January 29, 2025 - 3:30pm
Yesterday, President Donald Trump released yet another executive order, this one entitled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.”
It notes that “countless children” regret their sex-trait alterations — women who can’t breastfeed after cosmetic mastectomies; a lifetime of medical bills; “a losing war with their own bodies,” and, in some cases, sterilisation. Thus, the United States “will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another.”
“Child,” in this case, means anyone under 19 years old, although “minor” might have been the more appropriate term. “Chemical and surgical mutilation” refers to cross-sex hormones, surgeries, and puberty blockers — not for precocious puberty, in which the body matures too early, but “to delay the onset or progression of normally timed puberty in an individual who does not identify as his or her sex.” That is: just for trans-identified youth.
To many of us who’ve studied this issue, Trump’s directives seem reasonable. First, it forbids funding to hospitals or medical schools which provide these procedures, preventing them from being covered by the government-funded insurance programmes Medicaid and Medicare and the military insurance programme Tricare. It notes that ending these practices may involve getting rid of section 1557 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which prohibited discrimination based on gender identity, but what power the administration has to override it, we don’t yet know.
The institutionalisation of “gender identity” as a fact, rather than a feeling, laid the groundwork for biological males in women’s sports, locker rooms, bathrooms, and prisons. Allowing men to be treated legally as women turned out to be profoundly destabilising, especially when any objection to it was dismissed by the Left as bigoted or hateful. These were heavy-handed policies protected in censorship.
Another target of the executive order is World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), an advocacy group, which created the “standards of care” for patients’ “lasting personal comfort with their gendered selves”. The order refers to this as “Ending Reliance on Junk Science,” and demands that the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), “publish a review of the existing literature on best practices” to treat young people with gender dysphoria. That includes “rapid-onset gender dysphoria,” a term that WPATH and others on the Left have worked hard to discredit, but which clearly exists. HHS should “use all available methods to increase the quality of data to guide practices,” it reads.
The executive order also directs the FDA to investigate those providing misinformation “about long-term side effects of chemical and surgical mutilation,” and demands the extension of statutes of limitations for those who’ve been hurt by gender-affirming care to sue, and the protection of whistleblowers. Extending the statute of limitations is a good thing, especially when it seems that it can take over a decade before those who’ve medically transitioned realise they’ve been harmed. Providers of these interventions should — must — be honest about their long-term implications.
Elsewhere, the order calls for ending “child-abusive practices by so-called sanctuary States.” These are the blue-state laws that indemnify practitioners who provide gender-affirming care to minors from states where it’s banned, but which may also suggest that children who run away and become wards of the state can access those interventions without parental or consent. Thus, Trump suggests applying the Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act to override them.
This lack of oversight is one of the key issues at the heart of the trans movement. We’ve long needed evidence-based guidelines instead of activist-based guidelines, but as documents unsealed in lawsuits revealed, WPATH suppressed systematic evidence reviews because they didn’t support gender-affirming care for adolescents.
Indeed, to this day, we don’t necessarily know what the data tells us about best practices going forward. There are no good data or robust follow-up studies. The order refers to “countless children” who regret their transition, but we don’t know how many there are. Trump insists on “a single, combined report,” which will detail “progress in implementing this order and a timeline for future action.” That report isn’t asking for this missing data, just a progress report on shutting it all down.
It wasn’t long ago that many Americans, especially Democrats, supported gender-affirming care and “trans rights”. But as they’ve come to understand what these amorphous phrases meant, they’ve shifted their stances. The majority of Americans no longer believe that boys should play on girls’ sports teams, or that minors should receive sex changes. Will those moderates be able to see that this executive order is in line with their thinking, or will they be overwhelmed by the barrage of directives that they can’t tell which are reasonable and which aren’t? We don’t know, but, for now at least, this executive order is a welcome corrective.
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SubscribeWell done Trump, and Musk of course. Good for America.
And they are also leading, and showing, the way for a political party of the Right in the UK and what they must do here.
Musk has a child who has transitioned with no regrets. She has disowned her father.
It’s a no brainer to protect children from those who would harm them.
It’s a no brainer for 20-40 year old men, who happen to be Trump’s key voter based.
And meanwhile, 20-40 year old college educated women who keep screeching about misogyny and the patriarchy, would be livid with Trump ‘s “trans phobia”.
That latter group would also be keen on illegal immigration, soft on crime, protecting the feelings of “Asian” communities involved in grooming and Taharrush, or treating with kid gloves the 13% in US responsible for half the sex crimes and fatherless kids in that country.
