Chris Powell: Euphemism can’t erase doubts about sex-change therapy for minors

A young transgender woman before and after two years of hormone-replacement therapy. 

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Is “gender-affirming care" good or bad?

Whatever it is, it's a euphemism, a term of camouflage to prevent something from being plainly understood and to present it in a favorable light -- in this case to diminish the controversy that would be recognized if the proper neutral, impartial, and descriptive term was used: sex-change therapy.

Since “gender-affirming care" is politically correct and most journalism seeks to be, journalism uses “gender-affirming care" to pretend that there is nothing questionable about it. After all, who could be against “care"?

But of course there are  questions about it, and the controversy can't be concealed any longer now that the Trump administration is siding with the politically incorrect  side of the issue. 

First the Trump administration turned the federal government against transgenderism -- men in women's sports, bathrooms, and prisons -- and now it is using the federal government's enormous power over medical policy to dissuade hospitals from using drugs and surgeries to change the sex of minors.

As a result, Connecticut Children's Medical Center, in Hartford, is getting out of the sex-change therapy business for minors, and Yale New Haven Health is canceling its use of drugs in sex-change therapy for minors while continuing to provide minors with mental- health treatment for gender dysphoria.

Most hysterical about this in Connecticut is state Atty. Gen. William Tong. “This is the next ugly front in the ongoing war on American patients, doctors, nurses, and health care providers," Tong shrieks. “This is about scaring patients from seeking care and scaring doctors from providing care, regardless of who is harmed and the lives that will be lost. It's unconscionably reckless and yet another disturbing intrusion of partisan politics on our private lives and choices."

In Politically Correct World, where the attorney general resides, it's impossible to have a good reason for objecting to drug and surgical treatment for minors with gender dysphoria -- impossible to object because drugs and surgeries can have life-altering and irreversible effects on people who, according to law, are incapable of making such decisions for themselves, incapable of informed consent.

In P.C. World the issue of informed consent simply vanishes amid gender dysphoria, even though many minors who have undergone sex-change therapy have come to regret it, and many, if not most, young people with gender dysphoria seem to outgrow it.

Not only that, but in P.C. World anyone who does object cannot possibly have good intentions and cannot sincerely be concerned about the children who are to be subjected to life-altering drugs and surgeries. No, as the attorney general says, such people are just aiming to “scare" doctors and patients and are "unconscionably reckless."

As for what Tong calls the “disturbing intrusion of partisan politics on our private lives and choices," he hardly objected a few years ago when government was ordering people to submit to inadequately tested vaccines on pain of losing their jobs. Of course, back then those vaccines, like the attorney general himself, were politically correct, though not so much now as harmful side-effects are more recognized.

Like it or not, with government so heavily involved in medicine, politics is heavily involved as well. If you lose an election, the government may change medical policies contrary to your liking. That's democracy for you. 

Tong and P.C. World seem not to remember that the party of political correctness lost last year's presidential and congressional elections in part because of its exaltation of transgenderism. But even if, as the attorney general insists, objecting to men in women's sports, bathrooms, and prisons while upholding longstanding protections for minors is fascism, it's a pretty tame version.

Gov. Ned Lamont is less hysterical than the attorney general but not much more thoughtful as he seeks to get his P.C. ticket punched. Responding to the change in federal policy on sex-change therapy, the governor says “In Connecticut we do not turn our backs on kids in need." Then maybe someone else can explain the thousands of Hartford and Bridgeport students recently reported to lack critical “special-education" services.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).