Shortly after Joe Biden took office, his Department of Health and Human Services issued a “reinterpretation” of federal medical guidelines when it comes to the treatment of gender dysphoria employing the use of hormone therapy or even “transitional” surgery. Under the new interpretation, medical providers could be held liable if they refused to perform such procedures, including on children, defining such a refusal as “discrimination” based on sex. Despite this order being politically popular on the far left, not all medical professionals were onboard with it. Now, more than three thousand of them have joined a lawsuit against the administration, seeking to force them to reverse the policy change. As with many similar lawsuits currently making their way through the courts, the plaintiffs in this case are being represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom. (Daily Wire)

Pediatricians and other health care workers are suing the Biden administration over a mandate tied to health care which would, according to the suit, require medical professionals to provide gender-related services and surgeries despite objections, medical or otherwise.

Objections, even to treating children, would be considered “discrimination,” pursuant to Biden’s reinterpretation of sex to include sexual orientation and “gender identity.”

“The American College of Pediatricians, the Catholic Medical Association, and an OB-GYN doctor who specializes in caring for adolescents filed suit in federal court to challenge a Biden administration mandate requiring doctors to perform gender transition procedures on any patient, including a child, if the procedure violates a doctor’s medical judgment or religious beliefs,” read a press release from the Alliance Defending Freedom.

What’s truly sad about this case (among many sad factors) is the fact that not all medical associations have joined it. Unfortunately, the leadership of the American Medical Association has shifted so far to the woke side of politics in recent years that they actually support the policy change. But this is still a sufficiently large number of doctors and other providers to attract the attention of the courts and attempt to bring the situation under control.

The one part of the suit I’m not quite as wild about is the inclusion of a demand for doctors to be able to reject such services based on religious grounds. While understandable for some providers, the religious angle seems to needlessly complicate a question that should be able to be decided based on just the science involved.This is particularly true when we’re talking about children, the focus of the majority of the pediatricians participating in the suit.

Performing irreversible genital mutilation surgery on a minor should be a non-starter for any doctor, even if the child has somehow been convinced that it’s a good idea. Too many will develop regrets as they gain maturity later in life, but those surgical procedures are not fully reversible. Suicide rates among recipients of such surgery are markedly higher than in the general population. That should tell you something right off the bat.

When it comes to hormone treatments, particularly for children, more problems arise. To this day, the FDA has never approved the use of puberty-blocking drugs such as GnRH analogues for the treatment of gender dysphoria. Those drugs are only used temporarily on children to treat precocious puberty (or early-onset puberty). No extensive studies have been done to determine what the long term effects of these drugs are in otherwise healthy children. Doctors administering them for this purpose should be investigated for malpractice, not given a medal by the government.

What the policy in question is really doing is seeking to punish doctors for living up to the oaths they took when they graduated from medical school. But it’s going to be a challenge to find a court with the spine to agree in the current woke political climate.