Amusing how it’s ultimately down to men to protect female spaces, while giving women the vote has made women’s lives much less safe.
Ironic rather than amusing.
For sure, maybe both. It isn’t funny when I think of my female friends, daughter or other young girls I know, who are going to be much more likely to be put in harm’s way, thanks to someone else’s “ideology”.
To take another example which would be unthinkable two generations back but doesn’t even invite comment these days, at least in the West – the replacement of marriage with a series of “relationships”.
Again something that was driven by modern women, because marriage is “slavery” – but the incidence of serious abuse of women and kids rises exponentially with the latter.
Rubbish.
Rubbish.
Do you mind repeating that once more, didn’t get that.
The idea that these Trump orders, along with the installation of so-called “evidence-based” investigations run by partisan Republican committees, will in any meaningful way further this debate is laughable on its face. The measures which the new administration has undertaken are, like the bombs in Gaza, only going to create new versions of the very radicalism they claim they are so invested in eradicating. The enantiodromia of Trump’s radicalism is merely another radicalism, only now on the right. It is no more a solution than the outrageous one the Democrats promoted for the last half decade.
Something that is never mentioned when speaking about “men” entering women’s bathrooms is a discussion about where exactly that so-called “man” is supposed to go if they cannot use the women’s bathroom: the men’s bathroom? Are you sure about that? What is the name of the fallacy when someone infers categorical status to a phenomenon based off the least demonstrative, though most visible, examples of that phenomenon?
Like with toupees, conservatives think they know what they’re talking about when they say that “men” are entering women’s bathrooms. I wonder what kind of heart attacks they would experience when they find out just how many “men” are walking around happily within the ranks of women who really don’t give a darn what sex they were born with. The relevant thing is that, because they pass, there’s no cognitive dissonance, and that is in the overwhelming majority of the cases, the invisible ones, which dumb conservatives don’t ever spend more than half a second contemplating because it disrupts their regressive narrative.
You want to know what is cognitively dissonant? That “man,” who is only a man by dint of which genitals he was born with but nothing more, who has never ever been treated as a man after they transitioned because they pass, now having to enter a men’s bathroom which, if you really carry out the thought experiment, is patently ridiculous.
At any rate, I would love to see Unherd put forward a piece that treats this phenomenon fairly, not from the obvious ridiculousness of the Democratic Party vantage point, but neither from this opposite, equally ridiculous, Republican Party vantage point.
I wonder how many hands we need to count the men that “pass”. Will 1 suffice or do we need 2?
In any case, the men who “pass” can thank the transactivists for making their life much, much more difficult.
“if they cannot use the women’s bathroom: the men’s bathroom? Are you sure about that?“
Yes.
Toilets are frankly an irrelevance for most women. The layout of them, cubicles, means that that a transsexual female can use them without comment or nuisance. Other ‘protected’ spaces like changing rooms where people are undressing may be another matter, let alone rape counselling sessions and prisons for example.
Once again, the whole debate has descended into mud slinging, in which everyone wants to call out others as extremists. Sigh….
Your comment perfectly illustrates the problem with Constructivism or Interpretivism. Its an endless loop of Relativism in response to the impossibility of making rules/laws that are purely Positivistic/Axiomatic.
The best you can do with rules is be Pragmatic. The overwhelming majority of people fit into a simple classification of male and female. Rules should be designed in simple, clear and precise fashion. If there are exceptions to the rules than accommodation can be examined. But rules can not be designed around the extreme exception.
What we’re doing now with Equity is treating the exception as the rule which results in absurdity, confusion and overcomplexity. Keep it simple.
It goes further than making rules based on the exceptions. The exceptions are used to invalidate the experience and views of the majority by casting them as an oppressor class. This matters more than the individual issues, be they framed around race, sex or whatever.
You seem keen to locate the definition of ‘man’ in a mental realm. That’s a dead-end. Man and Woman issue from the physical world. Reality, not fantasy.
Not sure I agree with your starting point, but I gave you an upvote because it is good to see someone who goes against the overwhelming ‘we-love-Trump’ attitude you find here. That said:
1) On this one point Trump’s rules (much as I fear and despise the man) make a lot more sense than the previous version.
2) That notwithstanding, you do actually have one point: If some trans woman actually looks womanly enough to pass, where should that person go? Choosing the men’s room is likely to lead to trouble too, potentially even violence, but we can hardly make it illegal to dress in drag.
Who would do the violence? The 2-gender Trumpists will surely welcome them as supporters? The woke lefties will want to give tgem a hug?
