June 26: White House Pushed Gender Surgeries for Children

SCOTUS rules with Biden in Murthy v. Missouri; CIA director knew of Hunter Biden letter; Is AfGJ lying to the IRS?

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The Big Story

The Biden administration directly pressured the World Professional Association for Transgender Health to drop its recommended age restrictions for sterilizing hormone treatments and surgeries for youth suffering from gender dysphoria, according to internal WPATH documents and emails included in an expert report in a lawsuit that was unsealed earlier this week.

The report, authored by expert witness Dr. James Cantor in Boe v. Marshall, shows that Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services Adm. Rachel Levine, who is transgender, pressed WPATH to remove the age restriction while drafting its widely influential 2022 Standards of Care 8 (SOC8), a clinical guideline that determines which “gender-affirming care” treatments are covered by insurers and serves as an industry-wide best-practices guide that insulates medical providers from malpractice lawsuits. In the original draft of SOC8, WPATH had recommended a minimum age of 14 for cross-sex hormones; 15 for double mastectomies (breast removal); 16 for breast augmentation and facial surgery; 17 for hysterectomy (removal of the uterus), vaginoplasty (removal of male genitalia to create an artificial vagina), and testicle removal; and 18 for phalloplasty (creation of an artificial penis). 

Levine, however, who was already pressuring WPATH to accelerate the release of the SOC8 in order to “ensure [its] integration in the U.S. health policies of the Biden government,” took issue with the suggestion that 14 might be too young for breast removal. One internal WPATH email cited in Cantor’s report and reproduced on Jesse Singal’s Substack describes a meeting between a WPATH member and a Levine staffer (emphasis added): 

Sarah Boateng, who is Adm. Levine’s chief of staff [said the] biggest concern is the section below in the Adolescent Chapter that lists specific minimum ages for treatment, she is confident, based on the rhetoric she is hearing in DC, and from what we have already seen, that these specific listings of ages, under 18, will result in devastating legislation for trans care. She wonders if the specific ages can be taken out and perhaps an adjunct document could be created that is published or distributed in a way that is less visible than the SOC8, is the way to go. 

Another email describes direct feedback from Levine (emphasis added):

The issue of ages and treatment has been quite controversial (mainly for surgery) and it has come up again. We sent the document to Admiral Levine. … She like [sic] the SOC-8 very much but she was very concerned that having ages (mainly for surgery) will affect access to health care for trans youth and maybe adults too. Apparently the situation in the USA is terrible and she and the Biden administration worried that having ages in the document will make matters worse. She asked us to remove them. We have the WPATH executive committee in this meeting and we explained to her that we could not just remove them at this stage. 

Despite telling Levine that “we could not just remove [the age restrictions] at this stage,” WPATH did just that. In violation of its internal processes and against the objections of some of its members, who expressed confusion as to how something as important as the age restriction could be eliminated “this late in the game,” WPATH removed the age restrictions that had been present in the draft document. WPATH members then fabricated an explanation of the change for public consumption, telling journalists that the age restrictions were removed to put “the emphasis back on individualized patient care.” 

This push from the White House, of course, came around the same time that medical establishments in countries such as Australia, Finland, France, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom were urging greater caution in invasive medical treatments for gender-distressed young people, given the low quality of evidence in favor of those treatments and the high risk of life-altering complications—as well as, we might add, the manifest insanity of cutting healthy body parts off of children to treat mental distress. 

Biden came into office promising to “listen to the scientists.” What that means in practice, apparently, is browbeating the scientists behind the scenes into saying only what the administration wants them to. 

Read Singal’s writeup here. 

And read Cantor’s full report here.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Liberal Jews deluded themselves about anti-Zionism, Hussein Aboubakr Mansour argues, and as a result the liberal Jewish establishment is disposable—both to Jews and those who hate them

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The Rest

→The Supreme Court sided with the Biden administration’s efforts to censor online speech by coercing social media companies on Wednesday, ruling 6-3 that the plaintiffs in Murthy v. Missouri—two states and five social media users who claimed to be victims of government-directed censorship—lacked standing to sue. By ruling on standing—effectively arguing that the injuries suffered by the plaintiffs were merely “hypothetical” and not traceable to government action—the court avoided a ruling on the merits of the case, which had produced, through discovery, a voluminous record of the Biden White House’s attempts to coerce and cajole tech platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to suppress various forms of “misinformation” related to COVID-19, including stories that later turned out to be true. Our sympathies lie with Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote in his dissent that by refusing to rule on the merits of the case, the court “permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what people say, think, and hear.”

