The California legislature is considering a bill that, if passed, would establish a taxpayer fund that would pay for “gender affirming healthcare services” such as hormone therapy and “gender reassignment” surgery. Assembly Bill 2218, which is expected to be brought to a vote on May 18, would put $15 million toward “treatments” that have never been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. In a letter to California lawmakers, Family Research Council’s Peter Sprigg points out that this bill also funds “programming that essentially amounts to ideological indoctrination” by funding educational materials from organizations that affirm transgender ideology while denying funding to groups that do not encourage people to “transition.”
Earlier this year, The Public Discourse pointed out that the best studies on the effects of transgender “treatment” have shown the worst results. Despite the evidence of the harm caused by ideology-driven practices, California’s bill would require healthcare providers receiving grant money to partner and consult with trans-led organizations in order to implement a “trans-inclusive healthcare program.”
Recent years have seen increasing numbers of individuals who have left the transgender movement, many of them sharing harrowing stories about irreversible medical “treatments” they received at the encouragement of doctors and therapists. While states in the U.S. move to further the transgender agenda, the U.K. is beginning to see the opposite trend as NHS moves toward protecting minors from “gender transition” treatments following a lawsuit that drew attention to irreversible harm done by the NHS’s gender clinic.
The bill that California is considering would pour taxpayer dollars into medically unsupported “treatments” that cause documented harm. God created us male and female, and that truth is affirmed by every single cell in our bodies. No amount of surgery or cross-sex hormones can ever change that, and it is not loving to tell people that it can. Instead, we should point people to the truth of God’s design.
(Image: Jeff Turner, Flickr CCBY 2.0)
