The Trump administration is once again being lambasted in social justice circles for rewriting federal guidelines covering health care for transgender people. This comes as the result of a Texas court shooting down the rules imposed under the Obama administration describing a failure to provide certain “transition” services to people as discrimination under the Civil Rights Act. Rather than fighting the judge on that one, the White House is rewriting the rule and they’re widely expected to drop the transgender requirement as part of being discrimination based on sex.

This, of course, has activists up in arms. And, as usual, they’re threatening a lawsuit before anyone has even seen the new version of the regulations. (Associated Press)

Instead of appealing the judge’s injunction, the Trump administration has opted to rewrite the rule, which applies to health care providers and insurers receiving federal funds.

Roger Severino, head of the department’s Office for Civil Rights, said the rewrite will address the “reasonableness, necessity and efficacy” of the Obama-era requirement. He refused to discuss specifics, as the revision is under White House review before its official release.

Groups representing transgender people expect the Obama protections to be gutted and are preparing to take the administration to court.

“The proposed rollback does fit into a pattern of transphobia and anti-LGBT sentiment in this administration,” said Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, a lawyer with Lambda Legal, a civil rights organization.

Too many of the arguments being raised in advance of the release of the new rules make no sense or simply fly in the face of established science. For example, let’s take the question of whether or not people suffering from gender dysphoria should be eligible to receive medical treatment and have it covered by their insurance policy. Obviously they should. But what kind of treatment? Despite some (though not all) professional medical associations changing their description of the syndrome, gender dysphoria is still an obvious mental illness or, at a minimum, a case of extremely confused thinking. Medical help should clearly be made available to attempt to correct that.

But that doesn’t mean that you should also be immediately lined up to be pumped full of unnatural (for your gender) hormones or have functional body parts lopped off or modified. Nor should insurance companies be mandated by the government to cover such procedures unless they choose to do so of their own accord. When a person shows up to see their doctor presenting symptoms of clinical lycanthropy we don’t ask the insurance company to cover the cost of buying them a werewolf costume. And it wouldn’t really be beneficial to the patient to do so anyway.

Defenses of such covered procedures are making other false claims in this debate. This is particularly true when it comes to children being subjected to these types of experimentation. The very liberal American Academy of Pediatrics is quoted as saying that, “for children who have yet to reach puberty, gender transition does not involve any medical interventions but instead focuses on social changes such as clothing and calling the child by another name.” But we already know this is a lie. There are already children out there being injected with unnatural compounds to retard the natural onset of puberty. If you don’t consider that a “medical intervention” you probably shouldn’t be practicing medicine. And frankly, when we find that happening we shouldn’t be asking whether insurance will cover it, but rather why that doctor isn’t in a jail cell yet.

These shouldn’t be complicated questions if we simply stick to basic and well established medical science. With the exception of a tiny fraction of the population who are born with particular genetic anomalies, there are two genders. They are determined pretty much at conception. It’s also true that the state of mental health care in our country is far from ideal and a lot more could be done to treat and hopefully cure people suffering from gender dysphoria. But under the SJW redefinition of gender, the medical profession is being dragged down some dark and very unscientific pathways.