WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — House Republicans are calling for the ouster of four military doctors who endorsed “sex change” procedures for children as young as seven years old, in the latest display of the Biden administration’s ongoing transformation of the U.S. Armed Forces.
Last month, the American Public Health Association’s American Journal of Public Health published an article coauthored by Drs. Thomas Baxter, David Klein, and Natasha Schvey of Travis Air Force Base, and Dr. Noelle Larson of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center (the fifth author, Dr. Christina Roberts, is not affiliated with a military institution).
It argues that “children can begin participating in their medical decision-making as early as age seven years,” including their exercising of “an inherent ability and right” to cross-sex hormones and gender “reassignment” surgeries, which they suggest could actually be a boon to military force readiness.
The Daily Caller reports that on March 28, Republican Reps. Mary Miller of Illinois, Diana Harshbarger of Tennessee, and Brian Babin of Texas wrote a letter to U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin urging for the Pentagon-affiliated physicians to be removed.
“If DOD advocates for the chemical castration of 7–year–old children to further a radical leftwing political agenda, we lose our moral standing in the world,” the lawmakers argue. “The nations and people caught in the middle of the 21st Century struggle between American dominance or Chinese dominance will view us as morally lost. You have led one of the greatest recruitment and retention crises in the history of our military because you have forced our armed forces to embrace woke politics ahead of their mission to defend our nation.”
“The U.S. military is the greatest force for good in the history of the world. The Pentagon should immediately fire any ‘doctor’ who recommends chemically castrating a 7-year-old child to advance a political ideology, which is evil,” Miller subsequently told the Caller.
Studies find that more than 80% of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide — and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
On top of those issues, experts outside the medical establishment further warn that surgically or chemically reinforcing gender confusion imposes irreversible harm on children such as infertility, impairment of adult sexual function, and reduced life expectancy, as well as the psychological toll of being “locked into” physical alterations regardless of whether they change their minds when they mature.
As for the military, one of President Joe Biden’s first acts upon taking office was to reopen the armed forces to recruits suffering from gender dysphoria, rejecting analysis conducted under the Trump administration which determined that troops diagnosed with gender dysphoria presented “considerable risk to military effectiveness and lethality.”
The reversal was part of a broader infusion of left-wing social ideology in the military that Biden has accelerated, contributing to significant concerns over recruitment shortages, troop morale, and public confidence in military leadership; as well as the administration’s aggressive support of LGBT ideology including underage “gender transitions” at taxpayers’ expense.