Catholic Media Lies About Biden’s Policies on Transgender Surgeries
concerning a dangerously misleading opinion piece by Carl Bunderson in the National Catholic Register, a Catholic newspaper
The linked article, entitled “Cardinals Cupich, Dolan Urge Reconsideration of Transgender Mandate,” reports on a written statement by the aforementioned cardinals. They object to proposed protections for trans people in medical settings, which have been put forward by the Biden administration. Bunderson repeats false claims by the cardinals that the proposals would force Catholic doctors and hospitals to perform genital surgeries.
Of course there is no law or proposed law that would force hospitals, much less individual doctors, to perform any specific surgical procedure. Surgeries such as masculine chest reconstruction, vaginoplasty, and phalloplasty are quite complex, and as such they require experienced surgeons who have been trained to perform them. Surgeons with this speciality are not found at every hospital, nor do they need to be. Absolutely no one, including the Biden administration, is attempting to force Catholic hospitals to perform these or any other “gender-transition surgeries.”
It’s an outright lie, but it’s a lie with a very specific, and evil, purpose. In fact, Catholic hospitals do have policies requiring them to withhold maintenence doses of prescribed medications from trans people. It’s these discriminatory policies that could be impacted by requirements that hospitals treat trans people equally. The Biden administration’s proposals could end the dangerous practice of Catholic hospitals forcibly detransitioning trans patients who find themselves in need of emergency medical treatment.
Hormone therapy, like many other medications, relies on consistent, regular dosage. In the case of estrogen and other transfemme HRT, this usually means a daily pill or combination of pills. For testosterone, once weekly shots are the most common method of administration. As with other patients on daily or weekly meds, trans patients are strongly advised to adhere to a regular schedule, and nasty side effects can result from the abrubt cessation of treatment.
Catholic hospitals’ extreme, ideology driven policy is to refuse to maintain transgender patients on their prescribed daily or weekly medications. Of course, in most cases trans people can seek treatment at a hospital whose ideology does not demand such drastic and unsafe practices. However, these Catholic policies even extend to emergency room patients. This means if a trans person has been in a car accident and is unconscious and taken by ambulance to the nearest ER, they will be denied maintenance doses of their prescribed medication for as long as they remain unable to leave the hospital.
It seems that extreme bias has made Catholics immune to common human decency when it comes to transgender people. Their policies dictate that they forcibly detransition all trans patients, even after major trauma. They ignore the risks that a sudden cessation of a daily medication, one a patient may have been taking for years, or even decades, might hold for the delicate system of a fragile patient requiring an extended hospital stay. It makes no more sense, medically, to suddenly withdraw estrogen from a trans woman who’s been in an accident as it would to suddenly start injecting testosterone into a cis woman.
It’s inhumane and medically unsafe for Catholic hospitals to do this. Their religious beliefs, though protected, should not be allowed to override a patient’s safety. Thus the lie that hospitals would be forced to perform gender-transition surgeries is purposeful, serving to conceal and protect extreme policies. The Catholic Church’s real objection is to protecting patients from the sort of religious zeal which forces doctors to act in ways that are antithetical to safety and continuity of care for trans people. Catholic leaders, and Catholic media, just don’t want you to know it.
reporting note: Assigned hopes to conduct a more thorough investigation into Catholic Hospital policies in the future. For this article, our descriptions of Catholic Hospital policies are based on the research of Zinnia Jones, as posted on twitter. Zinnia is not a reporter, but Assigned has followed her for several years, and considers her research thorough and reliable.