The situation of having a female presenting trans woman in a men’s bathroom is ludicrous on its face. Republicans and conservatives have legitimate complaints but they seem to lack the ability to carry out their counterfactuals to their logical conclusions. The fact of the matter is that many of them have simply never been around a trans person or have never been aware that they have been around a trans person and, if they knew one or were aware they were in the presence of one, would be shocked to find themselves realizing the sheer absurdity of asking that person to go to a bathroom that aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth. Thanks for the upvote. Unherd is great on so many things but when it comes to the trans debate, they’re as bad as the most accelerationist Democrat, only on the other side.
At a guess Carlos I wonder if you are talking about the historical situation with respect to gender dysphoria?
I think collateral damage from the madness of the radical trans situation is that small cohort of, for want of a better description, “real” transsexuals. How are those who transitioned 10, 20, 30 years ago supposed to navigate and live with this new situation?
Back in the 1990’s we had a male to female transsexual in our group of post graduates. Quite an eye opener for all. At the start he had begone hormone treatment and was starting to dress and live as a woman. He was respectful of all and appreciative of support. I knew him as he became her with a full transition for a number of years until I moved away. Having got to know her well I have little doubt she has been horrified by the last years of radical trans.
Thank you for that story of your personal experience with a transgender person. I fully agree with you and I wish I could hear more stories like the one you told. There are many trans people out there that do not support what the Democratic Party has done in their name and, frankly, I find their position perhaps the most reasonable of all. In my view, Democrats must abandon the accelerationist posture around trans rights and become sensitized to how the average American, who views trans rights from a fundamentally sympathetic perspective, is oriented around this debate. In other words: common sense. At the same time, Republicans must understand that the social contract will always contain ungovernable aspects where state power can not be called upon to adjudicate matters. We can never have a society that legalizes the inspection of genitals before entering a bathroom. Therefore, trans people that pass use those bathrooms without “detection” and, if that’s the case, there has to be a reckoning with the fact of trans lives being given access to gender-specific public spaces like bathrooms, not by the sex they were born with, but by the gender they transitioned to later on in life.
“Allowing men to be treated legally as women turned out to be profoundly destabilising…”
Was this ever in doubt with thinking, breathing people?
The reason it was even considered as a concept was because we have gotten used to women being treated legally as men.
The only difference is that so far it was men being disadvantaged as a result, whether it’s tech jobs, STEM education, mens hobbies, boy scouts etc.
It’s only when that was carried to its natural conclusion – that the other way round must also be true – and resulted in women being disadvantaged that it became a big issue
Even now, a lot of women who oppose trans, men going into female sports or toilets – would also angrily oppose any suggestion that men might be biologically different and hence naturally better at certain activities.
You’re making some good points. It actually wasn’t that long ago that some feminists were claiming that the reason for segregation in sports was to avoid men facing the humiliation of being defeated by women!
And of course pretty much any specifically male space or organisation was seen as discrimination against women and girls.
In Britain this even extended to school playgrounds. The usual course of events was that separate playgrounds were got rid of (sometimes providing a car park for teachers) and then boys were banned from playing rough games (like football) because girls complained.
Agree with your comments, but football a rough game? Substitute for Rugby.
That men are naturally better at certain activities is hardly controversial. You could find a couple of boys at your local high school who’d beat the world’s fastest woman in a sprint race, and they’d certainly have their biology (not better diet or more arduous training) to thank for it.
Your misogyny always comes through in your comments, Samir.
Ditto your misandry!
Never.
But that was another way for the left to destroy the West.
All the trans are mentally ill (unless pretending to gain advantage) and should be locked up in appropriate hospitals.
I wonder how quickly would they realise they are men or women again?
So does your misandry!
Where have most of the comments here gone?
That is the way the site works. Unpopular comments are in effect shadow-banned. If a post accumulates enough downvotes it is removed, together with all related replies, and reinstated after a day or two when the discussion is over and no one is interested any more. That way you can protect people from too much exposure to wrongthink, while still boasting about your commitment to free speech and open debate.
Yes, it is terrible and true.
The same happens on other forums like Spectator.
I am less and less inclined to comment.
I was away from here and elsewhere for last few weeks and spent more time reading books and listening to music.
Large amounts of downvotes doesn’t seem to remove Jeremy Watson’s comments quickly!
Its an abiding mystery how so many people have been so stupid and/or consumed by ideology to believe that it wouldn’t. Or at least pretend that’s what they believe.
Well written and thoughtful. Getting more information is always a good idea.