Evil. Actual Evil.

Jamaal Bowman has been defeated in the Democratic Primary in New York’s 16th congressional district. Four years ago, Bowman defeated Eliot Engel, who served as the House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman. Engel took the race for granted and progressives took him out. Bowman attacked Engel as a lobbyist for Israel and too close to the Israeli right. Bowman took his win against Engel and decided he could go full antisemite. He could not. He is toast. But now we get to watch him, with a devil may care attitude, spend several more months making an ass of himself in the House of Representatives.

That is not, however, the biggest story. This is. And it is evil.

Regular readers know I try to refrain from using the word “evil” because I think too many people use it too often against other sinners for just basic policy or political disputes. But this actually is evil.

Health officials in the Biden administration pressed an international group of medical experts to remove age limits for adolescent surgeries from guidelines for care of transgender minors, according to newly unsealed court documents.

Age minimums, officials feared, could fuel growing political opposition to such treatments.

Email excerpts from members of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health recount how staff for Adm. Rachel Levine, assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services and herself a transgender woman, urged them to drop the proposed limits from the group’s guidelines and apparently succeeded.

If and when teenagers should be allowed to undergo transgender treatments and surgeries has become a raging debate within the political world. Opponents say teenagers are too young to make such decisions, but supporters including an array of medical experts posit that young people with gender dysphoria face depression and worsening distress if their issues go unaddressed.

In the United States, setting age limits was controversial from the start.

The draft guidelines, released in late 2021, recommended lowering the age minimums to 14 for hormonal treatments, 15 for mastectomies, 16 for breast augmentation or facial surgeries, and 17 for genital surgeries or hysterectomies.

In other words, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health initially intended to recommend fifteen year old girls for mastectomies and fourteen year olds for hormonal treatments that could cause permanent problems, but the Biden Administration recommended none at all solely to avoid political fallout.

Note, the objection from the Biden Administration was not that 15 year olds should not have their breasts surgically removed. It was that saying so publicly could prompt backlash. In other words, a supposed medical group was, in fact, operating with politics in mind, not on what they actually thought was right.

But what they actually thought was right was that a fifteen year old should be eligible for a mastectomy.

This is evil, evil stuff.