There is a document with the seal of the United States government on it, and it teaches that a category of children does not exist.
It is called “Wolves in White Coats.” The Department of Health and Human Services released it in August. It was written, in large part, by an Ohio advocacy group whose president holds a degree in public relations and whose organization has stated plainly that there is no such thing as a transgender person. The government did not commission a study and publish the findings. It took the pamphlet and lent it the coat.
Eileen Monte
I have read enough of it to know what it is and what it is not. It is not an inquiry. An inquiry into whether a treatment helps or harms would count both the helped and the harmed. This one counts only the harmed. It gathers eight people who were injured — eight people whose pain I do not doubt and will not argue with — and it stops there. It does not cite a single case where the care did what it was meant to do. From a population of thousands, the government selected eight, all pointing the same direction, and called the collection a finding.
“That is not a sample. That is a casting call.”
That is not a sample. That is a casting call.
I want to be careful here, because there are parents reading this who are afraid, and their fear is not a sin. A mother who reads the word “mutilation” on a government website and goes cold — I understand that mother. I am not writing against her. I am writing about what was done to her: She was handed an advocacy group’s certainty, dressed as her government’s judgment, and told it was the same thing as truth.
So let me tell you the thing the report will not.
There is a surgery that removes breast tissue from a minor. It is common. It is covered by insurance. It is settled, unremarkable medicine, performed on teenagers every year in this country, and no one has ever written a federal report about it. No one calls it mutilation. No one calls it fraud. No one summons the image of wolves.
That surgery is performed overwhelmingly on cisgender boys — boys whose bodies, in the ordinary course of puberty, developed breast tissue that distressed them. We fix it. We are glad to fix it. We do not ask a boy to prove his suffering is real before we relieve it.
The scalpel does not change when the child on the table is transgender. The tissue does not change. The procedure is the same procedure. What changes — the only thing that changes — is the name we give it. On one child it is care. On the other child, the identical act becomes a scandal, a crime, a racket, an atrocity worthy of the government’s seal.
Which tells you what the report never was about. It never was about surgery on minors; if it were, the numbers would have led its authors somewhere they refused to look. It never was about protecting children; if it were, it would have counted all of them. It was about one kind of child. It decided, before it counted anything, that this child is not real — and then went looking only for the wreckage that would prove it.
They will wave the dollar figures — $50 million — the referrals to the Justice Department, the language of a racket. I do not have to audit a single invoice to know this: A document assembled to prove that a child does not exist already has told me what its counting is worth. You do not get to erase her and then ask to be trusted with the tally of what her care cost.
“You do not get to erase her and then ask to be trusted with the tally of what her care cost.”
The title asks us to fear wolves among the sheep. It is a shepherd’s image, and this is a book that knows its shepherds. So I will ask the question the title invites and then flinches from: When the flock is counted, and one kind of lamb is struck from the count before the counting begins, who is the wolf, and who has been left outside the gate?
The shepherd in the old story does not audit the flock. He does not ask which lamb costs the most to keep or whether the one that wandered off was worth the 99 he would leave to go find it. He counts. He finds one missing. He goes.
That is the whole of it. He goes.
A government that means to protect children would have counted the way the shepherd counts — every lamb, the near ones and the strayed ones alike, none struck from the tally before the counting began. This report counts differently. It decided, before it began, which lamb did not belong to the flock, and then it called the leaving-out a finding.
I know which counting I was raised on. I know which one wears the seal now.
And I know that the child this document says does not exist is somebody’s one — worth the leaving of the 99, worth the whole night’s searching, worth the shepherd’s whole attention. No report can un-name her. It can only tell you, by the ones it would not go looking for, what it is.
Related:
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Why transgender people threaten some and what that says about us all | Analysis by Eileen Monte
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