The era of castrating kids is over, thanks bigly to Donald Trump

I don’t often make predictions, but early last year, I made this forecast about the chemical and surgical castration of minors:

I predict the entire house of cards will have fallen across the West within the next year or so — giving the quack medicine known as gender-affirming care” a shelf life approximating that of lobotomies, and two decades too long.

Ten months later, the prophecy has been fulfilled.

Among a flurry of gender-themed executive orders issued by the Trump administration this week was one released Tuesday entitled "Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation". It began:

Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a childs sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions. This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nations history, and it must end.

The EO warned that the victims of this practice often experience regret, may end up unable to conceive or breastfeed, and may encounter rising medical bills, “lifelong medical complications, a losing war with their own bodies, and, tragically, sterilization”.

As such, the new Administration announced it that “will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.”

 

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As well as providing a comprehensive list of the drugs and procedures to be eschewed, significantly, the order requires federal agencies to “rescind or amend all policies that rely on WPATH guidance” — a move that would likely expose recalcitrant practitioners to litigation.

Thus, while stopping short of banning “gender medicine” entirely, Trump’s executive order will ensure it is heavily curtailed, if not shuttered for good, in the nation with the highest victim count and the most culpability for expanding, innovating, and popularising the barbaric practice worldwide.

Lasting change?

But this is just an executive order that can be reversed by the next administration, critics might argue.

Possibly. But given that the popularity of castrating kids is now at historically low levels and that Republicans control both houses of Congress, it is highly likely Trump’s reforms will be written into law before the upcoming midterms.

Even if not, recent polls suggest that the America First movement that swept the country last November, far more than representing just MAGA voters or Trump personality cultists, is a unity ticket that Democrats will struggle to oust in 2028. Trump’s executive order could have a very long shelf life.

But this is just America, critics may likewise argue.

Actually, the United States has lagged in its rollback of paediatric gender quackery, at least on a national scale. Chile, Italy, Germany, the UK, the EU, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, France, Sweden and Finland have all made bold moves towards curtailing the practice.

And this just in from The Australian:

More than 100 doctors, academics, lawyers, politicians, advocates and detransitioners are calling for the Albanese government to launch an immediate inquiry into youth gender medicine and to pause the use of puberty blockers and hormone therapies for children in Australia.

The group of signatories, which includes former prime minister Tony Abbott, former deputy prime minister John Anderson, Queensland child psychiatrist Jillian Spencer, former Liberal candidate Katherine Deves, and outspoken medical doctor Dr Julie Sladden, warned the practice is a potential public health disaster of generational significance”.

While a few skirmishes remain to be fought, the era of castrating kids is fast coming to an end. Thank heavens for that.

My next prediction?

Not long from now, the vast majority who aided and abetted the pseudoscience known as “gender medicine” will pivot and deny they ever supported it.

You know they will.

Good thing we kept the receipts.


Do you think that this is all a storm in a teacup or a significant advance?  


Kurt Mahlburg is a writer and author, and an emerging Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He has a passion for both the philosophical and the personal, drawing on his background as a graduate architect, a primary school teacher, a missionary, and a young adult pastor.

Image credit: Bigstock


 

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  • Eric Lockett
    followed this page 2025-02-01 18:39:04 +1100
  • Susan Rohrbach
    commented 2025-02-01 10:33:54 +1100
    Regarding transgender regret: see the following link for many articles: tinyurl.com/tgregret

    They are a mix of popular and academic. Many countries are bowing out. I look forward to seeing the articles detailing longterm positives about these mutilations.

