By Andrea Widburg
True gender dysphoria is a legitimate condition that occurs when a person’s sense of self doesn’t align with his or her sex. It can be a purely mental illness or, as I suspect, it can be a hormonal imbalance, perhaps tied to the person’s mother having taken the Pill not long before becoming pregnant. (Today, too, it’s a social contagion.) Logical treatments are therapy or, perhaps, hormones aligned with a person’s chromosomes. Instead, the left has embraced the magical idea of “transing” people—that is, expensive hormones and surgery. It turns out that Biden’s Veterans Administration is currently all-in on this delusional idea and is willing to spend vast sums of money to make it so.
As of 2012, the military still banned “psychosexual conditions” such as “transsexualism, exhibitionism, transvestism, voyeurism, and other paraphilias.” In other words, people with creepy, unhealthy, deviant sexuality—aka, people with mental instability and illness—cannot be relied upon to defend our nation.
In 2016, during his last year in office, when it could no longer harm him politically, Barack Obama repealed this ban. Slightly over a year later, in August 2017, President Trump issued a memorandum against having people with body dysmorphia and related sexual conditions serve in the military. Leftists promptly sued (of course), stopping the military from acting assertively under the Commander-in-Chief’s guidance.
It wasn’t until April 2019 that the ban against transgenderism in the military finally went into effect. Within days of entering the Oval Office, however, Biden reversed the ban and re-opened the military to people with sexually related mental illnesses.
Of course, the problem isn’t just that (as many people believe) people who claim gender dysphoria have a mental problem or (as I believe) a possible hormonal imbalance. It’s also that people who have undergone “gender/sex reassignment” procedures are not fully functioning human beings, whether as men or women. Instead, they’re sinkholes of perpetual, expensive healthcare.
The hormones they take leave them with ongoing serious problems ranging from increased risks of heart disease to cancer. They can also be really expensive. According to this chart, an Estradiol patch to help make a man feel like a woman costs almost $200 per month, while a testosterone gel to make a woman feel like a man is priced at about $463 a month. It’s important to note that small amounts of these hormones almost certainly won’t do the trick. Overcoming a body’s natural hormones takes a baseball bat, not a twig.
Surgery is expensive, too, although the cost depends on whether you’re just cutting pieces off, removing internal organs, or using plastic surgery to create a simulacrum of breasts, penises, and vaginas, or feminized or masculinized faces and necks. One site, which I’ll go with now, says surgery can run anywhere between $6,900 and $63,400. That ain’t cheap, especially for something that’s unnecessary.
I say it’s “unnecessary” because we should never spend money feeding into people’s delusions. We should work to free them from those delusions. But what happens when you have an administration committed to restructuring America to accommodate mental illness? Well, as noted, your military becomes a battleground, not just in terms of national defense but economically, too.
As of 2021, before Trump was able to ban (temporarily) so-called “transgender” troops, the Pentagon spent $15 million over five years to treat only 1,892 so-called transgender troops, “including $11.5 million for psychotherapy and $3.1 million for [243] surgeries.”
And most recently, in Seattle, the local Veterans’ Administration, instead of dedicating itself to dealing with genuine health issues afflicting America’s veterans, dreams of spending vast amounts of taxpayer money on so-called transgender treatments:
A Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) facility in Seattle, Washington requested more than half a million dollars in fiscal year 2023 to build and staff a surgical facility for performing gender transition surgeries, although the VA has yet to approve such procedures, documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation show.
The facility has offered hormone therapy, minor surgeries, hair removal and other treatments for decades as part of an effort to expand procedures geared toward an estimated 12,500 nationwide veterans who have been diagnosed as gender dysphoric, according to the documents obtained by the DCNF via public records requests. But the documents and emails show that the VA medical center at Puget Sound also estimated to incur expenses of $642,562 in 2023 and more than $1.5 million by 2027 in an initial proposal to the VA’s health care system for funding to establish a genital surgery center.
Facts are stubborn things, and reality is just that…real. When a nation takes a deep and expensive dive into treating delusions as reality and incorporates those delusions into its military infrastructure, that nation no longer has a reliable bulwark against any enemies, whether foreign or domestic.