Welcome to Episode 6 of The Spectrum.

This was recorded on February 3rd, 2025.

In this episode, we will look at Trump's third Project 2025 transgender ban.

This one is in an executive order dated

January 28th, 2025, and is titled "Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation."

Its real title should be "Insuring

Transgender Children

Suffer." This disgusting executive order seeks to make treatment of transgender children impossible.

It is a vast overreach of executive power, and it is based entirely on lies.

First, it starts with the premise that any surgical or hormonal treatment is "maiming," and it makes the claim that "countless children soon regret that they have been mutilated."

There is only one way that these words make any sense, and that is if you have preconceived notions that this is the only possible outcome. It is based on the premise that gender issues are a psychological disorder and that treating it through physical means is always wrong. It is based on the idea that a child does not know his or her own identity. These are false premises.

The order claims to "end reliance on junk science," but the order itself is not based on any science at all, but obvious prejudice to being dressed up to make it sound like they are trying to protect the very children they are hurting. As one example, the Department of Health and Human Services is directed to publish a review of the best practices for promoting the health of transgender children. You can bet that there won't be one bit of actual science referenced in this review.

Instead, it will be Project 2025 propaganda dressed up to look vaguely like science.

It uses the threat of withholding federal funding to medical institutions that treat transgender children in a way that actually helps them. It threatens to use the Justice Department to take action against those who treat children. It threatens parents who love their children and want what is best for them. For a political party that claims to value parental rights so highly, this executive order seeks to deprive parents of the rights to take care of their own children.

There is no doubt that if they are successful in this, then they will next attempt to make treatment of adults impossible as well.

This goal, the goal of all these actions and those that will follow, is to attempt to make transgender people cease to exist in

America. Of course, transgender people will still be there, but officially the country will not admit to that. It will be official policy that there is only one way to be a man and only one way to be a woman, and any person who tries to go outside those rigid definitions will be subject to official censure and perhaps legal action. Certainly anyone trying to help them will be. Let's look at some of the fallout we can expect from this executive order if it is ultimately implemented as broadly as Trump hopes. Suicide rates among transgender children will rise.

Transgender children will suffer the effects of body changes that hurt their mental health. I based this on a 2024 survey by the

Trevor Project that showed 12% of LGBTQ+ young people attempted suicide in the past year, and 40% of transgender and non-binary young people considered suicide. Combine that with the fact that young people who reported living in accepting communities reported attempted suicide rates at less than half the rate of those who lived in communities that were not accepting. Also, 90% of LGBTQ+ young people reported their well-being was negatively impacted due to recent politics. Put all this together and it's clear that the people

Trump claims to be protecting do not feel protected, they feel persecuted. If Trump thinks he's protecting young people, why do the young people think they are being persecuted and not protected? That's easy.

It's because they're right. They are being persecuted. The Trump administration is ignoring the truth that these young people are telling them and making their lives a hell on earth.

Donald Trump will have the blood of young transgender and non-binary people on his hands.

These are lives that could have been saved and that we could have helped grow into happy, productive adults. Instead, he's going to make their lives miserable and many will end up taking their life because he's trying to create a world in which their truth is denied. The extraordinary effort Trump is making to make transgender people officially invisible is incredible.

According to a report published in 2022 by the UCLA Williams

Institute, about 0.6% of the

U.S. population identifies as transgender. It's about 1.6 million people. What may alarm the

Project 2025 people is that breaking this down by age groups, about 1.4% of youth aged 13 to 17 identified as transgender versus 0.5% of adults.

I'm not questioning these statistics, but statistics like this are challenging to properly collect and even more challenging to interpret. Why are more young people identifying as transgender compared to the older population?

There are many possible reasons. One is that the actual number hasn't actually changed, but more of them were receiving care and so numbers are now more accurate.

Maybe that the subject is more widely known about, so young people learn about it rather than just wondering why they feel differently than their peers. Until late 2024, the general trend had been for more societal acceptance, making it safer and easier to admit things that older adults still feel stigma about. Since gender is complex and interacts with many other aspects of our psychological makeup, some young people may question themselves and later realize that what they thought was a gender thing was something else. It's impossible to say which, or more likely how many of each of these account for the differences, and there are probably other possibilities that have not yet occurred to me. We should also note that the report does not include young children.

The youngest age of reporting is 13. This report estimates that about 1.6 million people over the age of 13 are transgender. While that's a large number of people, it's a relatively small part of the US population. All we can say about this is that it gives us an approximation about the size of the population we're dealing with. This was at a point where accommodation for transgender people was at an all-time high. You can expect those numbers to go down if there are even organizations capable of making the attempt to measure them during the next few years, because young people will be afraid to self-report. With Trump's push to make the words "transgender, non-binary, and gender identity" disappear from any official government document or website, and now from any organization that gets money from the government, it will be even harder for transgender people to find help. Let me be perfectly clear about my position as an adult concerned about the welfare of children.

We know that gender identity in all humans forms at a very young age, typically by about four years old. We also know that gender identity does not change.

Non-binary identities are perhaps more complex, but the non-binaryness of identity is itself probably not going to change. We know that if a young person expresses that their gender identity does not match with their physical sex, then getting them treatment that prevents them from experiencing the wrong puberty will save them from a great deal of emotional trauma.

Doing this will make the person's transition easier. They will fit into society more seamlessly, and they are much more likely to grow into happy, healthy adults.

Yes, it is true that given our current state of medical science, they will be giving up the ability to have children themselves.

However, if they understand the pros and cons of their medical treatment, then they can make an informed decision. Ultimately, this is their body, and it's their right to make that decision with the help of parents and trained medical professionals. The government has no right to control the bodily autonomy of these people. However,

Republicans don't seem to think bodily autonomy is anything that any person should have these days.

Gender and the interactions with other aspects of personality and identity are very complex. Sometimes people may mistake a concern over social roles with a gender issue. There are cases of young women wanting to access the opportunities that were available to young men, thinking that they wanted to be boys, but when the issue was examined more closely, what they really wanted were the options that were available to the boys, and they didn't actually have the gender identity of a boy. These kinds of situations still happen today, and this is why proper medical evaluation is needed. Because this treatment is life-altering, we need to be as sure as possible that the person, whether a minor or an adult, is making the right decision. However, because the treatment is so much more effective for young people, we must not deny them the option. Instead, we need to get them the help needed to understand what the right decision is. Trump's executive order will instead deny the truth that these children speak and force them to endure physical changes they do not want.

It will create psychological trauma. It will lead to deaths that could have been prevented, and it does this by pretending to protect these children. It is disgraceful and it is disgusting. While there are risks with any medical treatment, the risks of puberty blockers is low, especially when compared with the risk of leaving the child untreated.

If the young person, in consultation with parents and medical professionals, realize that this is not the right path, then stopping the puberty blockers will allow puberty to occur. I urge every professional and institution that works with these children to find every legal way to resist this illegal and reprehensible executive order. I urge anyone who cares about the welfare of our children and a parent's right to make the decisions they think are best for their children to reach out to elected officials at every level of government from local to national and let them know how un-American this executive order and any actions inspired by it are. There are links in the show notes to the executive order, the survey and study referenced, as well as FAQs on puberty blockers. It is important to understand that puberty blockers can be used for other reasons such as treating precocious puberty. Trump's executive order may make it more difficult or impossible for these children to receive treatment. If you have a story about

LGBT life experience you would like to share, please reach out to me at spectrumpodcasthost at gmail.com. If you know a transgender or non-binary young person, do your part to let them know they are loved for who they are and that you support their decisions.

Take care and stay safe.