The Administration for Children and Families has sent a letter to California requesting the removal of content promoting gender ideology in its Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP). Failure to comply with the letter’s demands by August 19th could result in the loss of federal funds. The PREP program provides sex education services to “foster homes, homeless shelters, juvenile detention centers, and some schools” although it does not fund most of the sex education programs in California schools. In its letter to the recipients of PREP grants, the ACF flagged several materials that teach “gender identity” as social fact and exceed the scope of “PREP’s authorizing statute.” According to National Review, the California Department of Public Health defended the curriculum as “medically accurate, comprehensive, and age-appropriate.”
On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights announced the end of its investigation into the California Department of Education (CDE) and the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF), determining that both entities violated Title IX and discriminated against girls and women by allowing male athletes to compete on and against girls’ and women’s teams. The DOE announced its investigation into the CIF in February and its investigation into the CDE in April. The Office of Civil Rights has sent both entities a resolution agreement to address their discriminatory practices. If they don’t comply within ten days, they will be referred to the DOJ for disciplinary proceedings.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has launched criminal investigations into three prominent children’s hospitals that provide pediatric sex reassignment procedures on the grounds that they violate federal statutes prohibiting female genital mutilation. According to Fox, the focus of the investigation is medical providers affiliated with Boston Children’s Hospital, Children’s Hospital Colorado and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. “I am putting medical practitioners, hospitals and clinics on notice: In the United States, it is a felony to perform, attempt to perform or conspire to perform female genital mutilation (“FGM”) on any person under the age of 18,” Attorney General Pam Bond said in an earlier memo.
National Review’s Becket Adams takes the mainstream media to task for its reporting on the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in the U.S. v. Skrmetti, which upheld Tennessee’s prohibition on pediatric medical transition. Specifically, Adams calls out publications like the New York Times, the Washington Post and CBS News for framing the ruling as a setback or blow to “transgender rights.” Of course, that framing presupposes from the outset that Tennessee’s law is in fact discriminatory on its face, logic which the Supreme Court rejected. It also raises the question, “which ‘rights,’ exactly, have been targeted?” “News blurbs that mischaracterize basic facts, all while raising questions they have no intention of answering, perform the opposite function of informing the public” Adams concludes.
Dr. Farr Curlin writes in the Wall Street Journal about the contrasting philosophies of medicine revealed by the majority and dissenting opinions in the U.S. v. Skrmetti. In its majority opinion, the Supreme Court determined that Tennessee’s law does not violate the Equal Protection Clause because it draws legitimate distinctions based on age and clinical rationale rather than sex or transgender status. Key to the state’s argument was that it found the evidentiary basis for “affirming care” woefully lacking and believed psychotherapy had a better risk-benefit ratio. However, a dissenting opinion by Justice Sotomayor rejects the state’s arguments about therapeutic purpose and instead argues that the law is facially discriminatory because under it “male (but not female) adolescents can receive medicines that help them look like boys, and female (but not male) adolescents can receive medicines that help them look like girls.” Dr. Curlin argues that Sotomayor’s logic ignores the purpose of medicine and promotes patient autonomy over patient health.“Traditionally, medicine treats a mental disorder by helping the patient align perception with reality—like the reality of a healthy body. Medicalized gender transition turns this norm on its head, ‘affirming’ the child’s disordered perception and treating his healthy body as a diseased one. If a girl wants to take testosterone to change her body because of her perceived identity as a boy, in this view, the doctor should go along” Curlin explains.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling upholding Tennessee’s ban on pediatric medical transition, Delaware’s Democratic Gov. Matt Meyer signed an executive order protecting providers and recipients of “gender affirming care.” Delaware joins at least sixteen other states, and D.C., who have passed protective legislation or protective executive orders. Delaware’s EO prohibits the state medical board from disbarring professionals who render sex-rejecting procedures and prohibits state agencies from cooperating with any criminal or civil investigations related to “affirming care.”
Josh Hershberger argues that a new Indiana law provides a roadmap for states to protect parental rights from the encroaching forces of “gender ideology.” Indiana’s law, which appears modeled after the Heritage Foundation’s Defining Abuse Child Protection Act, clarifies that “Child abuse or neglect does not include raising or referring to a child in a manner consistent with the child’s biological sex.” Hershberger contextualizes the need for more laws like Indiana’s by contrasting it with laws in Minnesota and California which functionally bias the judicial system in favor of social and medical affirmation. Despite the many controversies regarding the weak-evidence base supporting “affirming care” for minors, these laws allow courts to take temporary custody of children who are “unable to receive affirming care” on the grounds that parents who disagree about the best treatment approach for gender dysphoria are neglectful or abusive.
In the New York Times, Andrew Sullivan explains how the gay rights movement was co-opted by transgender activists and mutated into the transgender-industrial-complex. As Sullivan goes on to explain, after the gay rights movement achieved its core objectives, the movement began to move away from pursuing civil rights as traditionally understood, and instead pursued a more radical project to “dissolve natural distinctions between men and women in society, to replace biological sex with ‘gender identity’ in the law and culture, and to redefine homosexuality.” One of Sullivan’s insights is that this revolutionary project is very different from “live and let live” politics. As Sullivan notes, dismantling the gender binary in law and education, then, “ceases to be accommodation of a minority and becomes a society wide revolution — an overreach that would soon lead to a potent and sane backlash, against not just trans people, but gay men and lesbians as well.”
Joseph Figliolia
Policy Analyst
