Transphobic former HHS official's claims about Dr. Rachel Levine simply aren't credible

Former HHS official Roger Severino (top photo) makes alleged claims about new and openly transgender  HHS official Rachel Levine (bottom photo). But the claims cannot be verified as truth, particularly when one remembers that during his tenure, Severino made several attempts to undermine transgender health via policy changes. Severino even misled the public to create a 'conscience rule.' The 'conscience rule' was then struck down by three court rulings.

As I said Wednesday, even though Dr. Rachel Levine was successfully confirmed as the Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services, conservatives and the religious right will do their utmost to undermine her.

From the Family Research Council:

 The Biden administration made history Wednesday, but not the kind that most Americans will celebrate. In a tight, near party-line vote, the Senate confirmed the president's transgender pick for deputy secretary of HHS, Rachel Levine -- whose idea of "health care" is sterilizing and mutilating young children.

Implied by Sen. Rand Paul during her hearing that Dr. Levine supports sex change surgeries for children, this claim has been proven as a lie. What's sadder is that FRC provided links in an attempt to prove the claim's accuracy and the links boiled down to a conference booklet which proved absolutely nothing.

It gets more hilarious. 

Supposedly FRC interviewed an eyewitness who claimed that Dr. Levine does advocate sex change surgeries for children. And who is that witness? Former HHS official Roger Severino.

For those who have not kept up with HHS drama and therefore are wondering why is Severino attempting to channel Alexis Colby on Dynasty during Blake Carrington's murder trial at the end of the first season, allow me to explain.

In 2017, Severino was appointed by former president Donald Trump as Director of the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Many in the LGBTQ community protested because he came from anti-LGBTQ right-wing groups. and we felt that his goal was to undermine our rights and health.

And that he did. Or at the very least, he tried:

 LGBTQ equality groups and several allies raised the alarm when he was picked due to his history of working against LGBTQ equality. And while at HHS, Severino did nothing to assuage their fears.  In 2018, The Advocate claimed that he was attempting to "erase trans people out of existence" by pushing a memo which would say that gender identity doesn't exist and that gender is set at birth and defined by genitalia. 

Severino was also responsible for an attempt to create a rule which would roll back protections for the trans community against discrimination through Obamacare, and  a "conscience rule" which said any healthcare worker could deny services to LGBTQ people based on "moral or religious" reasons. In November 2019, three different federal courts struck down the rule and one court found that HHS exaggerated a justification for the rule. Severino was pointed out in an NPR article to have contributed to that exaggeration. 

This is what Severino had to say to FRC about Dr. Levine:

During Roger's time at the agency where Levine is now second-in-command, he met the new deputy. Back then, he explains, Levine wasn't so coy about what he believed about young people. When the HHS team asked about minors and transgender treatment, "I heard it directly," Severino explained, "and the answer was: 'Yes, yes, minors should be given cross-sex hormones and surgery when they have gender dysphoria'..."

He even had the audacity to make this claim:

"The activism runs deep," he warns. "It was evasive to the point of being disingenuous, not to answer Senator Paul when asked directly when I knew what the answer was, because I've heard it when the shoe was on the other foot and those doctors wanted to keep the Obama transgender mandate in place. This is scary times when we're going to see this push, especially when it comes to minor children, 12 to 18, to have radical surgeries that will sterilize them. And you cannot turn back. And I'm afraid that's where HHS may be going if Levine gets confirmed."

There is no other way of putting this. Roger Severino is full of shit. Why should anyone believe this man? His entire tenure at HHS comprised of thinking of new ways to undermine LGBTQ,  particularly transgender health. He's also the same man who was caught lying in pursuit of changing HHS policy to endanger LGBTQ health.

The only thing we should take from this nonsense with FRC and Severino is the satisfaction of karma in seeing that Health and Human Services went from housing an undercover bigot like  Severino to being led in part by openly transgender Dr. Rachel Levine. 

That realization, my friends, is sweet.

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Dr. Rachel Levine makes history, becomes first openly transgender person confirmed by Senate

Just a few moments ago, Dr. Rachel Levine made history. 

By a vote of 52-48, Levine was confirmed as assistant secretary of Health and Human Services. She is the first openly transgender person to be confirmed by the Senate. She even had two Republican senators, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski,  join Democrats in voting for her.

Levine survived a brutal confirmation process which saw conservatives practically gang up to sink her nomination, including spreading vicious memes  and lies about her on Twitter and Facebook, disrespecting her during the confirmation hearing, and finally conjuring up some nonsense about her mother in a nursing home. This played heavily in the right-wing media, but rightfully got ignored in the mainstream press.

They even falsely claimed that she advocated sex change surgeries for children.

But none of it worked as Levine sailed through.

The road is not going to be easy for Dr. Levine because conservatives and the religious right are angry at her confirmation. And she will continue to be the subject of  many ugly lies and comments. But like the old saying goes, "no struggle, no progress."  Her confirmation is a victory for the transgender community, not to mention the concepts of fairness and equality. 

From The Associated Press:

Levine had been serving as Pennsylvania’s top health official since 2017, and emerged as the public face of the state’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. She is expected to oversee Health and Human Services offices and programs across the U.S. President Joe Biden cited Levine’s experience when he nominated her in January. Levine “will bring the steady leadership and essential expertise we need to get people through this pandemic — no matter their zip code, race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability,” Biden said.

Related posts:

Rand Paul made a fool of himself when questioning Dr. Rachel Levine. The Family Research Council tries to repair the embarrassment.  

