Our Douglas Andrews wrote earlier this week about the dangers of the leftist manipulation of language as a form of power that separates the wheat from the chaff. One of the biggest ways that this linguistic gymnastics has been employed throughout the pandemic is the claim of “misinformation” and “disinformation.” To leftists, these once important words with specific implications for national security have come to mean just about nothing because they merely mean anything they don’t like and wish to silence.

Well, last month, Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel (Richard) Levine — the first “woman” to achieve the U.S. Public Health Services Commissioned Corps’ (USPHS) honorary title of four-star admiral — had a new strategy for silencing inconvenient truths that he happens not to like. In an interview with NPR, he said, “There is no argument among medical professionals — pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, etc. — about the value and the importance of gender-affirming care.” This is, as the Washington Examiner’s editorial board explains, “a fallacy called ‘proof by assertion’ — as if the forceful repetition of a controversial statement can make it true.”

Levine, by insisting on the fantasy that all physicians et al. agree that gender-affirming care is the right way to proceed with people struggling with identity, ignores the thousands of physicians who have been fighting this harmful practice from the get-go. Doctors such as Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo, who tore apart the Department of Health and Human Services’s (HHS) “guidance” on gender-affirming care for children just last month; Idaho endocrinologist Dr. William Malone and his colleagues, who have been fighting against the unscientific biases of HHS and the Endocrine Society (ES), both of which are advocating puberty blockers; and child psychiatrist Dr. Miriam Grossman, who has been on the front lines navigating this social contagion that is seriously harming the children under its sway.

Dr. Grossman issued a statement of her own in response to Levine’s delusional stance, saying: “There is a complete lack of high-quality, long-term data that these medical interventions actually help, and it is very disturbing to me as a fellow physician that Dr. Levine is arrogantly announcing that all pediatricians, all physicians and therapists agree with her position.”

These are the voices of doctors just in the United States. In Europe, physicians in several countries are shying away from gender-affirming care. In Dr. Ladapo’s point-by-point rebuttal of the HHS gender dysphoria guidelines, he points out: “A small study on 44 patients in the United Kingdom failed to show any psychological benefit to puberty blockers on children aged 12 to 15. … In May of 2021, Sweden’s Karolinska Institute suspended the use of puberty blockers for those under the age of 18 due to the potentially irreversible consequences such as cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, infertility, increased cancer risk, and thrombosis. … A recent Finnish study … reported on the effect of initiating cross-sex hormone therapy on functioning, progression of developmental tasks of adolescence, and psychiatric symptoms. This study found that during cross-sex hormone therapy, problems in these areas did not decrease.”

Levine, of course, has all the reason in the world to stifle new studies showing just how dangerous gender-affirming care is in general, but especially to children. He is, after all, “transgender,” and justifying his lifestyle choices takes precedence over the lives harmed or the truth that men are men and women are women — at least that’s what his words and actions demonstrate.

As a woman, it is truly insulting for these men to pretend to even understand what being a woman is. By their own woke logic, transgenderism could be considered a form of cultural appropriation, though it can’t even be considered quite that because men have no concept of what it is to be a women, just as no woman has any inkling of what it’s like to be a man. So they build a fantasy on what they think being a man or a woman is really like. This is amply demonstrated by those who dress in drag. Their stage character is usually a hyper-sexualized facsimile of a women. This is not a surprise, though. As conservative podcaster Matt Walsh has famously pointed out, they can’t even define what a woman is.

Political analyst Kylee Zemple sums up Levine’s incompetence perfectly: “The bottom line is that anyone who claims to be a champion of medicine or science but is quick to shut down dissenting theories and flag new evidence as ‘disinformation’ is no scientist at all.” Levine is delusional, that much is evident. His blatant lies on this subject are laying the groundwork for much suffering. Thankfully, there are plenty of ethical medical professionals out there willing to put their jobs and reputations on the line to speak out against gender-affirming care for children. Enough of us are listening that censorship will not be as effective as Levine and Biden’s Ministry of Truth hope.