Violence against children at Vandy

Gov. Bill Lee, R-Tenn., Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and other Tennessee lawmakers have demanded an investigation into Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Center for Transgender Health after conservative commentator Matt Walsh published evidence that the clinic is treating minors. Walsh also posted video footage of VUMC doctors boasting about the profit margin of transgender surgeries and intimidating conscientious objectors into silence.

“The female-to-male bottom surgeries, these are big money-makers,” Dr. Shayne Taylor says in a video published by Walsh. Vanderbilt’s Dr. Ellen Clayton warns that anyone who couldn’t get on board with transgender procedures would be “problematic” and that conscientious objections would “not be without consequences.” The doctors were speaking at Medicine Grand Rounds in 2018.

A presentation from Vanderbilt Psychiatry’s YouTube channel encourages prescribing cross-sex hormones to children as young as 13. Some of the possible effects of cross-sex hormones are irreversible, including sexual dysfunction and infertility. VUMC surgeons also confess to performing double mastectomies on teen girls.

In a statement to The Daily Wire, Gov. Lee said the practices at the clinic raise “moral, ethical, and legal concerns” and that the state cannot “allow permanent, life-altering decisions that hurt children” to continue.

The clinic responded to an inquiry by Fox News Digital by insisting that all procedures performed on “transgender youth” are done with “parental consent” and “involvement.” The statement also said that VUMC provides accommodations for those who morally object to any practices performed at the hospital.

But the clinic did not deny that minors are given puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones or that they are undergoing surgeries like double mastectomies and castration in the name of “gender affirmation.” And while the statement assured conscientious objectors may be accommodated, it did not confirm whether these objectors have had to endure any ramifications because of their beliefs.

Vanderbilt is only the latest hospital to come under fire for causing harm to children who identify as transgender. Conservatives have uncovered videoed admissions by doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital, Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Oakland, Calif., Seattle Children’s Hospital, and National Children’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. that they are “treating” children. Young girls are even receiving “gender affirming” hysterectomies.

While Walsh and others who report on this barbarism are maligned as “stochastic terrorists” who are inciting violence, the actual violence is happening within the walls of our nations esteemed hospitals, filled with doctors who once promised to do no harm. That all citizens are not up in arms about such grotesque practices is shocking. That an entire political party, led by the current president of the United States, endorses it is even more appalling.

Look honestly at what is happening: Children, who, our law rightly says, do not have the capacity to consent to such things as sexual activity with adults, are being permanently maimed and sterilized by adults based on the premise that they have consented to life-altering surgery. All this takes place under the auspices of an ideology that is new and constantly in flux.

A healthy society would stop to ask why we’re allowing such incongruency. It would pause to ponder why, according to the New York Times, “more teenagers than ever are seeking transitions” and why “more … teens are choosing ‘top surgery,’” meaning double mastectomies. It would wonder why so many young people hate their bodies, are unconcerned with future fertility and/or breastfeeding, and want to permanently change who they are.

But we do not live in a healthy society. We are sick with the stupidity that always accompanies worshiping the god of self instead of the God of Scripture (Romans 1:18-32). While the God of Scripture tells us we are made in His image as male and female, the god of self is self-creating and self-defining based on feelings (Genesis 1:27).

Outside of the belief that there is a transcendent Authority who made us down to the design of our bodies there is no real reason to say that a man cannot become a woman, a woman cannot become a man, a boy cannot become a girl, and a girl cannot become a boy, ) Without the biblical worldview, there is no reason why a person’s feelings shouldn’t reign supreme. While science can tell us about the biological categories of male and female, it cannot tell us why they matter more than a person’s own self-declaration. Only God can tell us who we are.

Thus, Christians in this age, as in every age, must be voices for vulnerable children and also agents of the truth and order that God created. We rightly expose and loudly oppose the practices in these hospitals, not primarily to win a culture or political war, but because we love God and His design—and we love children and young people. After all, that’s what Christians do.