Gender ideology is unraveling. It’s fraud all the way down. There is no good evidence that “transitioning” helps anyone, especially children. And people are realizing that the entire premise — that a boy can somehow be born into a female body, or vice versa — is superstitious nonsense. Indeed, transgender ideology is so insane that the coalition against it ranges from conservative Christians to lesbian feminists.
Transgender ideology has many enemies, but the most effective are those who have been victimized by wrongly named “gender-affirming care,” especially the detransitioners who have realized that so-called transition is a pursuit of the impossible, driven by lies. The power of their testimony was displayed during the recent Detrans Awareness Day, which was organized by Genspect and hosted at the U.S. Capitol on March 12. There were interviews and meetings with administration officials and members of Congress. The public centerpiece was an outstanding series of panel discussions involving activists, doctors, policy experts, and especially detransitioners.
The first panel included Dr. Eithan Haim, the whistleblower whom the Biden administration persecuted after he exposed the continued medical “transition” of children in Texas. He warned that transgender programs resist being shut down and explained how doctors may be committing fraud to keep performing trans experiments on children. Put simply, they may deliberately use the wrong billing codes to hide what they are doing.
For example, if a girl claims to be transgender, a doctor might change her chart to show her as male, which is easily done in the Epic medical records system, and then “diagnose” her with testosterone deficiency. The doctor could then prescribe testosterone for her and get either private insurance or the government to pay for it without them knowing it was to “transition” a child. Leftist groups are promoting this scheme, publishing literal guides to committing insurance fraud.
Transgender ideologues are resorting to insurance fraud because of laws and policies restricting the medical fraud that is “gender-affirming care.” Pro-trans doctors were confident that if they just kept transing people, eventually evidence would come in and vindicate them, but the opposite happened. Among other examples, the U.K.’s Cass Report found there is no good evidence that performing transgender medical interventions on children helps them. It has also been revealed that the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) suppressed a review of the evidence it had commissioned, and that Johanna Olson-Kennedy, one of the nation’s leading pro-transgender pediatric doctors, is suppressing the results of her own taxpayer-funded study.
Detransitioners are flesh-and-blood proof of what the numbers show. Their testimonies indict a medical profession that is either in the grip of radical gender ideology or cowed by those who are, and which has therefore betrayed its duties to patients and the public. The detransitioners speaking in the Capitol described a conveyor-belt approach to transgender medical interventions that quickly affirmed trans identities and encouraged each new step of so-called transition.
Thus they were harmed by those who were charged above all with doing them no harm. In the words of Laura Becker, “I have to wear a mastectomy bra for the rest of my life because I was lied to.” She “was a traumatized girl” who needed help, not a “gay trans man” who needed her breasts cut off.
The malfeasance of the medical system is fed by the internet (increasingly joined by the school systems and social services), which is filled with encouragement to embrace a transgender identity. Instead of addressing trauma or the difficulties of being different, there is the false hope of fleeing into another identity.
The online world and transgender ideology intersect in other malevolent ways. As Chloe Cole put it, exposure to online pornography makes many young women want to escape their femininity; if that is what being a woman is, many girls will want nothing to do with it. Meanwhile, Forrest Smith noted that for males there is often a sexual aspect to the desire to transition, which may also be the result of pornography exposure and use.
Though there are common themes to their stories, and insights to be gained from them, detransitioners are not interchangeable, so it was important to have more of them sharing their distinct experiences. Yes, some detransitioners are more publicly prominent and polished, but they are hardly alone. As Detrans Awareness Day demonstrated, the number of people speaking out about the harms transgender ideology inflicted on them is increasing.
These detransitioners are leading the way to defeat radical gender ideology. Their stories expose the lies and fraud of “gender-affirming care.” Their boldness in speaking out informs both politicians and the public. And their lawsuits against the medical systems that have injured them will likely be the final nail in the coffin of the medical industry’s embrace of transgenderism.
Suing “gender” doctors may make “gender-affirming care” impossible by making it uninsurable. As Soren Aldaco explained, it is not about money but about holding the medical system accountable. The first lawsuits will be the hardest. But it will get easier after the first few wins, and then the floodgates will open as trans-experimenting doctors are rightly sued into oblivion for their fraud and malpractice.
Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a fellow in the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
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