In April, Florida’s Department of Health proposed a rule that would deny people under 18 gender-affirming surgical procedures, medications like puberty blocker and hormone therapy, and “any other procedure that alters primary or secondary sexual characteristics for the treatment of gender dysphoria”.

To do this, the Department had to ignore the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychiatric Association, and misrepresent the contents of reports by 10 researchers in order to justify denying gender-affirming care.

They would also, as it turned out, misuse a study.

Ron DeSantis is all in with this as it would prohibit gender-affirming surgical procedures, medications like puberty blocker and hormone therapy, and “any other procedure that alters primary or secondary sexual characteristics for the treatment of gender dysphoria” for patients under 18. 

Gender-affirming care for both adolescents and adults has been endorsed by the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychiatric Association, and many other professional groups as necessary and frequently lifesaving for transgender individuals. 

At a press conference at the beginning of this month, DeSantis compared gender-affirming surgical procedures to castration saying that doctors who perform the procedures should be sued. 

He is willfully ignorant of facts available to him, or he has found the facts as he presents them according to his own biases and political aspiration to be better for his agenda than presenting the facts as he knows them to be. In the process he not only gains adherents by promoting falsehoods, deliberate misrepresentations of facts, and selective application, but he also keeps the truth from Straight, cisgender people. While he condemns Gender Affirming Care (GAC) in general terms, Desantis is careful not to define it as it would lose its effectiveness as a ploy.

If he were to speak in specifics and define terms, he would let people know that Gender Affirming Care also includes breast augmentation, butt lifts, tummy tucks, plastic surgery, and testosterone therapy utilized by both cisgender males and cisgender females of whichever sexual orientation. That would affect straight people.

Florida could be losing a lot of businesses and one of the reasons people retire there and seem to get younger. 

GAC is also important for dealing with Body Dysmorphic Disorder that affects people to varying degrees as they are obsessed with one or more perceived defects or flaws in their appearance whether or not that perceived flaw appears minor or isn’t even noticed by others resulting in such feelings of embarrassed, shame, and anxiety that a person may avoid many social situations.

And so, we have diets and programs that help in the easiest cases with whole industries built around dealing with BDD,

with more serious cases needing medication, therapy, and the occasional medical altering of one’s appearance to be more acceptable to oneself.

And no one has a problem with society creating model images that cost money to imitate and companies making fortunes out of dealing with actual problems with legitimate or quack approaches, or people dealing with a flaw they never knew they had until someone on television told them they did.

DeSantis throws out Hormone blockers and Hormone therapy in such a way that they sound nefarious.

In reality, Hormone blockers, also called puberty blockers, prevent puberty from starting while a person is basically figuring themself out. They do not cause sterility or have permanent effects but have been found to lead to better mental health outcomes in trans people who receive them. 

Puberty is rough enough as those who choose not to suppress the memory will admit with all those things that happened to our bodies that surprised us, scared us, or were seen by us as just something new, next!

Some got through it okay, others to varying degrees did not for many reasons. We have all seen one kid enter puberty only to come out a totally different adolescent whose ideas and attitudes seem out of character for who the person once was pre-puberty. 

Why not slow the process a little to let the questioning child and the parents figure things out as the blockers are temporary but the changes of puberty are permanent. As an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, let the kid and the parents take the simpler route rather than to later have to undo what should never have been done.

People like DeSantis label but do not define. 

The use of the so called “Gay Lifestyle”, if you wanted to sound normal, or “Homosexual Lifestyle” if you wanted it to sound more clinical, was a common tactic for a while until Gays had to move away from the ever increasing rents and property taxes of the Gay Ghettos in the cities, the slums they had reclaimed and gentrified, to the less expensive suburbs and America saw the “Homosexual Lifestyle” and the “Heterosexual Lifestyle” were pretty much the same and not like people had been led to believe.

They will use “late term” abortion to imply that after 15 weeks the pregnant woman will bring the child to full term while having endured all that a pregnancy brings with it only to have the child killed at the very last minute when there had been plenty of things to accidentally smash the belly up against or stairs to fall down.

While DeSantis plays fast and loose with his chosen area of facts, the Health Department played fast and loose with supporting “evidence”.

In 2018 Dr. Ken Pang, a clinician and scientist at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Australia, and his team published one of the first large-scale analyses of gender-affirming care on transgender children which among its findings and suggestions based on them was that hormone blockers and hormone replacement therapy could help alleviate gender dysphoria and make transgender youth feel more at home in their own bodies. 

Being one of the first such reports, there were only 13 studies that his team could use in a study published five years ago, and this was noted when the report was published in Pediatrics, one of that field’s premier medical journals.

“Hormonal treatments for transgender adolescents can achieve their intended physical effects, but evidence regarding their psychosocial and cognitive impact is generally lacking.”

This reference to the need for more studies did not claim or even suggest that what had been found in those that existed was either inconsistent or lacking in numbers enough to validate glaringly consistent findings, and there have been studies done between this one from 2018 and the statewide Florida health memo, but these newer studies were ignored.

However, in 2022, the Florida memo misused this admission when denying gender-affirming care to kids.

Dr. Pang, who along with his fellow researchers, had not been aware the study was being used as a basis for going against what the study found, made his objections clear. 

“It seems rather disingenuous for the Florida Department of Health to be using what they presumably know to be an out-of-date statement to support a blanket ban on gender-affirming care, while at the same time ignoring the more recent evidence which shows, for instance, that gender-affirming medical care is associated with improvements in mental health.

There is a lot more emerging literature. This is a fast-moving space. And increasingly, the evidence shows that the provision of gender-affirming medical care is helpful.” 

He also lamented, 

“One of the first principles is to do no harm. So, to be seeing the research we’ve done being utilized in this way—I was just dismayed by that.”

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