LIZ PEEK: The trans fever is over — and America is reckoning with the damage done
Trans fever has broken. All it took was a president with the guts to call out the evil being done to children across America and a shocking $2 million settlement awarded to a young girl whose body was mutilated by the grown-ups supposedly looking after her.
Bless President Donald Trump for tackling the trans issue head on in his current term, defying the woke police. In his first few weeks in office, he issued a number of executive orders that reset the issue of gender "fluidity", declaring that henceforward, agencies would acknowledge two sexes — male and female. No more marking passports with an "X"; no more biological men locked up in women’s prisons.
Trump demanded that schools stop pushing gender ideology in their curriculums (no more picture books like "When Aiden Became a Brother" targeting four-year-olds) and using pronouns based on gender identity rather than sex. Trump also challenged the granddaddy of transgender issues by declaring that the "policy of the United States [is] to oppose male competitive participation in women’s sports…as a matter of safety, fairness, dignity, and truth."
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Most importantly, the president declared the government would "not fund, sponsor… or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another."
An estimated 4,000 children aged 12 to 18 have endured trans surgeries over the past four years in the U.S., a period during which many countries in Europe moved away from such procedures, declaring them "experimental" and the medical evidence supporting them unreliable.
As The Economist wrote in 2023, "Some older studies suggest that, left alone, most children will naturally grow out of their dysphoric feelings." They also reported that the longer-term impact of puberty blockers are unknown but might include problems with "brain development and decreasing bone density."
Why didn’t America’s doctors investigate the revealing studies and reach the same conclusions as their colleagues in Britain, or Sweden or France? Maybe because concerns about botched diagnoses and harmful surgeries were dismissed by people like Rachel Levine, former President Joe Biden’s assistant secretary for health, who claimed that such reports were just anecdotal. Levine, herself a trans person, claimed, in a radio interview, that, "There is no argument among medical professionals…about the value and the importance of gender-affirming care." Except, actually, there was.
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As this shameful chapter in American medicine comes to a close, let us hope that a veritable tsunami of lawsuits follows, charging doctors, parents and educators with having ruined the lives of far too many children.
Adults who were either too ignorant or too craven to confront the madness of the moment, and who turned a blind eye to the ghastly "gender affirming" cruelty that was ruining the lives of (mainly) young girls. They have no excuse. The transgender craze, and gender confusion was, from the beginning, very much a fad.
In 2023, when a staggering 38% of students at Brown University declared themselves "not straight", compared to only 7% of Americans overall, didn’t anyone at that Ivy school imagine that something was screwy?
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And yes, there are people who suffer from genuine gender dysphoria, and who need help. But doctors should know the difference between that rare condition and normal adolescent explorations and confusions.
Like most fads, this concept of gender fluidity is fading. The number of kids claiming to be neither male nor female has plummeted. According to one researcher, "The transgender share among university students peaked in 2023 and has almost halved since, from nearly 7 percent to under 4 percent." Do we really think the biological makeup of young people changed radically in a matter of a few years? Of course not; young people simply moved on.
But a number of girls and women in our country cannot move on. One of those is Fox Varian, the 22-year-old from New York state who sued her psychologist and plastic surgeon for performing a double mastectomy on her when she was only 16. She won a $2 million lawsuit against the doctors who recommended the procedure; the jury agreed that the treatment was ill-advised and that Fox, who had a multi-year history of mental health issues, was not given proper care.
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There are a number of similar lawsuits in the pipeline, lodged by women whose breasts have been removed or were prescribed puberty blockers at a young age and who later regretted their decision. Chloe Cole is one of the most vocal "detransitioners" who underwent radical surgery and trans treatment beginning at 13 years of age. As she said in an affidavit, "The worst part about my transition would be the long-term health effects that I didn’t knowingly consent to at the time."
In a recent interview on Fox News, Chloe said she expected the recent decision would prove a "massive precedent" and that similar lawsuits would flood the country. Let us hope so.
It is not an easy path to challenge woke gender orthodoxy. Chloe Cole has been doxed and shamed by the trans community; they despise anyone who believes this transition should be left only to adults capable of making such a profound decision.
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The American Society of Plastic Surgeons issued a statement after the Varian verdict admitting that, "there is considerable uncertainty as to the long-term efficacy for the use of chest and genital surgical interventions for the treatment of adolescents with gender dysphoria, and the existing evidence base is viewed as low quality/low certainty." In other words, the medical basis for such life-changing interventions is garbage.
The American Medical Association, the country’s largest physician group, has also pivoted, declaring that children should not receive surgical gender realigning treatments. Surely the American Academy of Pediatrics, which reaffirmed their backing of trans mutilations as recently as 2023, will follow suit.
Too little, too late for some women who will forever live with the consequences of a nation and a medical community afraid to tell the truth.