Abigail Shrier wrote a popular book called “Irreversible Damage” where she talked about the movement to change a child’s appearance to the opposite sex with drugs and surgeries. Her goal was to convince voters that this caused “irreversible harm” to children. Now that president Trump has signed a ban on taxpayer-funding of transitioning children, she has excellent thoughts.

Here’s the article in the Free Press.

She starts like this:

When the history of 21st-century gender mania is written, it should include this signal entry: In 2020, a website called GoFundMe, usually a place to find disaster-relief appeals and charities for starving children, contained more than 30,000 urgent appeals from young women seeking to remove their perfectly healthy breasts.

Another entry, from June 2020: The New England Journal of Medicine, America’s platinum medical publication, published a piece explaining that biological sex is actually “assigned at birth” by a doctor—and not a verifiable fact, based on our gametes, stamped into every one of our cells. In fact, biological sex ought to be deleted from our birth certificates—the authors claimed—because a person’s biological sex serves “no clinical utility.”

How did it start? She has an answer:

It began with Obamacare.

Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s signature legislation incentivizing and coercing private insurers to offer their products on a government exchange, prohibited those companies from discriminating on the basis of sex. And in May 2016, six years after the bill’s enactment, the Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services added this fateful qualification: Discrimination on the basis of “sex” was to include discrimination on the basis of “gender identity.”

“Obama effectively wrote into law, through healthcare, that gender identity is a protected class,” healthcare executive and gender-medicine researcher Zhenya Abbruzzese told me. And that opened a huge new source of funding for these treatments. “Because once these insurers feel like they have to cover it, that’s it. You have just turned on the engine,” Abbruzzese said.

If an insurer covers testosterone to treat a man who was deficient, then, according to gender ideology’s cracked logic, the insurer would also need to cover testosterone for a woman identifying as a man. If a procedure to remove a man’s unwanted breast tissue was covered, then a similar procedure for a woman identifying as a man must also be covered. Denying those claims could subject insurers to federal enforcement action.

Do you ever wonder why healthcare got so expensive after Obamacare was passed? It’s not just because Obama increased the number of mandatory coverages, and mandated coverage of more people. It’s the types of treatments that were now covered by health insurance companies. That’s why caused YOUR premiums to go up.

I like to get into fights with my doctor. He kept insisting that doctors who support pandemic mandates and transitioning children are driven by “evidence”, whereas opposition to these fads were based on “social media”.

But was he right? No, he’s wrong:

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), an activist organization styled as a medical one, issued guidelines used as the “standards of care” by all major insurers and Medicaid to justify the provision of, and reimbursement for, gender transition services. WPATH represented their guidelines as evidence-based. Court-ordered discovery in a 2022 lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice to overturn Alabama’s ban on gender treatments for minors revealed that WPATH’s guidelines lacked solid evidentiary basis, but also that WPATH leadership knew it.

The organization suppressed publication of systematic reviews of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries undertaken by Johns Hopkins University. That research would almost certainly have revealed, as so many systematic reviews have now done, that while the risk of sterility, cardiac event, osteoporosis, and bone fracture were high, any alleged mental health benefits of the WPATH-approved puberty blockers-to-cross sex hormones protocol remained unproven.

But the Biden administration pressed onward, suing any state that enacted bans on medical transition for minors. Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, a transgender adult, successfully pressured WPATH to drop minimum age requirements for gender medical treatments and surgeries in its September 2022 standards of care.

I blogged about this. And I guess that one of the reasons why Trump won is because people realized that the doctors were NOT operating on the basis of evidence at all. The doctors were being driven by the “big money” they were getting for drugging and mutilating these children. I blogged about that, too.

Back to Abigail. She talks about how the Obama and Biden regimes funded pro-trans research with taxpayer dollars. But they didn’t get the results they wanted:

The Obama and Biden administrations worked in tandem with activist organizations. Federal funds poured into tainted research. Gender physician Johanna Olson-Kennedy received nearly $10 million from the National Institutes of Health to study the effects of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones on gender-confused adolescents ages 11 and up. (She later lowered the age to 8.)

[…]As for her nine-year study on puberty blockers, Olson-Kennedy didn’t like the results so, by her own admission, she shelved them. “She said the findings might fuel the kind of political attacks that have led to the bans of the youth gender treatments in more than 20 states,” according to The New York Times. She told the Times she intends to publish the data, but that getting her work to a place where it wouldn’t be “weaponized” required it to be “clear and concise. And that takes time.”

The public that had funded her research has never had the opportunity to review its results.

OK, that’s enough. You should read the whole article, it’s just first class. Evidence, evidence, evidence.

By the way, if you missed Matt Walsh’s opening monologue on Trump’s action, he shows why it’s actually better than you think.

If you are not listening to the Matt Walsh podcast, you should subscribe to it. Every opening monologue is worth a listen. We really need to return men to their rightful place as moral and spiritual leaders. We are not “servant leaders”, as Christian feminists like to argue. If we encouraged men to make moral judgments, and lead, then we would never have had transgenderism in the first place. And we need to train women to prefer men who judge and lead on moral and spiritual issues. It will be a 180-degree change from what we have now, but we need to do it.