Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, let loose on his Democratic colleagues Friday, blasting them for defending sex change surgery for children.
‘I am not the one who is cruel. Doing a double mastectomy on a 12-year-old girl. That’s cruel. Castrating a ten-year-old boy. That’s cruel. Putting them on permanent hormone therapy and puberty blockers that could prevent them from ever having children permanently changing their physiology. There’s a cruelty to that for sure,’ Crenshaw said during a House health hearing this week.
‘We are not the crazy ones here,’ he added. ‘This has been called a manufactured culture war … If it’s a manufactured culture war, then why are we even debating? Why do you care if it’s banned? So it’s not manufactured.’
Crenshaw detailed what he said was a 45,000% increase in transition surgeries at hospitals that conduct the procedures, and that Republicans weren’t ‘making this up.’ He went on to argue that ‘peer influence’ was a major factor in the increase.
He later questioned why anyone would advocate for continued use of such procedures on children with such high level of risk involved in relation to their future biology and mental health.
‘You might not know that bananas are healthy for kids, but you also know that there’s not much risk to giving them a banana. So it’s not a big deal. This kind of stuff is a really big deal,’ he said.
‘And when every single piece of evidence shows that there’s not a clear benefit associated with it, you just press pause. Heck, we’re not even pressing pause. We’re saying don’t fund institutions that are actively doing it. We’re doing way less than pressing pause,’ he added.
Crenshaw then slammed Democrats for ignoring the overwhelming percentage of Americans who polls have shown don’t support such procedures, arguing they should care because the use of taxpayer money was involved. ‘So you do have to care just a little bit,’ he said.
He went on to argue that ‘roughly 70%’ of U.S. teens going to gender clinics have a co-morbid psychiatric diagnosis that came about prior to the gender issues.
‘That’s a really important fact. Do you not care about that when you’re claiming that refusing this kind of care is causing suicide? Do you not care that those preconditions might have already been there? Is that not a fact that you would want to look at before you automatically propose permanent physiological change as someone,’ Crenshaw said.
‘We are not the ones being uncompassionate. We are not the ones being cruel. We are the ones saying press pause. There’s an extreme trend going on, and we don’t have the science to back up its benefits. And you can’t argue with that, but please try,’ he added.