenagers are too young to make such permanent, life-changing decisions.
Supporters, however, insist that young people with gender dysphoria are at greater risk of depression, suicide and other mental illnesses if their condition is not also addressed physically.
Levine’s staff emails were released this week as legal documents were unsealed in a federal lawsuit challenging Alabama’s ban on gender-affirming health care.
