A tide of justice builds

The U.S. Department of Justice and the Texas attorney general recently announced a $10 million settlement with Texas Children’s Hospital for its role in transgender surgeries on minors. “The Justice Department will use every weapon at its disposal to end the destructive and discredited practice of so-called ‘gender-affirming care’ for children,” proclaimed Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “Today’s resolution protects vulnerable children, holds providers accountable, and ensures those harmed receive the care they need.”

At the same time, the legislature of the state of New Jersey is moving forward with a bill to stop any possible lawsuits or other accountability for hospitals and other medical providers that performed transgender surgeries on minors, joining more than a dozen other states with such liability shields. An LGBTQ advocacy group called the bill a “major milestone, saying it would “give transgender New Jerseyans full protection from malicious, discriminatory interference in their right to health from other states and the federal government.”

The two stories, happening within a week of each other, perfectly illustrate the difference between red and blue state approaches to these life-altering surgeries.

In red states, the fever has broken. Professional medical organizations such as the American Society for Plastic Surgery and the American Medical Association are recognizing that life-defining surgeries like breast removal surgery on children and teenagers are not good medical practice. Hospitals like Texas Children’s are realizing that they got caught up in a craze that was a fad for a moment but a bad idea to anyone who paused and thought before jumping on the train.

In New Jersey, meanwhile, it is full steam ahead on “gender-affirming care.” But that reflects primarily the will of woke activists who have captured the Democratic Party. It does not reflect everyone in blue states. Indeed, the first trial to award damages to a plaintiff for medical malpractice based on transgender surgery involved a $2 million verdict from a jury in New York State. So even though the everyday people who populate juries in blue states are recognizing the damage done to real people, the woke ideology and interest groups that command blue state legislators are moving swiftly to safeguard medical professionals from accountability.

I don’t think the verdict in New York or the settlement in Texas will be the last examples we see in coming months and years. We can pray for the recognition that so-called gender affirming care, especially surgeries on minors, is incompatible with our long-standing notions of informed consent. And though parents have always had a role in determining medical care for their children, and this is in fact an important aspect of liberty for parents, the state also has an important interest in regulating acceptable medical practice (as the Supreme Court recognized recently in the Skrmetti decision).

Much like in the case of abortion, accountability should start with doctors who push dangerous and unproven procedures on patients in line with their ideological agendas rather than the best medical science.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the New Jersey bill is a twofer of liberal talking points. In addition to covering “gender affirming care,” the bill also covers “reproductive care,” i.e. abortion. It is perhaps no surprise that the two travel together. They both stem from the same woke ideology that prioritizes individual autonomy over all other goods and truths, whether the medical science of fetal development or the medical science of biological sex.

Moreover, both are supposedly under attack, according to the left, by the Trump administration. President Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services has implemented admirable new policies to end federal funding of certain transgender procedures, which has helped prompt hospitals to rethink what they provide.

But legal accountability needs to go further than that, and it needs to ensure that the real victims, the children who have now detransitioned, are compensated for the violations of their rights. Current New Jersey law won’t allow that, but I expect and hope that legal pressure from other quarters will prompt a reevaluation of “gender affirming care” even in blue states. May it come soon.