OPINION:
When the urge to be edgy leads to fad, the unique, the uncommon and sometimes the weird and goofy is suddenly high fashion. In 2016, “transgenderism,” the urge to be what you’re not, became a fad. A visitor from Mars might think that every Earthling is determined only to change his sex and find an inappropriate place to pee.
In the wake of mostly young people rushing to identify as the opposite sex (or gender), sexual normalcy was trampled underfoot. Fortunately, common sense has emerged from the courthouse. The freshly nonconformist view, that men are men and women are women, may be safe, at least for now.
The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas on the last day of 2016 struck down a rule from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that would order physicians to perform sex-change procedures even when their professional judgment tells them not to do it, such as in the case of children.
The decision is good news for families, the 900,000 doctors nationwide who treat them, and health care providers that would have paid the $1 billion bill. “This court ruling is an across-the-board victory that will ensure that the deeply personal medical decision of a gender transition procedure remain between families and their doctor,” says Lori Windham, senior counsel at Becket Law, which represented the plaintiffs.
When the regulation was issued in July, a coalition of church-affiliated hospitals and doctors, together with eight states, sued HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell, arguing that she had exceeded her authority when ruling that the Obamacare prohibition against discrimination on the basis of sex obligates doctors to perform “gender reassignment” surgery and abortions “regardless of their contrary religious beliefs or medical judgment.”
The stories of young people challenging their parents, schools and communities with demands for transgender surgical procedures has carried the explicit message that anyone who opposes has an unhealthy attachment to Victorian custom and mores.
Pop culture is not a reliable cure for the common craze. Reliable research finds that up to 94 percent of young people who experience gender dysphoria, the clinical term for sexual identity confusion, grow out of it naturally, without such surgery. For that reason, HHS exempts its own Medicare or Medicaid systems from its rule, while attempting to force it on doctors in private practice.
If the new rule had been allowed to stand, the Hippocratic Oath that has guided the medical profession for 25 centuries would have been replaced by federal bureaucratic fiat. The dispute is what happens when government policy is turned over to ideologues. HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell is an Obama loyalist who replaced another Obama loyalist, Kathleen Sebelius, after Ms. Sebelius supervised the disastrous rollout of Obamacare. With a couple of undergraduate degrees from Harvard and Oxford, though none in medicine, Mrs. Burwell has demonstrated all the skills of a technocrat eager to champion a theory, but clueless about the unique mission of physician as healer.
Change is a constant companion on the road to a more enlightened world, but not all change is an improvement. Male and female confusion about sexual identity, as well as the confusion of those claiming to be of the opposite sex for its shock value, deserve reasonable sympathy. But deploying the power of government to reinforce sexual fashions that doctors frown on is both bad policy and bad medicine. The judges in Texas have ruled in favor of good sense.
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