Catholic League president Bill Donohue said Wednesday that President Joe Biden’s new policy for transgender youth exposes them to serious health risks and constitutes “child abuse.”
“For the first time in American history, we have a president who is championing the cause of child abuse,” Dr. Donohue wrote in reference to the president’s June 15 executive order that seeks to counter state legislation banning hormone therapy and puberty blockers for children suffering from gender dysphoria, among other things.
The executive order describes these state laws as “harmful and discriminatory legislative attacks on LGBTQI+ children, Youth, and Families” and instructs the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) to use the department’s authorities “to protect LGBTQI+ individuals’ access to medically necessary care from harmful state and local laws and practices.”
“In classic Orwellian doublespeak, the White House is saying Biden is taking multiple actions to ‘protect children across America,’” Donohue wrote, arguing that the Biden policy is exposing these children to serious medical risks.
Donohue cites an important Swedish study that found that over the course of the 30-year period from 1973 to 2003, individuals who had undergone sex reassignment surgery had “considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behavior, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population.”
“The suicide rate among those who undergo surgery to change their sex is 20 times higher than those who do not,” Donohue continued, while another study found that minors who “transition” to the opposite sex without parental consent are associated with “higher risk of suicide.”
“There needs to be a national moratorium on the pernicious practice of allowing children to switch their nature-assigned sex,” Donohue proposed as an alternative to executive activism meant to strongarm states into accepting dangerous medical practices for children.
Donohue’s warning echoes those of the American College of Pediatricians (ACP), which released a paper in 2016 noting that the use of puberty-blocking hormones is exceedingly dangerous and involves serious health risks including “high blood pressure, blood clots, stroke and cancer.” Moreover, suicide rates “are twenty times greater among adults who use cross-sex hormones and undergo sex reassignment surgery,” the authors added.
Conditioning children to believe a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful is “child abuse,” the physicians declared.
In Wednesday’s essay, Donohue warned that adults who counsel children to consider changing their sex or otherwise facilitate sex-reassignment surgery — complete with hormone blockers and genital mutilation — “are a threat to their psychological and physiological well-being. This is child abuse.”
“Astonishingly, President Biden is leading the way,” he concluded.