→Speaking of listening to the scientists … 16 Nobel Prize-winning economists published an open letter on Tuesday warning that a second Trump term would “reignite inflation” and have a “destabilizing effect on the U.S.’s domestic economy.” How to explain the timing? Well, the first presidential debate is on Tuesday, and voters, despite the best efforts of the Economic Speakers Bureau (see yesterday’s Big Story), seem unenthusiastic about the incumbent. A Wednesday poll from Quinnipiac showed Trump putting up Robert Mugabe numbers among white men, polling dead even with Biden among white women, and winning 41% of the Hispanic and 19% of the Black vote:

→Weeks before the 2020 election, 51 former intelligence officials, including three former CIA directors, published, at Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s request, a statement falsely insinuating that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian disinformation operation. On Tuesday, a joint staff report from the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government revealed that then Acting CIA Director Gina Haspel and other senior CIA officials were aware of the letter prior to its publication—and that some of the “former” intelligence officials, including letter author and former CIA Acting Director Michael Morell, were on active contracts with the agency at the time. The drafters of the letter, the report notes, long maintained that the CIA had no role in approving the statement, but internal documents obtained by the committee reveal that the Prepublication Classification Review Board (PCRB), the office responsible for reviewing publications by current and former intelligence officials, flagged the letter to the CIA’s chief operating officer and that Haspel would have had to personally review the letter, per policies she had implemented.

The report also reveals that some CIA employees raised concerns at the time—about the political nature of the letter, about the status of some of the signatories (such as Morell) as active agency contractors, and about the fact that some of the signatories were working for the Biden campaign. The “statement,” the report concludes, “bears all the hallmarks of an intelligence community influence operation” run against the American public to influence the 2020 election.

In an email to The Scroll, former intelligence analyst Peter Theroux wrote of the new revelations: 

The staff report is 100% spot-on. The 51 weasels’ letter indeed bears all the hallmarks of a black op playing dirty pool to influence a domestic U.S. election. This is the kind of made-in-Hollywood Bad CIA stuff that clean CIA officers have spent decades telling junior hires that’s illegal and we never, ever do it, etc., etc., etc. But these sons of bitches did it. It is unprecedented and a foul scandal.

Here is the thing about the PCRB—it is toothless. They are nice people who apply the rules to the work submitted to them, and they return it to you saying OK as is, or please see requested revisions/redactions. Former CIA folks without clearances are merely required not to publish classified information. Formers (like me, like Morell, and others) who still hold Top Secret clearances are held to the higher standard of current, full-time, overt employees and must be non-partisan, may not undermine U.S. policies or those of our allies, and so on. But there is no enforcement. The PCRB asks that you publish your draft with their requested revisions and to resubmit it if you add significant substance to it. You can do as you please. You will never hear from them or the lawyers. 

Of course, Gina Haspell, if she saw the work of the 51, should have picked up the phone (knowing, along with the FBI, that the laptop was entirely Hunter’s) and told Morell he was a lunatic who was going to permanently damage the Agency’s reputation. Who knows what she did. But Morell, Brennan, Nakhleh, and most of the 51 are dishonest, partisan, self-regarding schmucks and hacks who would not have listened.

→The Alliance for Global Justice, the nonprofit that has been banned from PayPal and Stripe for fiscally sponsoring a front group for the international terrorist organization the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, may also have been violating IRS rules by failing to report lobbying, Gabe Kaminsky reports at the Washington Examiner. The problem appears to be with another AfGJ fiscal sponsorship called the Colorado Freedom Fund, a progressive “criminal justice initiative” whose director, Elisabeth Epps, also serves as a Colorado state lawmaker. Under Epps’ leadership, the CFF has lobbied the Colorado statehouse, including on legislation that Epps has sponsored. That creates a conflict of interest for Epps, but it could also mean tax problems for AfGJ, which has told the IRS in recent years that it doesn’t engage in lobbying—even though the CFF, as a fiscal sponsorship of AfGJ, is legally part of AfGJ. 

