
Tim Mossholder / Unsplash
CV NEWS FEED // Independent journalist Abigail Shrier celebrated President Donald Trump’s executive order putting an end to federal support of gender “treatments” on minors, calling it “a much-needed slap in the face” for supporters of so-called “gender-affirming care.”
Shrier, who wrote “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters,” outlined in a Substack article how the “gender-affirming care” for minors not only ended but also began in politics.
She noted that President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act was reformed in 2016 by the Department of Health and Human Services. While the original 2010 legislation stated that insurance companies cannot refuse coverage on the basis of sex, the new qualification stated that discrimination based on sex included discrimination based on “gender identity.”
Healthcare executive and gender-medicine researcher Zhenya Abbruzzese told Shrier, “Obama effectively wrote into law, through healthcare, that gender identity is a protected class. Because once these insurers feel like they have to cover it, that’s it. You have just turned on the engine.”
The legislation had far-reaching implications, Shrier explained.
“If an insurer covers testosterone to treat a man who was deficient, then, according to gender ideology’s cracked logic, the insurer would also need to cover testosterone for a woman identifying as a man,” she wrote. “If a procedure to remove a man’s unwanted breast tissue was covered, then a similar procedure for a woman identifying as a man must also be covered. Denying those claims could subject insurers to federal enforcement action.”
These ramifications echoed across American culture. Shrier wrote that by 2020, the charity website GoFundMe had 30,000 appeals from healthy teenage girls looking to undergo a mastectomy in order to affirm their “gender identity.”
However, Trump’s Jan. 28 executive order stating that the federal government would no longer “fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another” finally “broke the spell” of gender mania.
“And the spell was always our biggest problem,” Shrier continued. She wrote that while parents who allowed their children to transition are often portrayed as Hollywood eccentrics, many of these parents are loving and well-intended, but naïve and misguided. Some of them were manipulated by therapists who told them their children would commit suicide if they were not “affirmed.”
Shrier wrote that parents who fell subject to the social contagion and allowed their children to transition “made an understandable, if devastating, error.”
“Disagreeable contrarians who resisted gender fever are the real oddballs,” she wrote. “Some combination of personality quirk and conviction that occasionally makes us obnoxious employees and intolerable cocktail-party guests also inoculated us against gender madness.”
But, she concluded, those who resisted gender fever served a vital function.
“Together, a ragtag crew of truculent journalists and outcast researchers stopped the entire herd from running off the cliff,” Shrier wrote. “None of us ever expected to be welcomed back into the same elite circles that, only recently, had cheered or looked away as a generation of tormented girls took themselves apart.”
BISHOP BARRON LAUDS TRUMP’S EXECUTIVE ORDER BANNING MUTILATION OF CHILDREN
