The Baltimore Sun’s Dan Rodricks took time off from his anti-Catholic diatribes about the child sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church to……defend child abuse.
Rodricks decided to write about his favorite Republican, Andy Harris, again this morning. And if you think that Rodricks has written immoral things before, you haven’t seen anything yet.
Rodricks writes:
Harris, an anesthesiologist, presented himself at recent congressional hearings as an outraged doctor come to save civilization from the Biden administration, the American Medical Association and other organizations that support health care for those whose gender identity differs from the sex they were assigned at birth.
Harris’ worst play to prejudices against transgender people was when, in regard to minors, he described the rare instances of gender-affirming surgery as “gender-denying mutilation.” Referring to Rachel Levine, the pediatrician who serves as one of the nation’s top health officials, Harris said it is “reprehensible for a government official, let alone the Assistant U.S. Secretary of [Health and Human Services], to promote the genital mutilation of minors as becoming a standard practice in the U.S.”
Did Harris say anything incorrect here? No. “Gender-affirming surgery” does mutilate the genitals of those who are going through it. It is the physical mutilation of the human body, often a child in recent instances.
Rodricks then goes on to complain about the “fixation” of Republicans…..trying to protect children from child abuse:
This vulnerable minority represents the new “other” for the country’s harshest conservatives. Dismissing medical science, eschewing live-and-let-live, or even common decency, Republican politicians go out of their way to associate trans people with the political left, raising fears and riling the evangelical base. It’s truly disgusting.
The irony of Rodricks complaining about “dismissing medical science” while trying to pretend that boys can become girls and girls can become boys through genital mutilation is puzzling. So is the concept that Republicans are “eschewing live-and-let-live” when the question for most conservatives is how children, not adults, can be protected from the child abuse that is allowing them to undergo so-called “gender-affirming care.”
Then Rodricks quotes the American Medical Association, for some reason:
The AMA, on the other hand, opposes policies that discriminate against trans people. “Gender-affirming care is medically-necessary, evidence-based care that improves the physical and mental health of transgender and gender-diverse people,” the AMA said in response to legislative efforts to ban physicians from serving trans patients.
As a reminder, this is the same AMA that once endorsed eugenics as a perfectly valid way to screen immigrants into the country.
Rodricks, refusing to accept the scientifically correct answer, then decides to enlist the help of somebody actually committing these atrocities on children. Dr. Sari Bentsianov says:
Puberty blockers have been in use for decades for conditions such as precocious puberty. Overall, there is a favorable safety profile with no serious long term adverse effects.
Internationally, however, governing bodies have come to different conclusions regarding the safety and efficacy of medically treating gender dysphoria. Sweden’sNational Board of Health and Welfare, which sets guidelines for care, determined last year that the risks of puberty blockers and treatment with hormones “currently outweigh the possible benefits” for minors. Finland’s Council for Choices in Health Care, a monitoring agency forthe country’s public health services, issued similar guidelines, calling for psychosocial support as the first line treatment. (Both countries restrict surgery to adults.)
I encourage you to read for yourself to learn that “gender-affirming care” is not the “settled science” that practitioners like Bentsianov and hack writers like Rodricks want you to believe it is.
State-sponsored genital mutilation, as we will have soon in Maryland, is sick, abhorrent, and immoral. It is sexual violence against children. Why Dan Rodricks chooses to defend it just to take shots at Andy Harris is beyond me and below the publication standards of what bills itself as a “newspaper of record.”