Pushing back on Biden’s transgender policies

During the 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden promised to be a uniter. He cast himself as a stable force, a political moderate able to bring empathy, maturity, and peace after the chaotic era of President Donald Trump. Millions of Americans, including many Christians, believed him.

There are now plenty of examples that demonstrate how empty President Biden’s assurances of competence, stability, and unity were—from Afghanistan to vaccine mandates to his extremist stance on abortion. But his administration’s position on transgenderism is perhaps its most radical stance, far out of step with the average American.

A recent study by Summit Ministries found that 64 percent of Americans believe that transgenderism is not a “healthy human condition.” Furthermore, 66 percent believe that schools teaching about the subjects of gender identity and sexual orientation to elementary-age students is inappropriate or even dangerous. Only 9 percent of respondents said minors should be encouraged to undergo gender alteration procedures.

The Biden administration disagrees. It has continued to push policies that would force the entire culture to conform to the destructive absurdities of transgender ideology.

In March, President Biden vocalized his opposition to Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, which prohibits kindergarten through third-grade teachers from holding formal classroom discussions about gender-switching and sexuality and school districts from keeping parents in the dark about their children. A few days later, the Biden administration celebrated a “Trans Day of Visibility.” In a video, President Biden insisted that parents must affirm their “child’s identity” to “keep them safe and healthy.”

Ironically, on the same day, the administration flagged a resource from the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health, led by a person who identifies as transgender, that promotes neither health nor safety. The document categorizes puberty blockers, hormone therapy, castration, and mastectomies as “gender-affirming care” for adolescents. Despite what the assistant health secretary claims, none of these procedures is fully reversible and can cause lifelong sexual dysfunction and infertility.

And, if you weren’t skeptical enough about the sincerity of the Biden administration’s concern for adolescent health and safety, there’s this: The United States Department of Agriculture announced on May 5 it would withhold federal funding for food from schools that do not allow boys and girls who identify as transgender into the private spaces and onto the sports teams of the opposite sex. The USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service administers the National School Lunch Program, which feeds millions of low-income children each year.

The move is enabled by the executive order President Biden signed on his first day in office, which directs retribution toward a grade school or university that “discriminates” against a person for identifying as LGBTQ. Discrimination includes excluding a boy who calls himself a girl from a female restroom or sports team.

All of this is unsurprising—though nonetheless disturbing— to those who paid attention to Biden’s campaign. In a 2020 ABC News town hall, he stated support for the “transition” of 8-year-old children. He signaled his radical position on the issue several times before the election. He is simply making good on his promises.

The president’s policies reflect the characteristics of the left-wing ideology they represent: punitive, predatory, and undeterred by popular opinion. That the majority of Americans are against imposing transgenderism onto children is apparently unimportant to the Biden administration.

I have often said that children are always the unconsenting subjects of progressive social experiments. From unscientific school shutdowns to abortion to gender ideology, kids, subject to the demands of adults, bear the brunt of social and political change. Generation Z’s high rates of depression and suicide are only the start of the manifestation of the chaos and depravity heaped on young people today.

So, what do we do? Those of us in the majority—who recognize the danger this gender ideology poses to kids and society at large—must speak up. The Biden administration moves forward because it believes we do not notice or care. We must be unafraid to publicly, clearly, and kindly reject the idea that gender can be changed. We must appeal to biology and human reason, communicating the consequences of obscuring male and female categories. This includes but is not limited to male inmates assaulting female inmates, males victimizing female classmates, young women losing athletic events to male competitors, and vulnerable teens undergoing irreversible surgeries.

As Christians, we have an even keener sense of duty. While society seeks to sacrifice children, we strive to save them. We are to “Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter” (Proverbs 24:11). We view children not as social experiments but as humans made male and female in God’s image.

We love them by affirming that truth, which means leading the way in opposing every policy and program that harms children.