For years, the transgender lobby sold the world on a lie: give a child puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and eventually surgery, and everything will be fine. Europe swallowed that lie first. Now Europe is spitting it back out. So why is the United States only now catching up?
European countries like Sweden, Finland, and even the United Kingdom once led the charge in normalizing these barbaric procedures on minors. They built the clinics, wrote the guidelines, and exported the ideology to the rest of the Western world. In recent years, though, those same countries have slammed the brakes. In 2021, Sweden's Karolinska Institute stopped prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors. In 2022, the NHS shut down the Tavistock Clinic, the UK’s only child gender identity clinic, and later banned the use of puberty blockers in most cases. Finland moved to prioritize psychotherapy over medical transition. And Britain's Cass Review, the most comprehensive scientific study of its kind, found that the evidence behind these interventions was “remarkably weak.”
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Fox News's Kayleigh McEnany pressed HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on exactly this disconnect during Fox News’s Saturday in America town hall, asking him why the United States had fallen so far behind Europe on the issue. Kennedy didn't hesitate to name the real motive.
"I think it was politicized issue and there were people making huge amounts of money," Kennedy told her. "A lot of the medical centers were making billions and billions of dollars on these surgeries, and they were falsifying the science and making it look like there was some benefit over the long term."
Kennedy pointed directly to the Cass Review as the turning point Americans were never allowed to have. "The Cass report, which came out in Britain and was the first really comprehensive scientific study, showed that the benefits were minimal and the cost, the people who were getting these surgeries, that it was often catastrophic for them, that in terms of suicide, suicidal ideation, that those numbers went up," he said. He added that HHS has now "essentially replicated" those findings.
Kennedy said his department is using every tool available, including Medicaid and Medicare funding, to discourage medical centers from performing these procedures on adolescents. This is the kind of common sense that used to be uncontroversial: kids whose brains, hormones, and judgment are still developing shouldn't be making irreversible, life-altering decisions.
The Trump administration is finally doing what Europe already figured out: treating this as a medical scandal instead of a civil rights crusade. I blame the Biden administration for the United States falling behind. Europe led the way in normalizing this evil. Now it's leading the way out of it. The only question left is how much damage was done to American kids while Washington finally caught up.
Much of that European reversal happened while Joe Biden sat in the Oval Office. While European doctors and regulators were quietly admitting they'd made a catastrophic mistake, the Biden administration was doubling down. It pushed to expand access to these procedures, fought state laws that tried to restrict them, and treated anyone who raised concerns as a bigot.
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