A Supreme Court Case Shows This Debate Isn’t Going Away
This past week a ruling by the Supreme Court in Mirabelli v. Bonta highlights just how deeply gender ideology is embedded in American culture. The case arose after California policies allowed schools to facilitate a student’s gender transition while keeping parents in the dark. Teachers and parents challenged the policy in court, arguing it violated both religious liberty and parental rights.
After years of litigation—moving through federal courts and all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States—the Court ruled 6–3 that such “gender secrecy” policies likely violate the Constitution and restored an injunction blocking them statewide. The Court emphasized that parents, not the state, are the primary guardians responsible for decisions about their children’s upbringing and mental health.
One thing is clear: issues surrounding gender ideology are now deeply woven into schools, law, and public policy. The fact that disputes like this must be settled at the Supreme Court level shows that the debate will not disappear simply because one political party wins an election or two. This cultural conflict is likely to remain with us for years to come.
Speaking before the United Nations Human Rights Council this week, Chris Elston (Billboard Chris) argues that so-called gender-affirming care for minors is causing irreversible harm to children. He testifies truthfully that treatments such as puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries interfere with normal development, sterilize young people, and remove healthy body parts.
These practices are driven by ideological activism rather than sound science, and he describes them as an unregulated experiment on vulnerable children—many of whom have autism, mental health issues, or trauma histories. The compassionate approach is to affirm children as they are without medical intervention.
Elston also warns that government authorities are increasingly overriding parental rights in transition-related disputes and calls on United Nations member states to act to protect children’s right to grow up with their bodies intact.
A recent Atlantic essay, “In Defense of Effeminate Boys,” argues that boys who display feminine traits should simply be accepted as a natural variation of the male sex—not pushed into rigid stereotypes or steered toward gender transition.
The author reports sharply divided reactions: harsh criticism from activist circles, but quiet support from many readers—including some inside LGBT organizations who privately share his concerns but feel unable to speak publicly.
At the center of the debate is what the author calls one of the most dangerous and consequential ideas in modern history: the belief that we must “let the kids lead.” In this view, a child’s declared gender identity overrides biological sex, and parents are expected to affirm it—even if it leads to medical interventions.
The deeper problem, he suggests, is that this reverses the role of parents. Instead of helping children understand reality, many adults now feel obligated to let children define it.
In a striking and carefully argued Newsweek editorial, bioethicist Moti Gorin and psychiatrist Kathleen McDeavitt urge liberals to reconsider their assumptions about pediatric “gender-affirming” medical care. Their appeal is unusual not because it is partisan, but because it is not: both authors identify as liberals and were contributors to the recent review issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services titled Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices.
The authors begin by acknowledging widespread distrust of HHS—especially among progressives after years of controversy surrounding public health institutions. But they argue that skepticism should not excuse disengagement, particularly when the evidence concerns vulnerable children.
Their central claim is straightforward: many organizations and professionals trusted by the political left have embraced a medical model for pediatric gender distress that is not supported by strong scientific evidence.
A Fragile Foundation for a Sweeping Medical Practice
The editorial traces the origins of today’s “gender-affirming” approach to a small and methodologically weak Dutch study involving just 70 adolescents. Most of the participants were same-sex attracted, and all who proceeded to medical transition were rendered sterile. One patient died from surgical complications, others were excluded from analysis due to adverse outcomes, and some were lost to follow-up. Yet despite these limitations, the study became the foundation for a sweeping international medical practice involving puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and sometimes surgery.
Gorin and McDeavitt argue that serious ethical concerns have since been minimized or obscured. They note reports of unfavorable findings being buried, including completed suicides among minors placed on hormones. They also highlight the role of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which removed age limits for medical interventions under political pressure while failing to warn patients about risks such as permanent sexual dysfunction.
The HHS review, the authors explain, reached conclusions that should alarm anyone committed to justice and evidence-based medicine. The risks documented in the review include infertility, impaired sexual function, decreased bone density, delayed cognitive development, and irreversible surgical consequences.
