Pediatric Castration, the Practical Core of America's Military Power

The House passed the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) this week, and it goes to the Senate next week for final passage. But it’s very controversial, because the final version advanced by the Republican Speaker of the House does something political: It forbids the use of Tricare, the publicly funded military health insurance program, to provide transgender medical procedures for the children of servicemembers, if those procedures may result in sterilization.

You can read the House debate here, with arguments like this one, from the Hawaii Democrat Jill Tokuda:

See how that works? Providing publicly funded trans surgeries for children is just basic decency; opposition to pediatric castration is scoring cheap political points. It can’t be a debate, because opposition to the mutilation of children is too indecent to be a tolerable opinion. If you don’t want a child to be castrated because he feels like a girl, or have an elective mastectomy to remove healthy breasts to feel like a boy, you’re denying them healthcare. It’s like withholding sutures to make little boys bleed to death, obviously.

News stories casually repeat this argument:

The must-pass bill is so critical that nearly 40% of House Democrats voted in favor–but not without expressing their disappointment.

Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., condemned Republican colleagues who, she said, “chose to sully this bill with political culture wars;” nevertheless, she voted in favor.

Trans surgery for children is presumptively normal; opposition sullies us with culture wars. At the risk of repeating myself, they haven’t moved the Overton Window; they’re pretending that it moved, and acting as if. If you don’t let me shove this pot roast up your ass, you’re being weird.

Similarly, watch how many rhetorical strawmen the Democrat Betty McCollum can pack into a single paragraph:

“No one knows exactly what this means.” Trans procedures that result in sterilization — a total mystery! If you remove a boy’s penis and testicles, then sew a piece of his colon into the form of a surgically implanted neo-vagina, can that child go on to have babies? Very complicated question. A definite maybe. The chunk of gut could for sure become spontaneously pregnant, I think, but I’m not a doctor. “Magic 8-Ball says ask again.”

But the final rhetorical maneuver is the most remarkable: By denying trans surgeries to children, House Republicans are denying our troops “the support they need to perform their missions effectively and come home safely.” Soldiers return from the battlefield because of gender-affirming medical care for children. Why did those soldiers die in combat? Because their children couldn’t get publicly funded surgical colon-vaginas, you monsters. At least since Agincourt, that’s what a soldier needs to make it home from war. “We few, we happy few, we band of — well, some of us are sisters, now, but you get the point.”

Congressional Democrats have become so profoundly degenerate and insane that their contributions to “debate” play like scenes from Caligula.

We’ll see what the Senate has to say about this next week. My thanks to Arne for bringing the House debate to my attention.