Slowly — very slowly — some Democrats are realising that reforming, limiting, or even banning “gender-affirming care” is not only politically viable, but morally and scientifically responsible.

Yesterday, Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene’s bill, the Protect Children’s Innocence Act, passed the House with three Democrats signing on. The bill renders the provision of these treatments a Class C felony, and states explicitly that recipients of the treatments have a right to sue. It also denies federal funding for such practices, reversing course on the Obama Administration’s convoluted path to funding them: declaring it discrimination if insurance companies didn’t.

The three Democrats who voted in favour of the bill hail from Texas and North Carolina, which may partly explain their willingness to cross party lines: they’re moderate Democrats representing moderate districts.

Curiously, four Republicans voted against the bill, breaking party ranks on the other side. Why they did so is something of a mystery. Some represent swing districts or purple states, including Pennsylvania and Colorado. Some may think the bill is too sweeping and punitive — not just a ban, but a threat, at a time when the Right is fracturing due to extremists within its ranks. Others think the bill is overreach, and that doctors and patients should decide their medical care — an argument advanced by activists and supporters of gender-affirming care. Some may also just realise that the bill’s chances of surviving in the Senate, after Democratic gains in the midterm elections, are minimal.

We shouldn’t need bills like this but, unfortunately, they are a necessary corrective. So many accumulated revelations should by now have granted permission to dissent without being branded unkind or consigned to the wrong side of history — the anxieties that still dominate liberal thinking. Increasing numbers of detransitioners, with girls as young as 12 receiving double mastectomies on healthy breasts. Doctors admitting they let the children decide which interventions they want. The low-quality evidence for these procedures.

In fact, even the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) noted, back in 2016, that “the clinical evidence is inconclusive.” The government shouldn’t have been in the business of supporting them in the first place.

And now it won’t. This morning, the day after MTG’s bill passed the house, CMS made an announcement of its own: a proposed rule barring “hospitals from performing sex-rejecting procedures on children under age 18 as a condition of participation in Medicare and Medicaid programs”. That is: no Medicare or Medicaid payments for anyone offering youth gender medicine. This, after the HHS’s “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices”, a bipartisan report that reviewed evidence and offered ethical critiques.

Americans’ views on youth gender medicine and gender-identity policies don’t break down neatly along party lines. A clear majority has grown more supportive of restrictions for trans people in recent years. Unfortunately, the legacy media, which should be the first to point that out, is the last to admit it. The Washington Post announced “Marjorie Taylor Greene’s sweeping anti-trans care bill passes the House,” rather than “Only three Democrats vote for bill criminalising paediatric gender medical treatments of no proven benefit.”

“Anti-trans” is not an appropriate phrase for a mainstream outlet. The HHS today published a statement saying that “current evidence does not support claims that puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries are safe and effective treatments for pediatric gender dysphoria.” That is objectively accurate.

Democrats must push beyond the Left-Right framing that the media keeps hammering, and be unafraid to support restricting these procedures . They have an easy defence for doing so: the truth knows no party lines.

---

Lisa Selin Davis is the author of Tomboy. She writes at Broadview on Substack.

LisaSelinDavis

---