Pennsylvania Spent Over $20 Million On Transgender Medical Services For Children And Youth: Report

Pennsylvania has spent more than $20 million on transgender surgeries, hormone treatments, and other services for children and young adults since 2015, newly released public records show.

The state spent more than $19.8 million in tax dollars on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and transgender surgeries for children and 18-year-olds between 2015 and July 28 of this year through state insurance programs, according to records provided by the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services to the Pennsylvania Family Institute, a nonprofit representing family values.

That includes the nearly $14,000 per day the state spent last year on transgender medical services for youth through these state insurance programs like Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), the nonprofit said.

Estimates would put the total now over $20 million, according to the nonprofit.

“This shocking report reveals Pennsylvania taxpayers are being forced to fund harmful drugs and surgeries on children, sending millions of dollars every year to carry out detrimental and irreversible procedures upon minors,” said Michael Geer, Pennsylvania Family Institute President.

The numbers also appear to show that Pennsylvania has seen a more than 8,200% funding increase for these transgender services since 2015.

Early data appear to show that funding is continuing to increase as well, the nonprofit said.

“This is state-sponsored child mutilation that taxpayers are being forced to fund,” Geer said. “Not one penny of funding should be used to advance this type of harmful activity.”

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At least three Pennsylvania children’s hospitals offer “gender-affirming” medical services — Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, and PennState Health Children’s Hospital, although not all offer every service.

Over the last few years, critics have sounded the alarm about the permanent effects of both gender hormone treatments and surgical procedures, especially on children.

Both puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones come with serious health risks. Puberty blockers can affect bone growth and density and cause sexual dysfunction, voice damage, and infertility, among other issues. Cross-sex hormones can cause infertility, deadly blood clots, heart attacks, increased cancer risks of the breasts and ovaries, liver dysfunction, worsening psychological illness, and other serious conditions.

The number of gender surgeries nearly tripled in the U.S. from 2016 to 2019, according to an analysis published Wednesday in JAMA Network Open. In 2016, there were about 4,550 procedures, and that number spiked to around 13,000 in 2019.

Hundreds of girls in the U.S., some as young as 12, have gotten elective, gender-related double mastectomies to remove their healthy breasts over the last few years.

Meanwhile, it is more popular than ever for youth to adopt new gender identities. An estimated 300,000 minors aged 13 to 17 identified as transgender as of last year.

Why Christians Need To Be A Lot Less Welcoming And Tolerant

As you may or may not have heard, something called the Dove Awards were held here in Nashville this week. Broadcast on TBN, the Dove Awards are an annual awards show, held by the Gospel Music Association, designed to celebrate and recognize achievements in Christian music. Except this year, the headlines around the event had nothing to do with Christian music, or Christianity in general. Instead the attention went to a man named Derek Webb, who gained prominence in the Christian music space as the longtime lead singer of a popular Christian rock band. Several years ago, Webb had an affair, left his wife, and then became an apostate. He’s now re-married to the lead singer of another Christian rock band, while he continues to put out albums with titles like “The Jesus Hypothesis,” which should give you a good idea of where he stands.

But this year, after winning several Dove awards in the past, Webb decided to attend the ceremony dressed in drag, alongside his drag queen friend who goes by the stage name “Flamy Grant.” You may recall that we talked about Flamy Grant a few months ago when one of his “Christian” songs briefly made it to the top of the Christian song charts. Webb and Grant have made music together in the past, including a song called “Boys Will Be Girls.” And they put those lyrics into practice, or tried, this week at the Dove Awards. Webb tweeted out a picture of himself dressed in his drag outfit, along with the caption “54th annual dove awards, here we come.” As you can see, Flamy Grant, is dressed in the customary Drag Queen uniform that makes him look like a character from a 90’s Tim Burton film, while Webb looks like he’s playing dress up with clothes he found in the clearance bin of the women’s section at Goodwill.  They both look utterly ridiculous and aggressively hideous.