Progressive Countries Lead the Retreat
Importantly, the authors point out that this reassessment is not driven by conservative politics. Some of the first countries to restrict pediatric medical transition were progressive social democracies, including Finland and Sweden, followed by the United Kingdom. These nations conducted systematic reviews and concluded that the benefits of medical transition for minors were unproven and outweighed by the harms.
The editorial closes by proposing an alternative: non-medical therapeutic support that helps young people manage distress without rushing them into irreversible interventions. Most adolescents, the authors note, will see gender-related discomfort resolve over time. While the issue remains politically polarized, polling shows that a majority of Democratic voters already oppose pediatric medical transition.
Gorin and McDeavitt’s plea is simple but bracing: liberals should read the HHS review for themselves (link above). Doing so, they argue, is not a betrayal of progressive values—but an affirmation of them.
If you walked into a hospital and asked, “What is medicine for?”—most people would offer some version of the same answer: to heal what’s broken.
But what if medicine stopped healing and started interrupting?
What if a medical intervention didn’t restore nature, but halted it?
And what if the patients were children?
That’s the debate surroundingKing’s College London’s new trial on puberty blockers for 226 kids under sixteen—a trial whose central question is not whether puberty blockers should be used, but when they should be administered.
And that, right there, reveals everything.
Today, we need to talk about why puberty blockers are not just risky, not just poorly evidenced, and not just morally incoherent—but why they are, in the deepest Christian sense, bad medicine.
1. Medicine that heals—which restores a natural process that’s gone wrong.
2. Medicine that disrupts—which interrupts a natural process on purpose.
Restorative medicine is Christian through and through. Jesus heals. The Church heals. Doctors heal. And we are thankful for all of that.
But the trial at King’s College isn’t trying to heal anything.
Puberty isn’t a disease. It’s not a malfunction. It’s not an affliction. It’s the God-designed process by which a child becomes an adult in body, mind, and soul.
Harrington notes that puberty is a “complex set of naturally occurring changes intrinsic to the human genetic template.” But the King’s College trial doesn’t ask whether halting these changes is moral or wise. It only asks:
Should we delay puberty blockers—or give them earlier?
And there’s the problem: the worldview underneath the trial has already decided that human nature is raw material—neutral matter that exists for us to re-engineer.
But Christians don’t believe in engineering the human being.
We believe in receiving what God has made.
NOTICERS VS. ENGINEERS
Harrington describes two kinds of people in this debate: Noticers and Engineers.
Engineers
Engineers look at the world the way Francis Bacon did in the 17th century:
The world is stuff. Stuff can be rearranged. And the job of science is to overpower nature “for the relief of man’s estate.”
There’s no form.
No telos. (The Greek word for ‘goal’ or ‘end’.)
No given meaning.
Puberty, therefore, isn’t a stage of creaturely development—it’s an expressive option. Something you can modify according to your inner sense of self.
Noticers
Noticers, on the other hand, see the world as Christians have always seen it:
Creation has shape.
Creation has direction.
Creation has purpose.
This is Aristotelian1 Based on the teachings of Greek philosopher Aristotle. It’s Thomistic2Based on the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas. It’s also John Paul II. (Saint John Paul the Second.3Pope from 1978 to 2005)
It’s Genesis. It’s Jesus. (Gen 1:26-284Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” ; Matt 19:4-65[Jesus] answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”)
Our bodies are not blank canvases. They are icons—physical revelations of invisible truths. Male and female are not costumes. They are modes of being human.
And as Harrington puts it, even in the most secular scientific contexts:
“Form and ends (telos) never really go away.”
You can deny nature only so long before it comes roaring back.
THE LIMITS OF CONSENT
One of the most powerful parts of Harrington’s argument is her explanation of how our culture replaced metaphysical limits with the single moral requirement of consent.
After the horrors of the 20th century—eugenics, forced sterilizations, and the experiments of Josef Mengele6Josef Mengele was a Nazi physician notorious for brutal experiments at Auschwitz—Western ethics focused intensely on coercion. The logic became:
As long as a subject consents, the action is morally permissible.
But this missed the deeper problem.
