What chutzpah: State Attorney General Letitia James is threatening to file discrimination charges against hospitals that heed President Trump’s executive order on sex-change procedures for kids.
Sorry, Tish: You’re not only wrong on the substance, for once you’re not the biggest bully in the room.
Something she plainly realizes — since if she had the courage of any convictions, James would be suing the feds, not the poor hospitals caught in the middle.
Hospitals that defy Trump’s order risk losing billions in federal funds — which would mean higher medical costs for all who use them.
That’s why some medical providers, reportedly including NYU Langone Health, immediately began canceling appointments.
Yet James claimed Monday that hospitals can’t comply without breaking New York law, huffing: “Withholding the availability of services from transgender individuals based on their gender identity or their diagnosis of gender dysphoria, while offering such services to cisgender individuals, is discrimination under New York law.”
Wrong: No treatment will get withheld on the basis of a diagnosis or an “identity” (and no “cisgender” person will get access, since they don’t want such “services”); Trump’s order was strictly on the basis of age: No sex-change hormones or surgery for children, including teens.
Also wrong: James’ promise that no one will lose funding because a judge ordered a temporary restraining order on Trump’s entirely separate freeze on some government aid.
(Easy for her to say, anyway: No funds she controls are at risk.)
Most important: Trump is entirely right to halt these dangerous procedures, which will affect kids for the rest of their lives.
Kids who are far too young to make such complex, life-altering decisions.
There’s a reason multiple European countries have greatly restricted or outright banned sex-change treatment and puberty blockers for minors.
Supposedly scientific studies claiming the procedures improve mental health have proved weak, especially the claims that starting transition is a key to preventing suicide.
Whereas the harm done is indisputable: Even taking puberty blockers has life-long consequences, and sex-change surgery is irreversible — you can’t restore parts you chopped off years before.
Fact is, it’s a clear violation of medical ethics to provide the “care” that James demands.
Yes, adult activists managed to confuse the issue in recent years; one extremist doctor even sought to hide research showing the treatments failed to show any significant improvement to kids’ mental health.
So the AG is pandering to a movement/ideology that’s rapidly being outed as fundamentally deceptive.
That is, again using her official powers to try to boost her political career at New Yorkers’ expense.
Yet she even gets the political calculus wrong: Per a Siena pol last month, more New Yorkers back rescinding federal policies that recognize transgender Americans than oppose it (47%-40%).
That is, this deep-blue state is on Trump’s side, not James’: If she can’t learn to read the room better, she’s going to pander her way out office.