 Rand Paul's attack on HHS nominee Rachel Levine exposes how the religious right needs anti-LGBTQ junk science

'Poll says 75 percent of Americans support LGBTQ protections' & other Wed midday news briefs

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The Guardian rightfully calls out the attack on transgender children by the GOP, gets the story right.

The Guardian just came out with a wonderful article about how the GOP are exploiting transgender children for political power. I'm of two minds about it. On one hand, it's easily the best article I've read thus far about the attacks on transgender children by the GOP and the religious right.  But on the other hand, it embarrasses me. On the risk of sounding xenophobic, it's a shame that a foreign press (The Guardian is a British newspaper) does a better job talking about an issue in this country than the American press.

With the slow death of print media, too many pundits and just about all of them doing very little work for large salaries and generous book deals, outside groups pushing talking points disguised as facts, not to mention  the right-wing propaganda factory known as Fox News and it's crew of slop artists, the American media model seems to be broken.

The Guardian is a good reminder that there are journalists who still exist to get the story accurate. There are so many good portions of the article, so I am just going to highlight a few. Feel free to read the entire thing and share it. 

1. “They are acting like we aren’t humans, that we don’t deserve the same things as them,” said Kris Wilka, a 13-year-old football player and trans boy in South Dakota, where lawmakers have passed legislation that would prohibit trans students from playing on the sports teams that correspond with their gender. 

 “Trans rights have been turned into a wedge issue,” said Jules Gill-Peterson, professor of gender, sexuality and women’s studies at the University of Pittsburgh, who has researched the history of trans children in the US. “The Republican party is hardly interested in defending women’s sports. This is a purely calculated political play,” Gill-Peterson said. “And it’s really easy to use children as a political football, because we don’t grant children the privilege to speak for themselves and defend their own interests.”

2. “They’re telling parents of cisgender children that you’re losing something by allowing transgender youth to play in sports,” said Alphonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), an LGBTQ+ rights group. “We’ve seen this playbook before – you’re losing something if you allow same-sex couples to marry, if you protect racial minorities in the workplace, if immigration laws are respected. It’s us v them.”

 But there is no research suggesting that trans girls have a competitive advantage. When the Associated Press recently contacted lawmakers behind the proposed bans, most couldn’t cite a single local example of a trans girl playing sports. Some pointed to a Connecticut case in which cisgender girls’ families sued, alleging that two trans female sprinters had an unfair advantage. 

 But two days after that lawsuit was filed, one of the cis girls beat her trans competitor in a state championship race, noted Dr Jack Turban, a child psychiatry fellow at Stanford . . . 

3.For the trans kids targeted by these bills, the consequences could be harmful to their wellbeing and in some cases deadly, advocates said. Trans youth already attempt suicide at a rate more than three times greater than their cisgender peers. 

 Even the introduction of the bills was damaging youths’ mental health, said Turban: “All around the country, these kids are hearing these messages that powerful politicians want to take away their rights.” Kris, the 13-year-old South Dakota boy, said football had transformed his life. After he joined his South Dakota school team last year, he made some of his closest friends and came to excel as a starting lineman. His middle school teammates and coaches didn’t care that Kris was trans, a sharp contrast from his previous school where administrators told him he couldn’t play on boys’ teams: “They treated me as any other kid on the team, and that’s what I wanted. I didn’t want to be the outcast. They gave me the position they thought I deserved.” 

 Now, Kris lives in fear that he could lose it all.  . . .

This is how it's done. Talking to the people involved, particularly the folks who would be most affected - in this case trans children. And don't allow yourself to be a sounding board for talking points. Impart accurate information and fill in the holes.

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Folks think they are being cute with legislation targeting LGBTQ folks in the above news briefs, but be forewarned. Y'all don't want any of this smoke. Neither attempt has a leg to stand on, but if you want to wreck your reputations with unapologetic bigotry, we are set to not only let you, but help you along the road.

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Small-Town Sandy Hosts a Public Standoff Over LGBTQ Rights—and the Proud Boys Resurface - Brooother!

LGBTQ students at Christian colleges face more harassment, survey finds - Christian colleges which probably have no probably taking LGBTQ tax dollars I bet.

How Fox News is contributing to the targeting of transgender Americans

 

 

Editor's note - I could only watch this video once and even then I couldn't finish it. So a huge trigger warning for folks, particularly transgender folks. This should not be happening.

It is not the custom of Fox News to host members of the transgender community or medical professionals with any expertise in transgender health care. But the network personalities and their guests have no problem engaging in all sorts of transphobic rhetoric as seen in the above video.

This goes beyond nasty when a widely watched "news"  network will repeatedly degrade and dehumanize transgender Americans without even giving them courtesy of defending themselves.

It's downright dangerous. It sends a false message to transgender men, women, and children that they are not deserving of love and respect, even from themselves. And even worse, it sends a message of allegiance and approval to transphobic actions, including violence. Last year, there was an ugly surge in transphobic crimes and this year doesn't promise to be any better with entities like Fox News and the conservative propaganda engine creating a false "war on women's sports" and a real war on transgender healthcare.

 If Fox News openly did this to African-Americans or people of the Jewish faith, the blowback would be justifiably enormous There needs to be an equally negative blowback in this case. Fox News isn't debating transgender issues. The network is deliberately targeting transgender people.

Related post - Fox News has aired 86 segments about trans people since President Biden took office