Trans-ing kids: These Congress members need to be held accountable

By Brandon Showalter, Opinion writer and social commentator Monday, August 07, 2023

A national reckoning is underway over the chemical and surgical trans-ing of children and teens. And while many players are culpable, ignorance is no excuse because they cannot say they were not warned. 

If the July 27 Congressional hearing before the House Judiciary Committee on “gender-affirming care” was any indication, some politicians are digging in their heels in denial because for them to admit the awful truth likely means facing paralyzing shame. In order to avoid that profound regret, they must continue refusing to acknowledge that gruesome medical atrocities are presently occurring nationwide and instead defend them as "care," even when living breathing evidence in the form of a teen victim of such atrocities is right there under their noses.

With an icy glare in her eyes and spouting talking points that typify the Democratic party's preening posture on these issues, Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pennsylvania) smugly styled herself as a champion of "science," insisting that the experimental drugs that sterilize and surgeries that mutilate confused children are clinically approved medical treatments and are, therefore, "not up for debate." The committee hearing scrutinizing these practices, she said, was a waste of time. 

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Mere feet away from her was detransitioner Chloe Cole, whose courage is truly astonishing. Cole spent her 19th birthday testifying before federal lawmakers about how she and her parents were misled about treatment options when she was diagnosed with gender dysphoria as an adolescent, and how an unscrupulous surgeon amputated her breasts when she was only 15. Before undergoing a bilateral mastectomy, she was prescribed puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones that have caused sexual dysfunction, among other serious health complications.

One has to wonder what was going through Scanlon's and her Democratic colleagues' minds when House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) included as part of his opening remarks a few minutes of stomach-turning video footage showing Dr. Blair Peters, a pink-haired gender surgeon from Oregon, being interviewed in a recent podcast. 

Peters, who speaks with an excruciatingly narcissistic affectation and grating vocal fry, described the practices he carries out on the bodies of children at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, including how he inverts the underdeveloped sex organs of pubertal-suppressed boys. These grotesque operations are part of a series that his university team is reportedly assembling, and he admitted that they do not entirely know what they are doing. 

Since these young boys have had their physiological development arrested with hormone blockers, there is often not enough tissue with which to construct a facsimile of a female sex organ. Not to worry though, he continues, because at OHSU they are using a robot to do intra-abdominal surgery to harvest the peritoneum (membrane lining the abdominal cavity) to line the newly-constructed canal simulating a vagina in the boys’ crotch area.

When Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Florida) tried to play that exact clip of the same surgeon in a separate committee hearing, chaos erupted and Democrat legislators fussed, but the footage was ultimately allowed to be shown. For if this surgery is life-saving and medically necessary so as to prevent trans-identified children from dying by suicide, as trans activists like to claim, why was it so objectionable that a description of the surgical process be seen?

I have to believe that it is because the Democrats all know deep down that these are monstrous acts worthy of being adjudicated at Nuremberg-like tribunals. The stealthy, information-suppressing tactics of trans activists and their corporate media allies seem to be increasingly ineffective and the appalling realities have risen to the surface. It is significant that this latest hearing took place at the national level; it follows approximately 20 state legislatures implementing a ban of some kind on these experimental medical practices. 

In a word that warned of God’s judgment against Assyria’s arrogance, the prophet Isaiah declared, asking: “What will you do on the day of reckoning, when disaster comes from afar? To whom will you run for help? Where will you leave your riches?” (Isaiah 10:3).

Those same questions must be put to not only the politicians promoting this grave moral evil but the doctors who are a disgrace to their profession. Physicians that have sterilized and disfigured young, vulnerable people in keeping with the dictates of an insane ideology while profiting from irreversibly damaging their bodies must be held to account.

Formal actions contesting this medical malpractice are mounting and let's hope that a legal disaster befalls these practitioners and that their riches are left with those whom they have harmed. For her part, Cole is suing the doctors that drugged and maimed her as is Layla Jane Lovdahl, whose breasts were amputated when she was only 13 years old.

Detransitioners Prisha Mosley and Soren Aldaco are two more young women who are the latest to file lawsuits against the doctors that misled and exploited them. Both women are represented by Campbell, Miller, Payne, PLLC, a new law firm that was launched exclusively for the purpose of helping detransitioners receive justice.

The Democratic politicians (and even a few craven Republicans in some states) that still defend this barbaric, pseudoscientific nonsense will not be able to say they did not know how terrible this was because many Democrat voters repeatedly warned them. Political liberals including radical feminists, lefty gays and lesbians, and many left-wing parents of gender-non-conforming teenagers have for years implored their elected representatives to listen to their concerns to no avail. 

Among those who have done so relentlessly and at considerable personal cost is Kara Dansky, the author of the 2021 book The Abolition of Sex: How the ‘Transgender’ Agenda Harms Women and Girls and whose upcoming book with the working title The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls mercilessly skewers her own party.

"Democratic party leaders are going to tell us that they didn’t know. They are going to tell us that they couldn’t have known. They are going to tell us that the science has changed in ways that they couldn’t have anticipated,” Dansky told CP in an email Thursday.

“Don’t believe them and don’t let them get away with it. I know they know because I have told them directly. I say that as a Democrat and a feminist,” she added.

As Cole finished her impassioned remarks before Congress at the end of July, she concluded with these pointed, prophetic words: “Let me be your final warning.”

Those who framed this depraved, unmitigated child abuse as evidence-based healthcare or as “trans rights” under the banner of civil liberties must face the music. In my view, the only acceptable outcome is a complete and total defeat of gender ideology; it must be purged from every single one of our institutions. 

May this brewing reckoning grow, and may God hasten the day when this scourge is regarded as the abominable horror that it is.