After the event, Webb posted a video with the caption “Why did i wear a dress to the dove awards?” I can easily answer that question, and I will, but first let’s hear Webb’s version:

why did i wear a dress to the dove awards? pic.twitter.com/KdjYXHFuUa

— Derek Webb (@derekwebb) October 19, 2023

First of all, it’s hard to take him seriously when he starts the video with fake news, calling himself a straight man. If that doesn’t deserve a community note on Twitter, I don’t know what does. Aside from that, Webb claims that he showed up to a Christian event in drag because he wanted to be an “ally.” And apparently being an ally to attention whores means being an attention whore yourself. That is what most of this is about, after all. Yes, drag is an outlet for men with cross-dressing fetishes to get their thrills. It’s also a simple expression of narcissism. All of these people are narcissists, going to absurd lengths to bring all of the attention back to themselves. Attention is the primary fetish that drives these people. And their “allies.”

There’s quite a lot of this kind of allyship in modern western “Christianity.” (Note the air quotes around Christianity. It was just a few weeks ago that a cathedral in Dallas gave a blessing to drag queens during their service. Watch:

You notice how the anchor claims there were signs “condemning LGBTQ people” and yet somehow their own news cameras never managed to get any of those signs on film. The only sign we see is one that says “God created them male and female,” which is a direct quote from the Book of Genesis. If that is a condemnation of LGBTQ people, it’s not the sign doing the condemning. The pastor also tells us that a law criminalizing sexually explicit shows for children will have severe ramifications for the drag community, and amounts to oppression against them. That, in and of itself, is a confession. Indeed LGBT activists have told us everything we need to know by their reaction to laws around the country that simply prohibit the sexual and physical abuse of children. They tell us themselves that these laws seriously cramp their style. And, well, I believe them. Which is why the laws must be in place.

But this drag and church combination has become increasingly popular. Just this week there was another drag event at a church, also hosted as a means of protest against laws that ban the mutilation and sexualization of children. Watch:

Now, you could point out that most of these churches that are inviting cross dressing men to parade around on the altar are Episcopal or United Church of Christ, or something similar, and therefore don’t really count as Christian at all. These are social clubs for Left-wing Boomers that happen to meet in buildings that vaguely resemble churches. Which is true, and a fair point. But it’s also true that the western Christianity as a whole has become increasingly infiltrated by this madness, and has generally failed to take a firm stance against it, much less effectively fight back.

Recently, I told you about the major victory in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld the ban on child gender mutilation in Tennessee and Kentucky. After that decision was announced, a number of prominent Christian leaders took to Twitter to celebrate the decision. But it was noted by many that most of these leaders, though they were eager to join the party celebrating the win — and to tacitly take credit for it — were nowhere in sight when the battle was raging. In fact, transgenderism and LGBT ideology seized its stranglehold on American culture while most churches, most Christian leaders, most pastors and priests — certainly not all, but most — said nothing at all. They may not have explicitly joined the other side and started waving the rainbow flag — though some of them did — but most of them hid from the fight.

Which is why, of all the people who most prominently led the charge against gender ideology, precisely none of us were church leaders. Some aren’t even Christian at all.

WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show

Worse still — and I can say this from experience — while we went to war against this evil, many Christian leaders spent their time lecturing us for the way that we fought, the tone we took, our harshness, our meanness, our supposed lack of grace and kindness. They sat on the sidelines, afraid to get their hands dirty, while lecturing those in the trenches for fighting in a way that they found personally displeasing to watch. This is the story of Christianity in the west, at least in modern times. 

The Dove Awards are a perfect encapsulation of this problem. Sure, the Gospel Music Association did not officially invite Derek Webb or Flamy Grant to attend, and did not have them on stage to perform their heretical songs. But they also didn’t meet these men at the door and refuse them entry, which is what should have happened. They were welcomed in, and apparently treated kindly, when they should have been rebuked and turned away. They should not have been permitted to turn a Christian event into a platform for narcissism and degeneracy. To be welcoming as Christians does not mean — or should not mean — tolerating any and all forms of behavior, and standing idly by while your own events and churches and communities are used to celebrate sin.

I may welcome you into my home, but that doesn’t mean you can wipe your muddy shoes on my carpet and use vulgarity in front of my children. I am welcoming you into my home — my home, not yours — which means you must live up to the standards I have established. Least of all will I welcome you into my home and then let you set it on fire from the inside. If I do that, then soon there will be no home left for anyone to be welcomed into. And that is exactly what the Christian church has done in the West. It has welcomed in the arsonists who have spent the past several decades burning it down from within. This is what happens when you make tolerance your guiding virtue. Soon you find yourself tolerating your own destruction.

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