    All of this is not to supersede my remarks below regarding the lesser of two evils.
  • mrscracker
    Mr. Mouse, there’s no science to follow in that. I have real compassion for folks caught in that sort of confusion & pain & I know you do ,too or you wouldn’t take the time to comment on it. But we don’t use amputation, the mutilation of healthy organs, or sterilization as therapies or to improve society.
    There’s no such thing as a “bottom surgery” either. If we embrace non-medically required castration, hysterectomies, mastectomies, & the like we should at least use the proper terminology for those surgeries.
    It seems farfetched but there are people who desire the amputation of other body parts & even blind themselves. Any cooperation of the medical community in that is equally unethical.
    I know you have compassion Mr. Mouse & God bless you for that.
    :)
  • Anon Emouse
    commented 2025-02-01 05:29:49 +1100
    It’s not an ideological difference mrscracker, I can find SO MANY MORE people happy with their bottom surgery than you can find people who regret it. It’s backed up by data of people who have had their lives significantly improved by having this care. And you would seek to deny them that coverage
  • mrscracker
    Mr. Mouse, I realize it’s an ideological issue & I believe you have the best intentions but there’s no such thing scientifically as affirming anything apart from one’s DNA -which cannot be changed.
    Again, it’s about medical ethics & social contagions. Not consent. Even if there were young people who were so indoctrinated into the eugenics movement that they willingly offered themselves up for sterilization it would still be a black mark on the medical community. And I believe I’ve read there were people like that. Eugenics was championed for decades by social progressives, some who really did think it was for the greater good.
  • Mary Conces
    followed this page 2025-02-01 03:42:29 +1100
  • Anon Emouse
    commented 2025-02-01 03:37:20 +1100
    There are many health benefits to gender affirming care as well, mrscracker, including castration. And usually there’s more consent involved than in circumcision.
    Why are you okay with one form of genital mutilation but not the other?
  • mrscracker
    Thank you for bringing that up Mr. Mouse. Unlike eugenic sterilizations & castration there can be legitimate health benefits to circumcision, not the least of which is the lowering of the chances of passing on STD’s to sexual partners. People have compared circumcision to cultural female genital mutilation practices but as far as I know those have no health benefits for women.

    No infant can give consent to a medical procedure & parents have the right to seek legitimate medical care for their children. I doubt many children would happily sign off consent forms to receive vaccinations but those can be life saving things. Dental care’s pretty important too but few children look forward to the dentist’s chair.
    The real issue in this article & the eugenics craze of the early 20th century was more about junk science & the erosion of medical ethics.
  • Susan Rohrbach
    commented 2025-02-01 01:55:18 +1100
    Yes I kept the receipts on president quack speed. Way back in the twenty teens, he praised the idea of a man competing in a women’s beauty pageant. On assuming first presidency, he also said that obergefell (the tree that bore the fruit of genital mutilation imo) was “settled law”. Then more recently, I think 2020, he also affirmed the Supreme Court decision that held up transgender as protected under the 1964 civil rights act.

    Right now with this transgender ban, he is mouthing what his bankrollers want mouthed, so that we conservatives will see him as our Savior. Remember when he was “most prolife president ever”? That was after he was bff with Bill, Hill , and Epstein. But it was before he raped (7/15/24) GOP platform of its promise to abolish abortion as it had slavery, and before he said that he would not sign abolition even if it was brought on platter.

    The best way to understand these disparities is that he was a Democrat planted to make conservatives lockdown who would not have under an admitted Democrat. (A lockdown for which he has never apologized) He does not have the dementia of Biden but he does have reality actor skills and the willingness to go limp on command.

    Stop falling for the reality act and do parse his words very carefully. When Trump says he’s for “parental rights”, doesn’t that include those of Adam and Steve? When he and funder Elon (dad of a dozen!) say they “want more children in the world’, doesn”t that actually mean via IVF? (In fact, frankentube is what trump wants taxpayer to fund!)

    They’re not after him, they’re after you. He’s only pointing the way!

