President Joe Biden’s health care team wants to completely eliminate age restrictions for children to receive care to help them transition genders.
Email excerpts show that Biden’s point person for transgender issues urged the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) to drop age requirements for transition and gender-affirming care.
The revelations come just as the Supreme Court said this week that it would hear a case in its next term examining whether a Tennessee ban on transgender treatments and surgeries for minors is constitutional.
Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services Rachel Levine, a trans woman, is leading Biden’s efforts to address transgender issues.
Draft guidelines released in late 2021 recommended lowering age minimums for certain treatments, but now Levine wants to eliminate age requirements entirely because Levine is concerned about access to care.
Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services Rachel Levine (pictured) wants to completely eliminate age requirements for gender reassignment treatments and surgeries because she is “very concerned that age requirements (primarily for surgeries) will limit access to care for trans youth and youth to influence’. maybe adults
The previous draft already relaxed restrictions by lowering the age minimums to 14 years for hormone treatments, 15 years for mastectomies, 16 years for breast augmentation and facial surgeries and 17 years for genital surgeries or hysterectomies.
This means that minors can now have their genitals permanently and irreversibly removed.
This week’s email excerpts, first reported by The New York Times based on unsealed court documents, recalled conversations a member of WPATH’s guideline development group had with Sarah Boateng, who at the time was serving as Chief of Staff to Admiral Levine.
“She is confident, based on the rhetoric she hears in DC, and from what we have already seen, that these specific mentions of ages under 18 will result in devastating legislation for transgender health care,” the email reads .
“She wonders if the specific ages can be extracted,” the unnamed person added.
Another email claimed that Levine was “very concerned that being older (especially due to surgeries) will impact access to care for trans youth and perhaps adults as well.”
“Apparently the situation in the US is dire and they and the Biden administration were concerned that including ages in the document would only make matters worse. She asked us to remove them,” they wrote.
The Supreme Court will hear a case in its next term involving a Tennessee law banning transgender treatments and surgeries for minors
Allowing teenagers to undergo transgender treatments and surgeries has always become controversial in the American political world.
Opponents argue that teens are too young to make such permanent, life-changing decisions.
However, advocates maintain that young people with gender dysphoria are at greater risk for depression, suicide and other mental health conditions if their condition is not also physically addressed.
The emails of Levine’s staffer were released this week as legal filings were released in a federal lawsuit challenging Alabama’s ban on gender-affirming care.