The Biden regime’s most senior transgender official attempted to pressure a group of medical experts to scrap the lower age limit for transgender surgeries, it has been revealed.
Admiral Rachel Levine, the transgender assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services, demanded back in 2021 that the World Professional Association for Transgender Health alter its draft guidelines to allow children to access sex change surgeries before they hit puberty.
At the time of Levine’s demands, the WPATH recommended age minimums of 14 for hormone treatment, 15 for mastectomies, 16 for breast augmentation, and 17 for genital surgeries.
Yet according to court filings in Alabama, where transgender advocates are challenging a ban on child sex changes, Levine pressured doctors to change their guidance to allow pre-pubescent children to get irreversible mutilations.
“We sent the document to Admiral Levine … She like[s] the SOC-8 very much but she was very concerned that having ages (mainly for surgery) will affect access to health care for trans youth and maybe adults too,” one WPATH member wrote in an internal email.
“Apparently the situation in the USA is terrible and [Levine] and the Biden administration worried that having ages in the document will make matters worse,” they continued. “She asked us to remove them.”
In a separate email, another WPATH member revealed how Levine’s chief of staff, Sarah Boateng, had argued that the guidelines would be “devastating” for transgender youth.
“She is confident, based on the rhetoric she is hearing in D.C., and from what we have already seen, that these specific listings of ages, under 18, will result in devastating legislation for trans care,” she wrote. “She wonders if the specific ages can be taken out.”
Levine’s pressure campaign was ultimately successful.
“[W]e heard your comments regarding the minimal age criteria for transgender healthcare adolescents; the potential negative outcome of these minimal ages as recommendations in the U.S.,” a WPATH member wrote in an email to Levine. Consequently, we have changes to the SOC 8 in this respect.”
The excerpts were submitted by James Cantor, a psychologist and long-time critic of child sex changes, to argue that WPATH was basing its guidelines on political ideology rather than scientific evidence.
“I think the next two years are going to be challenging,” Levine said at the time. “But I am positive and optimistic and hopeful that the wheel will turn after that and that this issue won’t be as politically and socially such a minefield.”
