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Florida Dept of Health goes after Rachel Levine for ‘character assassination’

June 29, 2022 | | Print Article

U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine is facing pushback for smearing critics who’re concerned about children being dosed with life-altering hormonal treatments as “opponents of LGBTQ equality” just out “to score political points.”

“Opponents of LGBTQ equality have targeted trans and queer youth to score political points, all to distract from the fact that they do not have any solutions to the problems that we face today,” Levine said at a Pride Month town hall event live-streamed last week by the Democrat National Committee, according to Fox News.

“They have stooped so low as to try to punish parents criminally for seeking gender-affirming care for their children who need it. Every major medical association agrees: gender-affirming care is life-saving, medically necessary, age-appropriate and a critical tool for health care providers.”

Fact-check: FALSE.

The Florida Department of Health did not care for Levine’s remarks.

“The [Florida] Surgeon General is opposed to experimental and irreversible medical treatments on children and teenagers that suffer from gender dysphoria,” Florida Department of Health spokesman Jeremy T. Redfern said in a statement to Fox News.

“The idea that this makes anyone at the Department of Health an ‘opponent of LGBTQ equality’ is nothing more than a poorly attempted character assassination,” Redfern added.

Florida Surgeon General Joseph A. Ladapo, who’s been outspoken in his opposition to  allowing children access to puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and gender reassignment surgery, went viral in late April when he published a fact sheet advising Floridians to not follow the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ widely criticized advice pertaining to “gender-affirming care.”

The fact sheet bluntly advised against pursuing social gender transition, prescribed puberty blockers, hormone therapy and/or gender reassignment surgery for children.

In defending this advice, the fact sheet cited the science:

(Source: Florida Department of Health)

Levine, who’s a transgender woman, has been equally outspoken, but in reverse, claiming that so-called “gender-affirmative care” for children is imperative and further arguing that all credible sources agree.

But all credible sources do not, in fact, agree. There’s a growing underground movement of medical professionals who staunchly disagree with this belief system.

“There’s kind of like an underground group of therapists and pediatricians and doctors who have to meet in secret groups to talk about their concerns with this, because everyone kind of sees it as being transphobic if we challenge this narrative,” according to Dr. David Haralson.

Based out of Colorado, Haralson, a marriage and family therapist, is “part of a group called the Gender Exploratory Therapy Association (GETA), which encourages therapy instead of medicalization to help resolve gender dysphoria,” as reported last month.

Dr. Oren Amitay, a registered psychologist and lecturer at Ryerson University in Toronto, described a similar phenomenon as the one outlined by Haralson.

“I don’t know if we’re in the minority, but we’re definitely in hiding, so to speak, because speaking out can get us in trouble. So yes, there are quite a few of us who disagree … who say no, this is wrong. And it’s not on ideological grounds; it’s on the science,” he told Fox News.

The actual science versus the administration’s preferred “Science™.”

Redfern concurred.

He told Fox News that Levine’s claim that “every major medical association” agrees with the Biden administration’s stance “isn’t data.”

“It’s an appeal to authority that is in stark contrast to the best available evidence. The [Florida] Department of Health is following the evidence. The federal government is following the eminence,” he said.

In other words, the Biden administration is following what’s popular and trendy, particularly politically, versus the actual science.

It’s the same phenomenon that played out during the height of the COVID pandemic when Democrat governors cited the so-called “science” to lock down their states.

The Republican governors who, meanwhile, chose to keep their states open were mocked, ridiculed, and accused of being anti-science.

It didn’t help that left-wing Trump administration officials like Dr. Deborah Birx refused to even consider any countervailing evidence.

Yet the data that’s since emerged publicly has convincingly shown that, not surprisingly, the Republicans who were so ruthlessly mocked in 2020 were right all along, while the left-wingers screeching about the “Science™” were dead wrong.

Vivek Saxena
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