    Conservatives, stop hiding and stop affirming his perfidy by chasing the little treats he throws out (note that he had to say that there are only two genders only because He (not science!) says so!). Yes, transgender needs undoing but that requires Obergefell overturn (and not via a Dobbsian diversion to the states). Hold Trump to his implied promise to abolish abortion for Created Equal’s birthday in 2026! MACEA!
  • Paul Bunyan
    commented 2025-01-31 23:38:02 +1100
    Yes indeed, Anon Emouse. Parenting regret is a serious problem. More people need to know about this so they don’t ruin several lives with an irreversible decision.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCOaYBmobh4&ab_channel=AllThingsWinnie
  • Anon Emouse
    commented 2025-01-31 23:35:22 +1100
    I’d also go on to state more people regret having kids than having gender affirming care. More people regret having knee replacement surgery than GAC.

    But don’t let those facts get in the way of Kurt’s moral panic
  • Anon Emouse
    commented 2025-01-31 23:30:57 +1100
    Oh. I guess Kurt is ok with that genital mutilation. If only he were consistent in his position on subjects
  • Anon Emouse
    commented 2025-01-31 23:29:34 +1100
    They outlawed circumcision? That genital mutilation that takes places every day that children can’t consent to?
  • mrscracker
    Praise God for this.
    If a cease and desist order for the eugenic sterilization and castration of young people had been ordered I think everyone would be applauding. It wouldn’t have been applauded 100 years ago. That’s the only difference.
    Each era has its own delusions and junk science and it takes time for those delusions to run their course.
    Well meaning people can get caught up in these ideologies. Even something as dark as eugenics was presented to our grandparents as a way to end suffering and generational poverty .
    I’m very grateful we are moving forward now.
  • Janet Grevillea
    commented 2025-01-31 18:51:35 +1100
    Yes, many of the adolescent girls taking puberty blockers, having mastectomies and progressing to opposite sex hormones are girls/young women who otherwise would have been lesbian. I don’t think having that serious interference with normal adolescent development setting a young person on the path of life-long medical treatment is a storm in a teacup. Similarly, living in a country in which the definition of “woman” and “man” have been removed from the law covering discrimination is having a dire effect on society, especially on the rights of women. I am speaking of Australia, not the USA, which I think is your focus.
  • Emberson Fedders
    commented 2025-01-31 17:25:28 +1100
    “The outcome is that lesbians are being erased from public life and young lesbians are deciding the only way to survive is to become men.”

    Speaking of moral panics and storms in teacups.
  • Janet Grevillea
    commented 2025-01-31 16:47:54 +1100
    For me and many other lesbians, this issue is far from a moral panic or a storm in a teacup. It is about the ways in which the law gives preference to gender identity over sex. T he outcome is that lesbians are being erased from public life and young lesbians are deciding the only way to survive is to become men.

    What we also need in Australia is an amendment to the Sex Discrimination Act, reinstating sex as a primary protected characteristic. Currently gender identity trumps sex.

    This means that lesbians are not allowed to hold public meetings unless they include men-who-identify-as-women-who-are-attracted-to-women to attend. There has been a hearing followed by an appeal, and still lesbians are obliged to include men (those who call themselves transbians) or go underground.

    Interestingly, male homosexuals are allowed to exclude women from public gatherings, and transpeople are allowed to exclude non-transpeople from their public gatherings.
  • Janet Grevillea
    commented 2025-01-31 16:32:48 +1100
    This is an interesting development. I, and I know many others, have written to the Federal Minister for Health asking him to attend to the findings of the Cass Review. To date he has ignored all our pleas, reassuring us that we already have a great set-up here in Oz, no need to question it.

    Suddenly, because Trump, and the Queensland Liberal National Party, and an election is in the air in Australia, and Liberal Party figures are demanding an inquiry, suddenly Mark Butler has heard the pleas.
  • Emberson Fedders
    commented 2025-01-31 16:31:37 +1100
    Of course it’s a storm in a teacup. Whipping up moral panics about gender affirming care is just another distraction from the real and many issues facing Americans today.

    Mahlburg’s job is to provide that distraction while billionaires continue to enrich themselves.
  • Kurt Mahlburg
    published this page in The Latest 2025-01-31 15:21:35 +1100