In other AfGJ news, the group’s terrorist fiscal sponsorship, Samidoun—which was recently banned from YouTube and whose leader, Charlotte Kates, is barred from entering the European Union—announced on X on Tuesday that it will be hosting a July 29 webinar with Hamas Politburo member Ghazi Hamad, who memorably announced that Hamas would repeat the Oct 7. attacks forever until Israel was removed from the lands of the “Arab and Islamic nation.”

Read more here. 

→Congressman Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) became the first member of the progressive “Squad” to lose his seat, dropping Tuesday’s Democratic primary to challenger George Latimer by 17 points, according to exit polls. The headline—in the progressive press, at least—was the $16 million spent by The American Israel Public Affairs Committee to oust Bowman, but Bowman constituents quoted in The New York Times suggest the reasons for the congressman’s underperformance may have been more prosaic. Just last week, Bowman “appeared on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, rapped with Cash Cobain [apparently a rapper—TS], and rallied with Ms. [Alexandria Ocasio-]Cortez and Mr. [Bernie] Sanders,” according to the Times. What he did not do was connect with his constituents. According to Greenburgh, New York, town supervisor Paul Feiner, “I could see Mr. Latimer five times a week. I’ve only seen Bowman maybe three or four times since he’s been a congressmember.”

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Fran Lebowitz Wasn’t Kidding, by Blake Smith

The avant-garde Jewish lesbian essayist was a forerunner of petty 1990s observational comedy. But she is also something deeper.

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Liberal Jews Deluded Themselves on Palestine

The antisemitism of the Palestinian cause is not a bug; it’s a feature of the new politics in America

By Hussein Aboubakr Mansour

Last January, members of the radical anti-Israel campus group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) filmed a video marking the end of their suspension from Rutgers University. At first look, the video strikes a dissonant chord: The visual aesthetic is a throwback to the Palestinian fedayeen and hijackers reading a communique after an operation. Yet the inflections and cadences, despite a detectable but faint accent, were jarringly American Gen Z.

Historically, the American Jewish establishment has portrayed SJP and its ilk as a foreign phenomenon, an import from the Middle East, fueled by Arab financing, radical Arab academics, and the influx of radical Arab and Muslim students—a form of jihad, but with laptops and lattes. In contrast, a December profile of the group in The New Yorker, the Time magazine of progressive Ivy League graduates, presented a snapshot of a prototypical intersectional movement. SJP students and professors, some of them Jewish, were portrayed as embattled social justice prophets persevering in the face of oppression by a corrupt establishment, and the unreasoning hysteria of pro-Israel activists. The Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt was briefly quoted as making allegations that SJP provided and received funds from terrorist organizations—accusations which The New Yorker author brushed aside as arbitrary and without merit.

The heroic-cartoonish slant of the essay aside, the author did capture a central fact about pro-Palestinian activism, including that which endorses Islamist genocidal movements, which many American Jews are still too quick to deny: Instead of being a marginal cause supported and funded by foreign elements, anti-Zionism is in fact the flagship foreign policy cause of the international left and the academic vanguard of progressive activism. A cause that was once regarded as fundamentally foreign is now mainstream across blue American cities and liberal elite institutions.

Whether wearing a hijab or a Star of David, SJP anti-Israel activists are not simply freaks who demonstrate in favor of Hamas. They are mainstream products of the monoculture of the academic left. They are similar, indeed identical, to the social justice, Black Lives Matter, climate, gender, decolonizing, and woke activists who have been wreaking havoc on the U.S. and tearing apart our institutions for years. The synthesis of causes, habits, mores, and aesthetics of the Middle East and of radical Western ideas has become part of the American elite vernacular.

