The U.S. Senate has approved the first-ever “transgender” person to be the assistant secretary of health and human services.
The 52-48 vote confirmed “Rachel” Levine, a man who dresses and acts like a woman, as the nation’s No. 2 health official. Two Republicans, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, voted yes.
That means a man who either mistakenly believes he is a woman or has a sexual fetish and enjoys masquerading as a woman — in either case a man who needs psychiatric help — will now help manage healthcare for 300 million people.
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Another problem with Levine’s appointment is what it means for parents. Levine favors puberty blockers for kids. He could well force parents to to accept a government decision to approve puberty blockers for kids, and then genital amputation, when kids “decide” they are the “wrong gender.”
Biden Loves It
The decision to give a voice in health policy to a mentally disturbed individual is a sign of just how radical the Biden regime will be.
Biden actually believes that Levine should make decisions affecting every living American, The Associated Press reported:
Levine “will bring the steady leadership and essential expertise we need to get people through this pandemic — no matter their zip code, race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability,” Biden said.
Transgender-rights activists have hailed Levine’s appointment as a historic breakthrough. Few trans people have ever held high-level offices at the federal or state level.
Maybe “few” have, but Biden is determined to rectify that shortcoming. The individual who reviewed the defense department during Biden’s transition was also a “transgender” person.
Puberty Blockers
A main policy problem with Levine is this: He wants kids to get the “help” they need to “transition.”
At his confirmation hearing under questioning from Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Levine refused to say whether prepubescent kids should receive puberty blockers — without parental approval — to “transition” to the “correct gender.”
In the past, Levine has advocated chemical castration for boys, as the Washington Examiner reported last month.
“The first phase at the young adolescent age is to give what is called a pubertal blocker, to give a medicine to block the progression of puberty, so you don’t go through the wrong puberty,” he said in 2017.
Between 14 and 16 years of age, kids would get “cross-gender hormones.”
Continued Levine:
They never go through the wrong puberty. That way, for a transgender woman, male to female, their voice doesn’t drop, they don’t have hair, they don’t have to have electrolysis. For a transgender man, they don’t have breast development that will need surgery, they don’t have periods, etc.
So you block puberty … and then at the appropriate time send them through the puberty consistent with their gender identity.
Yet studies show that sex-hormone suppressors “can carry significant dangers for boys, such as obesity, bone issues, and a higher risk of testicular cancer,” the Examiner noted.
Beyond that, gender confusion typically goes away with time: “Critics of the practice point to research that found many children who experienced gender dysphoria, sometimes as high as 80%, no longer express feelings of wanting to change their gender after puberty.”
Dr. Paul Hruz, an associate professor of pediatrics at the Washington University School of Medicine, told the Examiner that such interventions are dangerous and unhealthy:
“When it’s being discussed, people say there’s robust research [showing transgender therapy on children is harmless], that’s not a true statement. The research itself is not where it should be for the degree of this kind of intervention.
“Most of the recommendations being made are based upon low or very low-quality evidence,” he added. “Especially in the area of the puberty blockers, we have no long-term data. We’re having some emerging data on the adverse effects and data that leads to questions about risk and benefit.”
Like Levine, kids who think they are the “wrong gender” are confused. They need a psychiatrist, not puberty blockers and genital mutilation, says Paul McHugh, a retired psychiatrist and professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University.
Some men want to dress as women because it arouses them sexually, McHugh wrote in 2015. But most kids with “gender dysphoria” don’t have that problem. Instead, they have “psychosocial” problems:
Gender dysphoria — the official psychiatric term for feeling oneself to be of the opposite sex — belongs in the family of similarly disordered assumptions about the body, such as anorexia nervosa and body dysmorphic disorder. Its treatment should not be directed at the body as with surgery and hormones any more than one treats obesity-fearing anorexic patients with liposuction. The treatment should strive to correct the false, problematic nature of the assumption and to resolve the psychosocial conflicts provoking it. With youngsters, this is best done in family therapy.
Nursing Home Deaths
Levine’s dangerous views aside, he is also partly responsible for thousands of COVID deaths in Pennsylvania.
Like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, as the top health official in Pennsylvania, Levine backed the governor’s order to force coronovirus patients into nursing homes. The mandate killed more than 3,000 people. “Deaths in nursing homes and assisted living facilities currently account for more than 68% of all the coronavirus-related fatalities in the state, with 3,086 long-term care residents dead,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported in May 2020.
As the dead bodies piled up, Levine pulled his mother out of a nursing home.
