Correcting the record

National Public Radio (NPR) is reporting that an official portrait hanging in the hallway the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has been substantially altered, framing the change as a grave injustice to human rights. As on cue, a major gay publication employed the dreaded “deadnaming” accusation. Compassionate people are expected to be deeply moved, it was implied, and bigots delighted.

What was the offending alteration?

HHS changed Admiral “Rachel” Levine’s official portrait to reflect his birthname: Richard Levine. President Joe Biden appointed Levine assistant secretary of health, the U.S. government’s highest ranking “trans” official, in an effort to normalize transgenderism in healthcare. USA Today ridiculously named Levine “woman of the year” in 2022.

Of course, this was a manufactured fiction—one that we were all supposed to dutifully salute. Focus on the Family, where I work, was sentenced to life in Twitter-jail for having posted “hateful” content about Levine’s appointment. We simply stated the truth: “Dr. Levine is a transgender woman, that is, a man who believes he is a woman.” The Babylon Bee faced the same retribution when they refused to play along.

The uncontested facts are that Levine became “Rachel” in 2011 at the age of 54, having been born Richard L. Levine on Oct. 28, 1957. Richard married Martha Peaslee, a fellow Tulane medical student in 1988 and fathered a son and daughter with her. Thus, Levine is a man. His marriage to Martha ended in divorce shortly after Levine became “Rachel” and two children sadly lost their father. But trans orthodoxy assures us this is perfectly healthy and natural.

Of the change to Levine’s official portrait, an HHS spokesperson told NPR, “Our priority is ensuring that the information presented internally and externally by HHS reflects gold standard science. We remain committed to reversing harmful policies enacted by Levine and ensuring that biological reality guides our approach to public health."

This is critical for an organization called Health and Human Services, because to be human is to be male or female, determined by one’s natural reproductive physicality or telos. These cannot change. On this, faithful Christians and atheistic evolutionists agree.

Even leading transgender activists admit the illusion of gender ideology when you listen carefully enough.

Chase Strangio, the ACLU attorney who argued the landmark Bostock and Skrmetti trans cases before the United States Supreme Court, made this wholly anti-scientific claim with a straight face to The New York Times just last week: “I would say that a man or a woman is someone who understands in their core that they are a man or a woman.”

Anyone who believes this is not tethered to reality. It is not hateful or mean to say so. Biology is not bigotry, but science is discriminating. It discerns fact from fiction. What transgender ideology says about what it means to be human as man and woman is wholesale fiction. And healthy people should say so.

That is precisely what HHS did in amending Levine’s designation. Here are three truths we must recognize about this action:

First, there are no “transgender” persons. Our bodies do not lie in ways that our minds must correct. They speak profound truths. Even the American Psychiatric Association admits, “Transgender is a non-medical term that has been used increasingly since the 1990s as an umbrella term” for people whose “inner sense” is at odds with their biological reality. It is a new phenomenon of self-perception, not biological reality.

Second, deadnaming is not a thing. It is an accusation hurled by transactivists to compassion-shame normies. Elon Musk famously said in reference to the tragedy of his own dear son that the accusation of “deadnaming” was the poison fruit of “the woke mind virus.” Refuse to be shamed by the term.

Third, Admiral Levine did great harm to science and human well-being while in office. Unsealed court documents demonstrate he “strongly pressured” World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) to remove age limitations on trans medicalization for children under 18 years of age “in order to assist with Administration political strategy.” WPATH promptly did so in September 2022. Our current HHS released a sober “review of evidence and best practices” of pediatric gender dysphoria showing how harmful Levine and gender ideology’s approach has been to our nation’s children.

This change of Admiral Levine’s name to match his biological manhood is today’s equivalent of the lone child in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” stating what everyone could plainly see, but refused to admit for fear.

Andersen’s child broke the psychic spell with one simple truthful utterance. Our current Health and Human Services officials have done the same, thus serving health and humanity. Truth spoken directly is redemptively freeing.

The trans spell is thankfully being broken as obvious falsehoods are systematically corrected without apology or explanation. It is what sanity requires and does.