Competing Values, Illustrated So Clearly It's Painful to Watch

A congressional hearing this week offers profound insight into the values we’ve grouped behind the imperfect labels of “left” and “right” in contemporary politics. At issue: the monstrous behavior misleadingly described as “gender-affirming medical care” for children. The most important of the witnesses in this House subcommittee hearing was Dr. Eithan Haim, the surgeon who was prosecuted by the Biden-era DOJ for revealing to the public that Texas Children’s Hospital was lying when it announced that it had ended gender procedures for its pediatric patients. You can watch the whole thing here:

I’ve written about Dr. Haim several times, starting here. Federal prosecutors cycled through a series of indictments in his case, groping in the dark for the thing they meant to accuse him of doing, before dropping the charges as a new administration took over.

But Democrats spent the hearing pronouncing his guilt, outcome be damned. Just before the ten-minute mark, you’ll find ranking member Mary Gay Scanlon saying this about the unsuccessful prosecution of Dr. Haim: “This is an open-and-shut case. And that’s why the grand jury determined that there was enough evidence to charge him with criminal HIPAA violations. So it wasn’t the Department of Justice that politicized Dr. Haim’s case when it charged him with blatant violations of HIPAA privacy laws. It was Dr. Haim himself who came up with a political excuse for his illegal actions.”

These are the people who keep warning us about Orange Hitler’s scary assault on Our Sacred Political Norms™: the people who know that their opponents are guilty the moment a grand jury indicts them, case closed. Being accused is being convicted. (Due process? Are you a Nazi!?!?)

Jamie Raskin does the same thing, around the 22:53 mark in the video: “He’s a doctor who fraudulently obtained the medical records of youth who were not his patients.” That exact claim, fraudulently obtained, was the central deficiency in a case that repeatedly forced prosecutors to try again with repeated versions of new indictments. As Haim himself told the subcommittee, in comments you can watch at 31:50, “The DOJ’s own evidence, that they gave us in discovery, disproved every single one of the claims against us.”

But there’s something much uglier going on in this discussion, as Democratic politicians repeatedly frame “gender-affirming care” as warm and kind, and Dr. Haim describes the gender program at Texas Children’s Hospital as an effort to “manipulate, mutilate, and sterilize healthy young children.” Watch around the 53:36 mark as Dr. Haim describes, for example, “fistulas, where stool from the rectum can pour into the wound that they call the neovagina.” What a warm and wonderful thing to do to a child, castrating him so he can have a chunk of his own guts sewed into his crotch as a surgical “vagina,” which then fills up with shit and becomes infected. You can see that only monsters would oppose that kind of wonderfully gentle and decent medical care.

We’re living through a period of mainstreamed madness, and we’ll emerge from it. Of course things that have been coded as medical care and evidence-based healing have drifted into disrepute. See, among many other examples, Ann Bauer’s discussion of the historical “treatments” for autism, or the casual use of lobotomies to treat depression. Also, everyone who gets a Covid vaccine becomes a dead end for the virus, we swear.

Regearding the hearing, see also the social media threads on this discussion from Haim (who calls Raskin the “arch deep-state goblin”) and from his wife, Andrea, who sat behind him during the hearing and had the distance to make some important observations about “watching Eithan’s takedown of these sniveling losers.”

My reaction to people like Mary Gay Scanlon is Mark Baum’s reaction to his dinner with a CDO manager: “Short everything that guy has touched.” Whatever the other side is, I’m on it, no need to hash out details.

If the offer is why aren’t you kind enough to castrate children and sew fake surgical vaginas into their bodies, I don’t need time to think about it.

See also this discussion at The Common Bridge this week about the politics of gender affirmation:

Affirmation Not Necessary

Dr. Eithan Haim put up with a tremendously ugly set of sleazy and defamatory attacks, this week, and won a victory for actual kindness. Remember his moral victory.