UNMASKED: New Docs Reveal Rachel Levine Backs Scrapping Transgender Surgery Age Limits
The Biden administration is not content with the idea that teens need to become legal adults before they can go under the knife to remove healthy body parts in the name of transgender identity. It also wants to hide this advocacy for mutilation of minors.
Newly revealed documents expose just how radical the administration’s support for experimental transgender surgery truly is.
According to these documents, first reported by The New York Times, a top transgender leader in the Department of Health and Human Services pressured the World Professional Association for Transgender Health—a transgender activist group masquerading as a health organization—to drop age limits for interventions that leave people stunted, scarred, and infertile.
WPATH released a document called the “Standards of Care” for these interventions, which activists euphemistically refer to as “gender-affirming care.” The interventions include experimental drugs to “delay” puberty, drugs to make males resemble females and vice versa, and surgeries to alter or remove healthy body parts to make a male appear female or vice versa.
Doctors have warned about the negative side effects of these interventions, and WPATH internal files revealed that even doctors at the leading pro-trans organization have expressed concerns about them.
Activists often claim that only legal adults go under the knife for transgender surgeries, but a study last year found that more than 3,000 minors had such surgeries between 2016 and 2020.
WPATH draft guidelines, released in late 2021, recommended lowering age minimums to 14 for cross-sex hormones, 15 for mastectomies, 16 for breast augmentation or facial surgeries, and 17 for genital surgeries or hysterectomies.
These lower age recommendations were insufficient, however, for Rachel Levine, a man—born Richard Levine—who identifies as a woman and who serves as assistant secretary of health at HHS.
A member of the WPATH guideline development group wrote an email describing a conversation with Sarah Boateng, then Levine’s chief of staff. (Boateng became principal deputy assistant secretary for health in October 2022.)
“She is confident, based on the rhetoric she is hearing in D.C., and from what we have already seen, that these specific listings of ages, under 18, will result in devastating legislation for trans care,” the WPATH member wrote of Boateng, according to The New York Times. “She wonders if the specific ages can be taken out.”
Another email said Levine “was very concerned that having ages (mainly for surgery) will affect access to care for trans youth and maybe adults, too. Apparently, the situation in the U.S.A. is terrible, and she [meaning Levine] and the Biden administration worried that having ages in the document will make matters worse. She asked us to remove them.”
These documents came to light in a lawsuit. Parents who claim their children identify as transgender are suing to block Alabama’s law protecting kids from experimental transgender interventions, and psychologist James Cantor submitted the emails in a report backing the Alabama law. Plaintiffs are seeking to bar Cantor from testifying in the case.
Levine framed the request in political terms, noting that an explicit endorsement of transgender surgeries for minors would trigger backlash. Not only did Levine not push back against the idea of allowing transgender surgeries for minors, but by advocating for removing the ages, he suggested that minors at even younger ages should be able to obtain them.
The fact that Levine framed his request in political terms reveals the Biden administration’s desire to cloak its support for putting minors under the knife. Levine knew this position would be unpopular and scandalous, yet he sought to advance it nontheless.
Gender ideology activists and their allies who have infiltrated health care organizations often insist that experimental transgender medical interventions—which often amount to chemical castration—are essential for gender-confused children, to prevent them from committing suicide.
Yet, many people who took experimental drugs and went under the knife to “affirm” a transgender identity later realized their mistake, and are now publicly warning others against mutilating their own bodies.
Doctors at WPATH have privately discussed the side effects of “gender-affirming care,” including cancer in teens, reduced sexual function, and the lack of informed consent for procedures with lifelong impacts.
In fact, this craze reminds me of the horrific history of eugenics and lobotomies, which were celebrated as the height of “progressive” science and medicine in the early 20th century. The inventor of the lobotomy received a Nobel Prize, and many Nobel laureates supported eugenics.
America may look back on transgender surgeries the way horrified students of history look back on these “progressive” phenomena.
Levine himself has expressed gratitude that he did not begin his “gender transition” until later in life, because otherwise he would not have been able to have children.
“I have no regrets, because if I had transitioned when I was younger, then I wouldn’t have my children,” Levine, a father of two, said in a 2019 speech. “I can’t imagine a life without my children.”
Yet Levine seems unconcerned about pushing children along the path toward sterility long before they can truly understand what it even means. Instead, Levine has attempted to enlist doctors to become evangelists for “gender-affirming care” and urged health officials to pressure Big Tech to stifle opposition to transgender orthodoxy.
This latest revelation further exposes how radical the HHS has become under Biden. Not only is this “health” agency unconcerned with the medical side-effects of “gender-affirming care,” but it seeks to hide its advocacy for minor mutilation from the American people.
