Red alert! Sound the alarms! Batten down the hatches! Folks, this is not a drill: Donald Trump, president of the United States of America—or so I’m told; I don’t watch a lot of news, if I’m being honest—has ordered transgender surgeries be undone nationwide!
Where once we had transgender for everybody, as Trump likes to say, we now have transgender for nobody.
Last Friday, at the Myrtle Beach Convention Center in South Carolina, the president said, “The democrat who [Darline Graham] is running to defeat is a far left political hack, who supports transgender for everybody and believes in telling confused children they’re trapped in the wrong body.”
“By the way,” he added with a gleeful grin on his pudgy face, “do you notice how that’s changing now? In fact, hospitals now are doing reverse surgery at my order. They’re doing reverse surgery, nobody [sic] ever heard about it.”
Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains.
The Myrtle Beach audience, presumably somewhat hollow between the ears, erupts in thunderous applause at Trump’s declaration of reverse surgeries that nobody [sic] ever heard about. That means you, yes you, assuming you’ve had one of those newfangled transgender surgeries, need to get your butt to the nearest hospital and receive your president-approved reverse surgery.
Fellas, you’ll be getting your boobs back and potentially having a penis removed. Ladies, they’ll be reattaching your testicles and/or penis, and maybe even… like… unshaving your trachea? I’m sorry, I really don’t know how any of this works! I just know that if you’ve had a transgender surgery (a distinct and separate thing from cisgender surgeries, let me assure you), you’ll need to get that reversed. President’s orders.
Or maybe this is like the presidential fitness test, and it’s just a bunch of hot air that you can safely ignore. It’s hard to say at this crucial juncture.
Speaking to The Advocate, Adrian Shanker—a deputy assistant secretary for health policy at the Department of Health and Human Services—said, “I don’t really know what President Trump means by reverse surgeries, but the reality is that he should leave medical decision-making up to the patient and their providers to discuss what medical care is right for a certain patient. These kinds of decisions really don’t have room for politicians in the middle of that conversation.”
Hear, hear! Isn’t that we’ve been saying all along? Doctors ought to be helping their patients make these decisions. If their patients are kids, they can involve parents in those conversations about puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and potential surgeries down the road. There is no part for the government to play in a person’s decision to pursue medical transition, except in my wildest dreams where America adopts a single-payer healthcare system and everybody can just go to the doctor and be treated for whatever they want, whenever they want.
Sorry, you’ll have to forgive me, I can’t seem to stop sobbing uncontrollably at the torturous dreams of an impossible future that haunts my every waking moment! What a drag.
Anyway… what do we think Trump was actually talking about when he said hospitals are “doing reverse surgery” at his directive? As any of you who have parents or grandparents of an advanced age may know, being elderly can sometimes mean you’re constantly confused. In this case, Trump is probably confused about the detransition clinics the Justice Department forced Texas Children’s Hospital and The Cleveland Clinic to establish at an out of pocket cost of $10 million and $2 million respectively.
These “detransition clinics” were established to provide free care to people who pursued some form of medical transition under the age of 19, and now want to undo those changes… somehow. It’s sort of unclear what that would entail, frankly, since many of the effects of cross-sex hormone therapy will diminish or disappear if you stop taking your hormones for long enough (and can still produce natal hormones), and the relevant surgeries are largely irreversible.
Therapy, I guess? Lots of therapy?
These “clinics” (can it truly be called a clinic if it has no patients?) were created coercively, under duress, so that Texas Children’s and the Cleveland Clinic could bring an end to costly litigation from the U.S. government, a tactic the Justice Department has been deploying for over a year now to antagonize and intimidate providers of gender-affirming care. It’s disgusting, and it’s certainly not something to be celebrated.
Here’s hoping Darline Graham’s opponent in the South Carolina senatorial race, Dr. Annie Andrews (who supports the trans community), absolutely crushes that awful little heiress in the mid-terms. This country doesn’t need any more political dynasties, thank you very much.