This vanguard of American progressivism harmoniously merges Marxism, intersectionality, Third Worldism, liberalism, Muslim identity, grassroots activism, and other elements of leftism in a way that is reminiscent of the stock rhetoric of the vanguard left in the 1960s and ’70s. But whereas in the ’60s and ’70s, radical groups that espoused the Palestinian cause as part of a movement of international solidarity with Third World “liberation struggles” were generally outside the mainstream, and not under the umbrella of a major political party, the opposite is now the case.

Examples in The New Yorker essay included Jannatul Nila, a senior at CUNY’s Hunter College who organized a rally to protest Israel's response to Hamas’ terrorism. The students’ chants and slogans reflect a blend of Islamic, progressive, and theistic Marxist symbols, underscoring their alignment with broader progressive and intersectional causes. After chanting “Allahu akbar” and “Free Palestine,” they also shouted, “We are the students of Frantz Fanon” and “We are the students of Edward Said,” the two icons of decolonization and the seminal intellectual figures of postcolonial studies. While it is difficult to imagine anyone outside of academic hothouse environments being moved by such slogans, they in fact illustrate the centrality of the new academic politics within the larger political discourse, in which Third World academics have become aspirational symbols.

In perhaps the most telling part of the SJP profile, a member of the group’s national steering committee, Carrie Zaremba, explained that “the idea is to appeal to people who know nothing.” After noting how these know-nothings are fed the updated version of old talking points, Zaremba points out that many join the movement because “they’re looking for a leftist organizing space.” The passage deserves to be quoted at some length:

Chapters start “small, with more tangible, visible elements of the Palestinian struggle,” and link those to prominent historical episodes elsewhere, such as apartheid in South Africa or the oppression of Native Americans in the U.S. “We go from apartheid to understanding what settler colonialism means. And then, from settler colonialism, we move to imperialism. And then, for example, what does Marxism have to do with Palestine?” After just one year of involvement with S.J.P., he said, “I really had a pretty solid grasp of what Palestinian liberation meant, and how interconnected it was to all the other struggles we see on the streets.”

The issue, then, is as much sociological as it is ideological. For contemporary college students, the Israel-Palestine issue is not a separate foreign policy issue referring to the struggles of people in a small spit of sand in the Middle East. It is a domestic issue of social justice that fits within a unitary and indivisible framework of global justice concerns and decolonization—on a par with BLM, the gender revolution, and climate justice. In fact, all of these separate slogans and causes are in a very real sense referring to the same thing, at least in the minds of the people who chant them. This is how intersectionality works.

The evolution in perception that is referred to by the term “intersectionality” signifies a more profound trend within American society and institutions. Leftist endorsement of groups like SJP as vanguards of social justice and progressive dogmas more broadly is not an exception. It is in line with support of anti-humanistic groups like BLM—which was until quite recently held to be de rigueur by much of the Jewish liberal establishment. Even among students from Muslim and Arab backgrounds, this intellectual shaping, predominately under the tutelage of the American academic community, has largely sidelined Islamist or Arabist ideologies.

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For years, opponents of movements like SJP or the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), whether from Zionist circles or the world of anti-Islamist activism, have emphasized these groups’ reliance on Middle Eastern and Islamic ideologies, finances, and personnel. These critics argue that the adoption of Western progressive terminology by these groups is a strategic ploy designed to manipulate the well-intentioned but naive beliefs of misguided “useful idiots.” The anti-Israel zealotry of so many such progressives in turn is regarded not as proof of their culpability but of the innocence of their souls and the purity of their hearts, which are being manipulated by foreign villains. This viewpoint, a descendant of the post-9/11 jihad demonology, has become so ingrained that it could be considered a quasi-official stance among liberal Jews and Zionists to explain the current climate of antisemitism on college campuses.

None of this is to deny SJP’s links to Palestinian terrorist organizations like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Rather, the point is that by trapping themselves in outdated categories, and by wishing to imagine themselves as normative American liberals, many American Jews are blinding themselves to seismic changes in American society and politics. Of those changes, the shift in the Democratic Party, the traditional political home of American Jews, is arguably the most consequential.

