Joe Biden: Texas Categorizing Transgender Procedures 'Child Abuse' Is 'Government Overreach at Its Worst'

Texas officials categorizing transgender procedures on children as “child abuse” is “government overreach at its worst,” President Joe Biden said on Wednesday, months after attempting to force millions of Americans to get a vaccine against their will.

In February, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), who this week won the Texas Republican primary in a landslide, directed state agencies to investigate transgender procedures on children, pointing to an opinion by the Office of the Attorney General (OAG), which asserted that “a number of so-called ‘sex change’ procedures constitute child abuse under existing Texas law.”

On Wednesday, Biden attacked Abbott’s decision, calling it “cynical and dangerous” and deeming the move as “government overreach at its worst,” conveniently ignoring his administration’s gross instances of government overreach in the last year of his presidency, including tying job security to the vaccine.

Texas Gov Greg Abbott speaks during a news conference (AP Photo/LM Otero).

“The Governor of Texas has directed state officials to open child abuse investigations into families simply because they have provided access to affirming care for their children,” Biden said in the statement, deeming the move an “anti-transgender” attack that could “callously threaten to harm children and their families just to score political points.”

Biden pointed to the Department of Health and Human Services, which announced “several actions to keep transgender children in Texas and their families safe—putting the state of Texas on notice that their discriminatory actions put children’s lives at risk.” That includes actively expanding access to what the administration calls “gender-affirming care for transgender children.”

“Respected medical organizations have said that access to gender-affirming care for transgender children can benefit mental health, lower suicide rates, and improve other health outcomes,” he said. “Children, their parents, and their doctors should have the freedom to make the medical decisions that are best for each young person—without politicians getting in the way.”

However, critics say “affirming” care is a misguided answer for children who claim to be transgender:

In the United States, data are unfortunately harder to come by—a serious problem in itself—but clinicians like the authors of the Washington Post piece who practice affirming care have given firsthand reports of a massive influx of teenage-patient referrals, also heavily favoring girls. Girls who transition and later regret it regularly comment on the bewildering ease with which they got hormones. One de-transitioner recently wrote that she was given testosterone on her first visit to a Planned Parenthood. There is surely irony in the fact that an organization that purports to be a bastion of “women’s health” is helping distressed girls escape womanhood.

…

Better explanations exist for the surge in referrals. Hormone therapy promises adolescents a technological quick fix for the self-doubts and anxieties that accompany puberty, which is when most kids begin to experience gender-related distress. Declaring a transgender identity can bring immediate positive attention to those who feel dismissed or ignored. Clinicians have noted that it can be a symptom of unresolved depression and anxiety or a response to past sexual abuse. In a 2018 article, Brown University’s Lisa Littman found that girls were coming out as trans boys in clusters at 70 times the rate one would expect, given the prevalence of gender dysphoria in the general population. In the typical scenario, these girls declared themselves trans boys after a prolonged period of social isolation and exposure to social media. Abigail Shrier, who has devoted a book to this phenomenon, finds that the primary factor behind girls seeking hormones and mastectomies is “social contagion.”

In short, gender dysphoria is a real and documented condition, but to believe, as gender-affirming “experts” do, that a “consistent, persistent, and insistent” declaration of cross-gender identity is proof of having been “assigned” the wrong sex at birth requires either breathtaking naivete or deep immersion in ideology (assuming there is a difference between the two). One must be willing to ignore just about everything that we have come to know about childhood development.

Nonetheless, the Biden administration is not altering its approach, asserting that “affirming a transgender child’s identity is one of the best things a parent, teacher, or doctor can do to help keep children from harm, and parents who love and affirm their children should be applauded and supported, not threatened, investigated, or stigmatized.”

Biden’s plan for the expansion of “gender-affirming” care follows Abbott’s February 22 letter to Jaime Masters, commissioner of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS), noting that the OAG determined that many so-called sex-change procedures on children “constitute child abuse.” Therefore, the agency should “conduct a prompt and thorough investigation of any reported instances of these abusive procedures in the State of Texas,” Abbott instructed.

Abbott added that DFPS should also “investigate the parents of a child who is subjected to these abusive gender-transitioning procedures, and on other state agencies to investigate licensed facilities where such procedures may occur.”

The letter followed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s opinion, in which he wrote that “the Texas Family Code is clear—causing or permitting substantial harm to the child, or the child’s growth and development is child abuse.”

“Courts have held that an unnecessary surgical procedure that removes a healthy body part from a child can constitute a real and significant injury or damage to the child,” the opinion reads in part.