So-called “gender neutrality” is creeping into medical institutions and public health agencies, where it is erasing distinctions between “male” and “female.”
For example, a California law enacted in 2022 provides taxpayer funding for abortion to “women and other people who may become pregnant.” An article in the American Journal of Managed Care on February 27 uses the term “pregnant people” to describe a study in Frontiers in Public Health (January 2023), which also used the term.
The journals are following the lead of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which no longer uses the words “women” or “females” when referring to COVID-19-related issues during pregnancy.
The CDC website’s section on the coronavirus informs the public that “Pregnant and Recently Pregnant People [Are] at Increased Risk from COVID-19,” in an October 25, 2022 update.
The gradual erasure of male/men and female/women from accepted public-health discourse coincides with a push to facilitate “gender-affirming” care, including surgery on adolescents, sometimes without parental approval. Such practices have provoked a backlash in Republican-controlled state houses across the country.
Action by the States
State lawmakers have introduced at least 85 bills this session to restrict gender-affirming care, especially for minors, up from 43 bills last year, and 32 in 2021, according to a report on an analysis by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reported by Pew Stateline.
Over the past two years, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Tennessee, and Utah have enacted legislation blocking gender-affirming care, says the ACLU, which opposes the measures. The bans in Alabama and Arkansas are on hold pending the outcome of legal challenges.
But 45 states have yet to enact such bans, raising questions about the extent to which the public is aware that biological distinctions between men and women are under attack, and the implications that has for medicine.
The lack of honesty in the current discussion of biological sex is doing great harm, says Marilyn M. Singleton, M.D., J.D., a California-based physician.
“We physicians must speak the truth,” said Singleton. “There is no such ethical medical treatment as ‘gender-affirming’ care. Plastic surgery does not change a man into a woman or a woman into a man. To promote and/or participate in bodily mutilation and transforming normal bodily functions into abnormal, harmful physiology is antithetical to Hippocratic Oath medicine. Certainly, to do so in children is immoral, and in my view, criminal.”
Facts of Life
The distinction between male and female is basic science, says Jane Orient, M.D, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.
“An indisputable fact of biology is that sex is determined at conception by whether an x-sperm or a y-sperm fertilizes the egg,” said Orient. “The sex chromosomes affect every cell in the body through every stage of development. One can attempt to change the appearance of body parts with drugs or surgery, but one cannot change the sex.”
Health professionals who believe otherwise need to look at the facts says Orient.
“There is no scientific basis for the assertion that a person can be ‘attached to the ‘wrong body,” said Orient. “There is no objective long-term research to show any benefit from acting on this concept, and all the interventions do harm.”
Scarred Bodies Left Behind
Political ideologues want to change language in order to change our perception of reality, says Harley Price, Ph.D., a lecturer at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies.
“To the unindoctrinated, it is obvious that all the linguistic inversions of the Progressive Left are designed to make what has always struck some people as repellent and grotesque seem sound, normal, wholesome, and uplifting,” said Price.
Leftist politicians are willing to butcher the bodies of young people to spare them mental discomfort, says Price.
“Missing the irony completely, President Biden, in one of his recent social media interviews, lamented the lifelong emotional and psychological ‘scars’ that would be suffered by children condemned to preserve in their birth bodies,” said Price. “Has he ever seen the scars that castration and mastectomy leave behind?”
Bonner Russell Cohen, Ph.D. (bcohen@nationalcenter.org) is a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research.