The Democratic Party of the 21st century is, by most traditional measures, far to the right of its 20th-century predecessors, having abandoned familiar social democratic struggles for higher minimum wages, housing subsidies, higher tariffs to benefit workers, and other economic measures. Instead, it has embraced comparatively low tax rates and global techno-capitalism—while at the same time embracing a compensatory Third Worldist ethos. This ideological shift reached a pivotal point with the election of Barack Obama, whose own formative years were split between Cold War America and Sukarno’s Indonesia. His presidency initiated a profound transformation within the structure of American institutions that reshaped the Democratic Party as the head of a political alliance of urban liberal technocrats, technology corporations, institutions of higher education, and activist grievance groups.

This reconfiguration of power dynamics within the Democratic Party in turn made it a natural ally for various groups sympathetic to and obsessed by the Palestinian cause, most of which saw and still see Jews and Israel as enemies. This domestic realignment mirrored Obama’s foreign policy priorities and its approach to Middle Eastern affairs, namely the policy of realigning U.S. interests in the region with Iran.

As Obama’s Democratic Party transformed itself into a big tribal sectarian tent, traditionally Democratic American Jews found themselves under the same roof with elements that were antisemitic and anti-Zionist, but whose grievances had now been granted higher status. There were now exigencies that demanded flexibility—intersection, if you prefer. Everyone would now pretend that anti-liberal progressive dogmas being incubated on campuses were the natural evolution of the liberal causes that many American Jews had long supported by way of achieving greater equality and liberation from prejudice.

Groups like the ADL and other American liberal Jewish institutions were often at the forefront of endorsing the same progressive ideas and intersectional jargon that are central to the current self-conception of the anti-Israel movement. Ironically, the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt, who was quoted in The New Yorker as a token Jewish establishment hysteric, was perhaps the key author and implementor of this strategy of intersectional “allyship,” as Obama’s yes man within the Jewish establishment.

If Jewish liberals were to maintain their position on the American left, further adaptability was required on their part: American Jewish identity needed to be defined by a commitment to social action and progressive theology. If Zionism is to have any legitimacy at all, it would be contingent on its interpretation as a movement aligned with progressive social justice and national liberation ideals—namely, as the handmaiden to establishing a Palestinian state. This ideology, including the false consciousness it fosters, is what still prevents many American Jews from comprehending the growing wave of antisemitic activism as a social justice cause—one being pushed and protected by the political party most American Jews still regard as their home.

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When reality is too frightening to contemplate, often the response is either to deny it or to assert that what's staring at you in the face is merely a facade. Hence, it’s common to see progressive and seemingly liberal movements that endorse anti-Zionism dismissed as fringe or fleeting phenomena. The result is the further obfuscation of an increasingly obvious political reality: The Democratic Party is openly courting the most antisemitic forces in America and the world.

This mystification also helps affirm Zionism’s own authentically liberal, even progressive identity: On one side are the prestigious and glamorous Western forces of liberalism, equality, and progress, of which the liberal Jewish establishment is part; and on the other, the forces of religious fascism, exotic fanaticism, and foreign barbarism on which the anti-Israel activists live.

Young American Jews have often shied away from facing the prospect that other liberal Americans of their generation—increasingly indoctrinated into left-wing ideologies and seeking a “leftist organizing space” for the struggle against racism, colonialism, and imperialism—are much more likely to align with pro-Palestinian activism than with Jews. One of the reasons is that many young Jews go to the same schools, where they are indoctrinated into the same ideologies, and are often unlikely to critically question whether there is something inherently distorted and dangerous in them.

Cries of “intifada” and “from the river to the sea” are not bugs in the new politics; they are features. There is no “version” of “social justice” politics without them. And as long as American Jews persist in ignoring that reality, they will continue to feel shocked and alone. The American Jewish establishment’s hope that it could overlook this reality and instead impress its erstwhile friends with “allyship” and stories of its contributions to the civil rights movement, feminism, and other progressive causes was a profoundly mistaken strategy that squandered whatever communal power they might have retained within the Democratic Party. The result is that the American Jewish establishment is increasingly disposable, both to Jews and to those who hate them.