The Nazi doctors weren’t evil only because they coerced people. They were evil because they treated human beings as manipulable material—as lab rats.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth:
If your worldview treats the human body as raw material to be reshaped for psychological comfort, you’ve accepted the same metaphysical mistake that drove eugenics.
Harrington writes:
“Never mind consent, it’s an offense not just against that child, but against reality itself: an atrocity only distinguishable from those of Dr Mengele in its having manipulated the victims into seeing it as ‘medicine.’”
That sentence should shake us.
It isn’t hyperbole.
It’s moral clarity:
If children are persuaded to view the disruption of healthy development as “care,” the wrongness isn’t lessened. It is compounded.
Children cannot meaningfully consent to the permanent interruption of their own maturation. You can’t sign a permission slip for your future self.
Consent cannot sanctify what violates nature.
THE CASS REVIEW: WHAT IT REVEALED (AND WHERE IT STOPPED SHORT)
In 2024, the Cass Review shook the UK medical establishment by revealing that the evidence base for “gender-affirming care” in minors was astonishingly weak.
It found:
• No robust evidence that puberty blockers improve mental health.
• No convincing data that blockers reduce suicide risk. (The primary concern)
• Significant concerns about bone density, cognitive development, and fertility.
• A clinical model driven more by ideology than by science.
As a result, puberty blockers were banned in the UK—but only until better data could be gathered. And there’s the rub!
King’s College London intends to gather that data.
But here’s the problem:
Cass framed the issue as uncertainty. Christian anthropology frames it as impossibility.
You don’t need “more data” to know that interrupting a child’s sexual maturation is a violation of creaturely design.
The Cass Review was a step in the right direction, but from a Christian point of view, it didn’t go nearly far enough. It never asked the foundational question:
Should we be medicalizing gender distress at all—especially through interventions that halt the very process by which a child becomes an adult?
THE METAPHYSICAL FAULT LINE
Here is Harrington’s most important passage, which I’ll read in full:
“The nub of the King’s College debate, then, isn’t over trial design, or consent. It’s a metaphysical disagreement so deep as to be irreconcilable. Is there any difference between using a drug to restore normal health in a child with cancer or premature puberty, and using the same drug to induce abnormal puberty-less-ness in a child who simply believes themselves to be the opposite sex?”
Mary Harrington
That is a razor-sharp question.
Now to the Engineer, perhaps, there is no difference.
To the Christian—noticer, realist, creature—the difference is everything.
A cancer drug given to correct disease is medicine. A cancer drug given to abolish normal development is harm.
And Harrington continues:
“The engineers… say it’s all just ‘healthcare.’ But noticers of human nature respond: no, puberty is not an illness… It’s an aspect of our form and telos.”
Form. Telos. Purpose.
Puberty is the God-given road by which childhood becomes adulthood.
It is ordered toward future vocation, future parenthood, future communion between male and female.
To interrupt it is not compassion.
It is, quite literally, a denial of human nature.
WHAT THE CHURCH MUST SAY
So what do we do with all of this?
First: We tell the truth.
We tell the truth about the body. We tell the truth about creation. We tell the truth about the limits of consent. We tell the truth about the dangers of engineering the human being.
Second: We care for hurting children with compassion—not affirmation of falsehood. A child in distress deserves love, stability, patient listening, and the promise that their body is not their enemy.
Third: We reject the false choice between cruelty and “affirmation.”
There is a third way: truthful love.
Love that does not lie about creation. Love that does not cooperate with gender ideology. Love that sees the child not as an identity project, but as a creature of God.
Finally: We remember that the body is an icon, a revelation.
Your body is not a problem to solve.
It is a gift to receive.
It is a form that speaks.
It is a telos that unfolds.
Puberty is one of God’s good words spoken into creation.
It is not ours to erase.
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Psalm 139 says,
“You knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”
To receive the body is to receive God’s work.
To reject the body is to reject His wisdom.
And to interrupt a child’s development is to tamper with what God Himself has ordained.
May the Church be a place of clarity, courage, and compassion—a place where children are protected, where truth is spoken, and where the human body is honored as the handiwork of the Creator.
Thanks for listening.
If this episode was helpful, please share it—and join me next time as we continue forming a distinctly Christian imagination for the world God made.
