Seven-hundred grand, let’s be honest, is a mere drop in the bucket when it comes to the federal budget. The Army probably spends more on toilet seats. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has probably expended that much trying to see if Anthony Fauci can be granted sainthood by the Catholic Church before he dies. It’s peanuts.
However, do you know how much money the government has historically spent trying to ensure teenage boys don’t get pregnant? Zero.
That’s because teenage boys don’t get pregnant — or at least they didn’t until the woke year of our Lord 2023 — where, somehow, the better part of a million dollars needs to be spent studying how to prevent unwanted pregnancies among teen “boys.”
According to a Thursday report from the Daily Caller, President Joe Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services handed over a $698,736 grant to a group called the Center for Innovative Public Health Research.
The nonprofit organization’s website states that it’s in the business of health technology, which is why it’ll be running a text-message-based program to “address social and structural influences of sexual behavior” in girls ages 14-18 who identify as boys.
A description of the grant program on USASpending.gov describes it as an “inclusive teen pregnancy prevention program for transgender boys — youth who are assigned female at birth (AFAB) and identify as transgender (e.g., as non-binary or as trans boys), not as girls.”
These individuals, the grant recipient states, “are at risk for negative sexual health outcomes yet are effectively excluded from sexual health programs because gender-diverse youth do not experience the cisgender, heteronormative teen sexual education messaging available to them as salient or applicable.
“This lack of programming is likely contributing to obstacles to sexual health: Data suggest that AFAB trans-identified youth may be less likely to use condoms when having sex with people who have penises and are at least as likely as cisgender girls to be pregnant,” the grant description continues.
“This health inequity must be addressed. Access to inclusive sexual education, condoms, and sexual support can vary widely across regions of the U.S., and within states for those living in rural versus urban settings. This is particularly true now that states have more influence on adolescents’ access to sexual health services and gender-affirming care.”
Should transgender treatments for minors be banned?
The group plans to use a platform called Girl2Girl — “a text messaging-based sexual health program designed for cisgender sexual minority girls 14-18 years of age” — to address this perfidious inequity. With your tax dollars, of course.
Furthermore, focus groups will “identify and give voice to the contexts that affect sexual decision making” that these transgender girls face. So-called “content advisory teams” will formulate messaging that “resonates with these youth.”
Then, they will “test the resulting adaptation in a national [randomized controlled trial] of 700 trans-identified AFAB youth 14-18 years of age.”
So, yes, this is peanuts. It’s also a very stupid wastage of peanuts.
I suppose as an indirect object lesson, maybe this could end up being worthwhile. Behind all of the jargon of the high priests of gender ideology lies a contradiction that all the obfuscation in the world can’t erase: boys don’t get pregnant. The basic facts of human biology remain undefeated.
However, there are several problems here. The first is that peanuts can add up. Consider that the Biden administration’s National Institutes of Health already allocated over $200,000 for an “Online Mentoring Program to Prevent Adversities Among Trans and Other Gender Minority Youth,” the Daily Caller reported, which matched LGBT-identifying youth with “mentors” that would promote “social-emotional skills” among that set.
“Few mentoring programs exist specifically for TGMY, and those that do have not been rigorously evaluated” and “often require guardian permission,” the application for the grant stated.
The Daily Caller also noted that “HHS also gave over $1 million to the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center in August 2022 to study the risk of thrombosis, the formation of blood clots in the blood vessels which can lead to death, in transgender adolescents receiving sex change hormonal therapies, federal grant records show.”
That last allocation may indeed be worthwhile — although it might have been even more worthwhile to study the effects of these drugs before they were used on minors. But, no: When it comes to puberty blockers and hormones on kids, we’re told it’s a matter of life and death. Would you rather have a live son or a dead daughter? Huh, you transphobe?
Indeed, while this $700,000 grant may be an absurdity, there’s genuine evil lurking behind it. Unproven psychological and medical treatments are being used on teenagers without regard to whether they’re safe or effective, and our tax dollars are being used to subsidize them. Maybe that money, small as the sum might seem, would be better spent giving Biology 101 lessons to bureaucrats instead of finding ways to keep teen “boys” from getting pregnant.
