The “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation” executive order (January 28, 2025) focuses on restricting gender transition treatments for minors. Key points include:
- Prohibition of Transition Treatments for Minors: The order bans federal funding and support for gender transition procedures like puberty blockers, hormone treatments, and surgeries for children under 19.
- Criticism of WPATH Guidelines: It criticizes the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and directs a review of scientific practices around gender dysphoria treatment.
- Defunding: Federal research or education grants will be cut for institutions that perform gender transition treatments on minors.
- Protection of Parental Rights: The order seeks to prevent sanctuary states from overriding parental authority in decisions about their child’s treatment and ensures whistleblower protection for those exposing harmful practices.
The order’s goal is to halt gender transition treatments for minors, protect children from irreversible harm, and enforce stricter regulations on healthcare providers involved in these procedures.
Today, January 28, is the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas is best known for synthesizing faith and reason in a comprehensive theological system in the Summa Theologica. He believed that human reason and divine revelation could complement each other in the pursuit of truth, helping explain complex theological concepts such as what it means to be human. I highly recommend the Thomistic Institute‘s videos or Peter Kreeft’s Summa of the Summa to learn more. As I received the news today regarding this executive order, I could not help but feel a sense of joy and relief that it would be published on St. Thomas’ feast day. This executive order is a movement toward a restoration of universal truth about what it means to be human. The executive order is bold, even confrontational, but it is an exhortation calling the misguided back to sanity.
As a therapist, I engage with people of all walks of life who have a variety of feelings about their sexuality. I address these issues in the therapy space with compassion and care. My excitement about this executive order in no way diminishes my desire to understand, love, and accompany those whose subjective experiences do not directly align with their understanding of their maleness or femaleness, or those who feel a discord between their subjective sense of self and their bodies. These experiences of discordance, distress, and confusion need a space to be explored. To promote the idea that the rejection of the body is a valid path to health is not in accord with what it means to be human and will not ultimately lead to wholeness and healing.
What I love about my Catholic faith and the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas and John Paul II is the balance between faith and reason, between the subjective and objective. John Paul II made space to acknowledge the reality of subjective experience and its necessary relationship to the truth through his writings on authentic freedom. In Veritatis Splendor, he writes, “Authentic freedom is never freedom ‘from’ the truth but always freedom ‘in’ the truth” (No. 64). When freedom is abused, it diminishes itself and leaves the person enslaved. As he said at the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1995, “Detached from the truth about the human person, freedom deteriorates into license in the lives of individuals, and in political life it becomes the caprice of the most powerful and the arrogance of power. Far from being a limitation upon freedom or a threat to it, reference to the truth about the human person—a truth universally knowable through the moral law written on the hearts of all—is, in fact, the guarantor of freedom’s future” (no. 12). In pursuit of the license to control how one is perceived – to pass as the opposite sex – one becomes enslaved to a lifetime of medical treatments and disintegration. Is it worth it?
The conclusions put forward by gender affirming care are not based on scientific evidence (nor on natural law). In April of 2024, I was blessed to present the current literature on the treatment of gender dysphoria in adolescents for the Catholic Psychotherapy Association. A major part of my presentation was distilling the Cass Review – an independent review of the UK’s gender clinic treatment protocols. This review included extensive literature reviews. The conclusions of the Cass Review, confirmed the conclusions of many other European countries, that there is not sufficient evidence to suggest that the medical harms of surgical interventions outweigh the potential psychological benefits of gender transition. These interventions produce documented harm (infertility, poor bone density, long-term medical complications) and undocumented, potential relief. I have been waiting patiently for people of authority to speak about this in the United States and have been grateful to those who have been bold enough to speak about this publicly when it felt dangerous. I have been thankful to members of Therapy First who have made it feel possible to continue to explore the unknown and taboo in the safety of the therapy space.
I want to believe that those influenced by the WPATH or working for the organization, with a passion for advocacy, truly want to be supportive and help those distressed by their sexed bodies feel more comfortable. Nevertheless, their good intentions have caused harm to many individuals. When I first read the WPATH Files, I was shocked and dismayed at the conversations among professionals who were attempting to problem solve harrowing medical complications that they likely never anticipated. To go beyond the current scandal, there were conversations about treating individuals suffering with body dysmorphia with a similar treatment protocol. In this scenario, if a person feels more themselves without an arm, who is to stop them from paying for a procedure to have an arm professionally and safely removed… This is the result of endorsing personal subjectivity as the center of reality.
I often find imagery valuable in working with my patients in therapy and have provided them with this image to help understand the important relationship between objective truth and subjective experience. Imagine you were in an art gallery with a statue in the middle of the room. Each person standing around the piece will see it from a different angle, yet all angles are one and the same statue. When someone adopts a subjectivist worldview, he is essentially saying that each vantage point creates a unique statue. Following this logic, each person becomes fixed in his vantage point unable to share, relate, or speak about any common observations. They are each locked in defense of their own positions, forsaking the universal and the possibility of relationship. Thus, if someone stands on the shadow side of the statue, he might declare that it is dark and deny the reality of the light side. Acknowledging universal truth, objective reality, allows us all to be in a shared space, observing something real outside of ourselves. When we come out of ourselves, share our observations, and exchange information we learn more about ourselves, each other, and reality. Our understanding of ourselves, others, and the world expands. It is only through this process of giving of ourselves and receiving the other that we are truly known. Those locked in defensiveness often feel isolated, misunderstood, and rejected.
I deeply hope that those hurt by this executive order – who feel misunderstood, rejected, abandoned, and negated find a way to move forward, find healing, and wholeness.