California’s Democratic legislators – the same group that has been consistently incapable of voting to approve single payer universal healthcare for all its residents – is poised to approve an Orwellian piece of legislation, that requires, on the taxpayers’ dime, the repeated indoctrination of everyone in the medical or mental health profession through “cultural competency training” for the stated purpose of providing “trans-inclusive healthcare.” This bill, California Senate Bill 923, introduced by Senator Scott Wiener, SD 11, must be defeated.
While “trans-inclusive healthcare” sounds benign, what it means is indoctrination in sex denialism – the conflation of sex and gender, and the idea that sex doesn’t exist or has no significance and must be overridden by subjective “gender identity.” It also means promoting “gender affirming services” -the medicalization of gender non-conformity or the idea that the body is “wrong” and must be modified through the ingestion of hormones and multiple surgeries if the personality fails to “match” sex stereotypes of how men and women, boys and girls, are supposed to act and behave, and who they are supposed to love.
The new acronym of groups for whose benefit this training is supposed to be conducted is “TGI” – “individuals who identify as transgender, gender non-conforming, or intersex.” The “LGB” is gone from this acronym, subsumed no doubt in “transgender” and “gender non-conforming”, as indeed, medicalization often means “transing away the gay.” The promoted “gender affirming services” include “feminizing mammoplasty, male chest reconstruction, mastectomy, facial feminization surgery, hysterectomy, oophorectomy, penectomy, orchiectomy, feminizing genitoplasty, metoidioplasty, palloplasty, scrotoplasty, voice masculinization or feminization” as well as hormone therapy. Somehow, stopping children’s puberty, giving “wrong sex” hormones, removing healthy body parts of minors and adults alike, and rendering sterile those who do not conform to sex stereotypes is promoted as “progressive” rather than recognized as the 1950’s style sexism and homophobia that it truly is. And the medical and mental health profession is to be indoctrinated into this “treatment” with no dissenters or alternative non -invasive approaches to gender-role non-compliance and bodily unhappiness allowed.
The curriculum for this training is not being established by a representative group of gender non-conforming people, as many lesbians and feminists are gender non-conforming without denying their sex but whose perspective is uniformly disregarded. Rather, it is a state recognized group of gender identity ideologues called the California Transgender Advisory Council made up of such organizations as Transgender Law Center, California TRANScends, and Equality California, the last the result of the forced marriage between the “LGB” and the “TQ”, in which gender identity ideology overrides everything else.
Also unheard are the growing ranks of de-transitioners, mostly females and mostly lesbians, who are rejecting their “transition” and the medicalization of their non-compliance with sex stereotypes and have come to accept their bodies, their gender non-conformity, and/or their homosexuality.
Health practitioners in California will instead be “trained” in using “TGI-inclusive” terminology including “correct names and pronouns,” and instructed to avoid “making assumptions about gender identity by using gender neutral language.” And the consequences for not complying can be dire. If there is a complaint or grievance filed and a decision made in favor of the complainant, the practitioner may not only be subjected to submitting to another “training” but can have her or his name publicly posted by regulatory boards. The bill provides that a willful violation of these requirements by a health care plan would be a crime. We can just imagine how long health practitioners would be able remain in business and on referral lists for non-compliance.
Biological sex is highly relevant to health care. Our patriarchal medical system has long ignored the specific bodily needs of women and important physical differences between the sexes beyond obvious difference in reproductive organs. According to Sarah L. Berga, MD, Wake Forest Baptist Health’s chair of obstetrics and gynecology and Vice President for Women’s Health Service, in an article entitled, Medicine Looking Deeper into Vital Differences Between Women and Men, “We’re beginning to truly understand how men and women differ in very fundamental ways and how these differences affect disease risk, symptoms, diagnostic sensitivity and specificity, and responses to therapy.” Women have traditionally been excluded from clinical trials and treated as merely smaller men, to our detriment. Should SB 923, become law, will medical practitioners be penalized for recognizing the sex of their patients?
It is ironic that when other countries such as liberal Sweden and the UK are beginning to question the “affirmative care” medical model for addressing gender non-conformity and especially questioning the gender transitioning of children as in “Swedish U-Turn on Gender Transitioning for Children”, that California is trying to silence all dissenters.
The solution to gender unhappiness is not engaging in extreme body modification, that only profits the pharmaceutical industry and cosmetic surgeons. There is nothing wrong with being female or being gender non-conforming or lesbian or gay that requires “fixing the body.” Rather it is our society, not our bodies, that is in need of repair. As one female detransitioner put it:
For eight years I had thought I was transgender…the only way I had known to process the frightening, uncomfortable or disempowering aspects of being a woman had been to escape womanhood and see myself as something else…It’s been four years since I re-identified as a woman. My gender dysphoria was real and often painful, but the way for me to resolve it wasn’t by becoming a man. It was by questioning and rejecting the stories society had told me about what it means to be a woman.
There are a number of professional organizations opposing this bill, among them the American College of Pediatricians, the California Chapter American College of Cardiology, the California Rheumatology Alliance, and the International Federation for Therapeutic and Counselling Choice. Please help defeat SB 923 and join FIST in the struggle for women’s liberation from the tyranny of gender ideology and medical malpractice masquerading as “affirmative care” by contacting the members of the Appropriations Committee and demanding they vote NO.