by Greg Piper
The U.K.-based Economist speculates that Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer could save her party from defeat in November if she replaces “doddering” President Biden on the ticket, by nationalizing her Great Lakes State strategy of “relentless targeting of suburban swing voters with simple messages: abortion rights, jobs and infrastructure.”
Voters might ask this scion of a political family, who acted out her motto “get sh*t done” by shutting down in-store gardening sections and in-state travel to second homes to defeat COVID-19, why she’s allegedly forcing counselors to help mentally fragile children “undergo permanent, life-altering medical procedures that many will come to regret.”
A new lawsuit accuses Whitmer and other state officials of squelching the First Amendment rights of licensed counselors by censoring therapy that explores youth gender confusion while authorizing “assistance to an individual undergoing a gender transition,” which can include puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgical removal of healthy breasts and genitals.
Catholic Charities of Jackson, Lenawee and Hillsdale counties and Lansing-based licensed therapist Emily McJones say they’ve had clients as young as 10 and 12 who believe they may be the opposite sex, but helped them “change their behavior and gender expression” through addressing “underlying trauma” and healing from past experiences.
“[T]here is no sound evidence” of long-term benefit from medical gender transitions, in contrast to the higher risk of liver, heart and blood disorders and cancer from cross-sex hormones and permanent sterility following “full medical transition,” they argue.
“Transgender individuals, too, have come forward, expressing profound grief at how hasty medical transitions have harmed them” and wishing they had received “compassionate counseling to help them uncover the causes of their distress and to embrace their biological sex,” the suit says.
Catholic Charities and McJones, whose Little Flower Counseling “provides evidenced-based treatments from a perspective that is faithful to the teachings of the Catholic Church,” are challenging two bills Whitmer signed into law last summer.
HB 4616 subjects a “mental health professional” to sanctions from probation to license revocation and a $250,000 fine for engaging in “conversion therapy with a minor.”
HB 4717 defines “conversion therapy” as seeking to change “gender identity, including, but not limited to, efforts to change behavior or gender expression,” but explicitly exempts pro-transition therapy.
Some LGBTQ people consider youth gender transition a form of conversion therapy, as they told Rolling Stone U.K. publisher Darren Styles when he criticized the new Labour government for continuing its Tory predecessor’s clampdown on so-called gender affirming care for kids.
As one of “the usual suspects” you bet I’m angry. If anyone thinks @jk_rowling is a reliable witness on trans they haven’t been listening. Like her, I’m not medically qualified, but unlike her I talk to trans kids, parents of trans kids and medical professionals. She is wrong. https://t.co/k117y94sVF
— Darren Styles OBE (@bydarrenstyles) July 13, 2024
“You are utterly wrong. This is gay conversion therapy,” a self-described gay endocrinologist said. “The transitioning of children should be illegal,” a self-identified trans person said. “Many times they are just gay kids being destroyed by turning them into something else they’re not because they have some emotional issues they’re going through.”
The suit says Whitmer, Attorney General Dana Nessel, health and licensing officials, and regulatory boards for psychology, counseling and social workers are bucking the trend against gender affirming care in half the states and the U.K., Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway.
U.K. Secretary of State for Health & Social Care Wes Streeting explained Labour’s continuation of the Tories’ emergency ban on private clinics prescribing puberty blockers for gender-confused youth after the National Health Service halted their use, in an X thread Sunday.
“Children’s healthcare must always be led by evidence,” which NHS will soon collect in a clinical trial, he wrote. “Medicine given to children must always be proven safe and effective first.”
The use of puberty blockers to suppress “hormone levels that are abnormally high for the age of the child” has been “extensively tested … and has met strict safety requirements,” while their use to stop “the normal surge of hormones that occur in puberty” has not, Streeting said, referring to the multiyear Cass review that sparked the U.K. about-face.
He denounced “highly irresponsible” public statements that followed Labour’s announcement, saying they “could put vulnerable young people at risk.”
Pink News interpreted that as a dig at Good Law Project Director Jolyon Maugham and former Mermaids CEO Susie Green, who said the decision will “kill trans children” and Streeting will have “blood on his hands,” respectively.
The Church of England is actually diverging from NHS, which newly defines “sex as biological sex,” by instructing its schools in new “anti-bullying guidance” that they “must challenge remarks” that use “[o]utdated terms,” including that sex is biological and objective.
The “Flourishing for All” document claims that sex is “assigned at birth” and defines people by how their gender identity relates to that purportedly subjective determination. The state church says it educates about a million children.
Chief Education Officer Nigel Genders presented the guidance to the General Synod last week, the Daily Mail reported.
The church told the newspaper the draft is in “public consultation” and its definitions are informed by “Government Guidance, the Cass Review and the Church of England’s theologically informed Living in Love and Faith process.”
Teachers, head teachers, teaching assistants, all who work in our wonderful schools, as you navigate your way through the last weeks of the school year, thank you for the service that you give to our communities and to our children. Thank you, and may God richly bless you. pic.twitter.com/GuDwhJDN1c
— Archbishop of York (@CottrellStephen) July 12, 2024
The Michigan lawsuit says the laws violate the free-speech and free-exercise clauses by regulating speech based on content and viewpoint, targeting religious speech and “interfer[ing] with the right of parents to direct the religious upbringing of their children,” and their “vague, undefined terms … invite arbitrary and selective enforcement,” violating the due process clause.
They compel Catholic Charities and McJones to participate in the “regime” of medical treatments for minors “designed to make their bodies resemble the opposite sex,” their lawyers at religious liberty law firm Becket said in a press release.
Asked how a law that doesn’t define “gender transition” can be read to force therapists to help minors get medical transitions, Becket spokesperson Ryan Colby told Just the News “there is no reason to assume” it only applies to social transition – adopting names and pronouns at odds with one’s sex and dressing as and using the facilities of the opposite sex.
The term is “routinely used as an umbrella” for both forms of transition, he said, citing Human Rights Campaign guidance and the “oft-cited” World Professional Association of Transgender Health’s Standards of Care 8, which “assume that psychotherapy is commonly offered during the process of a medical transition, including for youth.”
SOC8, which included age minimums until Assistant Secretary of Health Rachel Levine pressured its drafters to remove them, recommends “health care professionals involve relevant disciplines, including mental health and medical professionals, to reach a decision about” whether any given medical transition procedure is appropriate for a minor.
Colby also noted SOC8’s mental health chapter says “various modalities of psychotherapy may be beneficial for different reasons before, during, and after gender-affirming medical treatments” – while recommending against mandating it – and that “psychological therapy can play a role in helping individuals suffering from anxiety symptoms following gender-affirming treatment.”
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Greg Piper is a reporter for Just the News.
Photo “Gretchen Whitmer” by Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
