Joe Biden has implied that federal legislation may be needed to stop states from banning the medical transition of children.
Under Governor Ron DeSantis, the Florida Board of Medicine, which oversees doctors in the state, has recently banned children that identified as transgender from receiving puberty blockers, hormone treatment, or so-called “gender-affirming surgeries.”
However, this decision was not acceptable to Joe Biden. Speaking to former “House” and “Harold and Kumar” actor Kal Penn on “The Daily Show,” Biden said that the issue of “transgender kids” was a “really hard” thing, launching into an attack on Florida’s decision to protect minors from life-altering medical decisions.
“What’s going on in Florida is, as my mother would say, close to sinful. I mean, it’s just terrible what they’re doing,” Biden argued. “It’s not like a kid wakes up one morning and says, you know, I decided I want to become a man or I want to become a woman, or I want to change.”
“I mean, what are they thinking about here? They’re human beings. They love, they have feelings, they have inclinations that are I mean, it just to me is, I don’t know, it’s cruel,” he added.
Biden then suggested that federal legislation, like that which covered gay marriage, was needed to force states to let children medically transition. “You mess with that, you’re breaking the law, and you’re going to be held accountable,” he concluded.
In a preview clip for an upcoming interview on the Daily Show, US President Joe Biden appeared to suggest that federal legislation was needed to prohibit states from restricting the medical transitioning of minors.
"What's going on in Florida … is close to sinful." pic.twitter.com/3HQo4lYJOm
— REDUXX (@ReduxxMag) March 13, 2023
Last year, Assistant Secretary for Health Dr Rachel Levine, who is a male-to-female transgender person, said that giving minors who identify as trans “gender-affirming” care is not only “life-saving,” but “medically necessary,” and that the federal government must “empower” children to undergo these procedures, matching Biden’s recent comments.
This is despite the fact that the “scientific evidence supporting these complex medical interventions is extraordinarily weak,” according to Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo.
A 46-page report published last year, which covered various pieces of medical literature on the subject of transgender care, concluded that not only do studies suggesting that such services stop suicide attempts are “either are either low or very low quality and rely on unreliable methods such as surveys and retrospective analyses,” but that the available evidence suggests the opposite:
“Numerous studies… identify poor methods and the certainty of irreversible physical changes. Considering the weak evidence supporting the use of puberty suppression, cross-sex hormones, and surgical procedures when compared to the stronger research demonstrating the permanent effects they cause, these treatments do not conform to GAPMS [generally accepted professional medical standards] and are experimental and investigational.”
“It’s sad that we have to say this, but our children are not guinea pigs for science experimentation,” said Governor DeSantis in his recent “State of the State” address to Florida lawmakers, a decision supported by many young adults who have now detransititioned.