Madeleine Kearns

In 2016, the Obama-Biden administration concluded that “the quality and strength of evidence” for medicalized gender transition was “low” and insufficient “to determine whether gender reassignment surgery improves health outcomes for Medicare beneficiaries with gender dysphoria.” Six years on, such skepticism has evaporated. In June, the Biden-Harris administration issued an executive order directing the departments of health and education to “promote expanded access to gender-affirming care.” What changed? Not the evidence, only the politics. At a special Pride Month ceremony for LGBT activists at the White House, the president promised to use the “full force of the federal government” in implementing their policy agenda, from education to healthcare.

Lisa Littman, a doctor and researcher, recently surveyed ‘detransitioners’ — people who thought they were transgender then changed their minds. The majority, 55 per cent, ‘felt that they did not receive an adequate evaluation from a doctor or mental health professional before starting transition.’ Sadly, it seems, their identity issues were more complicated than simply being trans. Many of these individuals are now living with the consequences of medical treatments that failed to help their gender issues and may have caused permanent physical and psychological damage.

Young people are now more likely to consume marijuana than to smoke tobacco. The social acceptance of tobacco is falling, just as the popularity of weed is getting higher. A 2019 Gallup poll found that 12 percent of US adults (and 22 percent of those aged 18 to 29) said they smoke marijuana. It won’t be too long, I predict, before we look back in horror at the widespread acceptance of cannabis use. It’s easy to forget that anti-tobacco researchers had to plod on at tortoise pace for years before they were able to prove what they had long suspected to be true (and what we all now take for granted): the causal link between smoking and lung cancer. Big Tobacco was so rich and powerful that its lobbying suppressed the true dangers.

Great Falls, Virginia Former senator Rick Santorum is mopping the floor. Mrs Santorum is stamping wax thistles onto the backs of envelopes. Four of the six adult Santorum children (plus one spouse) are scattered about the house, ‘working from home’. Bridget, the live-in helper, is doting on the youngest, little Bella, who has the genetic condition Trisomy 18. I’m in the paradisal blue room, behind a stack of books, typing away with my usual four fingers. Before the plague, family members would introduce me to friends as ‘Elizabeth’s Scottish friend whom she met in Uganda, who writes for National Review’. But when my sister got engaged to one of Elizabeth’s brothers, I became ‘Daniel’s fiancée’s sister’.