Florida: The Common-Sense State
Cue the left-wing outrage chorus.
Florida’s surgeon general, Harvard-educated Joseph A. Ladapo, yesterday challenged cockamamie guidance from Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services, which recommended puberty blockers and hormone therapy for children experiencing “gender dysphoria.”
Dr. Ladapo correctly called that “irresponsible.”
“Guidance of this magnitude requires a thorough, unbiased review of the evidence. It was irresponsible of HHS to release guidance that failed to meet the most basic level of academic rigor,” Ladapo said, adding that his office would “fill the void left by the feds.”
Ladapo’s Florida’s Department of Health - a beacon of sanity in an increasingly mad America - issued its own guidelines that contradict the virtue-signaling gibberish flowing from Washington.
“Due to the lack of conclusive evidence , and the potential for long-term irreversible effects, the Department’s guidelines are as follows:
Social gender transition should not be a treatment option for children or adolescents.
Anyone under 18 should not be prescribed puberty blockers or hormone therapy.
Gender reassignment surgery should not be a treatment option for children or adolescents.
Children and adolescents should be provided social support by peers and family and seek counseling from a licensed provider.
This common-sense guidance, along with the passage of a Florida law that forbids teaching sex or gender issues to Florida children in grades K-3 and yesterday’s move to treat the Disney company like every other corporation doing business in the Sunshine State, has America’s left-wing nuts in a state of apoplexy.
To those of us who still regard childhood as a brief oasis of innocence, Ladapo’s recommendations - which would have been unremarkable until far-left fanatics took over Washington - are a hopeful sign.
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat recently tackled the sharp rise in Americans identifying as LGBTQ and especially trans in a piece headlined, “How to Make Sense Of The New LGBTQ Culture War”:
“According to Gallup, the share of younger Americans who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender has risen precipitously in the last decade. Almost twenty-one percent of Generation Z — meaning, for the purposes of the survey, young adults born between 1997 and 2003 — identifies as L.G.B.T., as against about 10 percent of the millennial generation, just over 4 percent of my own Generation X and less than 3 percent of baby boomers. Comparing the Generation Z to the baby boom generation, the percentage of people identifying as transgender, in particular, has risen twentyfold.
Douthat offers three possible explanations for the explosion of people identifying as transgendered.
Here’s the only one that made sense to me:
This trend is bad news. What we’re seeing today isn’t just a continuation of the gay rights revolution; it’s a form of social contagion which our educational and medical institutions are encouraging and accelerating. These kids aren’t setting themselves free from the patriarchy; they’re under the influence of online communities of imitation and academic fashions laundered into psychiatry and education — one part Tumblr and TikTok mimesis, one part Judith Butler.
There is no clear evidence that any of this is making kids happier or better adjusted; instead all we see is a worsening of teen mental health, blurring into a young-adult landscape where sex and relationships and marriage are on the wane.
Social contagion!
That’s the perfect description for what’s happening. As movies, TV and social media glorify transgenderism it becomes a fad among the young, one with dangerous long-term consequences.
Look, it’s one thing for an adult to decide that they want to undergo medical procedures to switch sexes.
It’s quite another to allow impulsive and confused children to undergo risky medical interventions to postpone puberty or to begin transitioning to a different sex.
Any child struggling with gender issues should be in counseling, with his or her parents. Decisions about medical interventions should wait until a child is at least 18.
There is a presumption under American law that those under 18 are under a disability because of their age. They cannot enter into contracts, for instance, or serve on juries. They can’t get tattooed, buy tobacco products or lottery tickets. Alcohol sales are restricted until 21.
Yet some would say that same minor child who isn’t old enough to buy a scratcher should be able to transition to a different gender.
Insanity.
Increasingly, America looks to Florida not only for sunshine and endless beaches, but for healthy doses of common sense.
