Timothy Wirkman Virkkala on nipping the transing of kids in the bud.

The MAHA wing of the Trump Administration announced, on Thursday, “new steps” to “cut down on breast removal and other ‘sex-rejecting’ procedures for children.”

The idea, apparently, is to “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) by refusing to mutilate young people on the basis of an under-debated, under-researched wildfire social contagion pushed by postmodernist conceptions of sociality and sex, namely “gender” and “transgender” and, uh, “queer.”

What we have come to learn as the trans movement gained ascendancy is that these procedures generally prevent not only sexual reproduction but severely compromise (some say remove) the capacity to experience orgasm.

Anti-sex, indeed!

When I was young, it was conservatives who were said to be anti-sex. But nothing old-fashioned traditionalists advocated way back then comes close to the extremity of leftists’ “gender-affirming” dogmas . . . from which doctors and hospitals have made vast fortunes.

So what has actually been done?

The “Declaration of the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services” that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., signed on the 18th is an interesting document, but lines like this are all-too-prominent: “The evidence compilation indicates that medical and surgical interventions for children and adolescents diagnosed with gender dysphoria present an unfavorable risk-benefit profile.”

True. But is it true enough? The horrors of inflicting radical medical interventions on patients not mature enough to rationally weigh benefits against detriments can hardly be overstated.

“We’re not going to let taxpayer money go to hurt these children,” said Dr. Mehmet Oz, who serves as the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. In follow-up statements, Dr. Oz also criticized the high costs of transgender procedures for minors, estimating certain surgeries at $150,000 or more. And since failure is the norm, there’s a lot of repeat business involved.

The key proposals? Prohibiting federal Medicaid reimbursements for any gender-affirming care provided to transgender patients under age 18; and blocking all Medicare and Medicaid funding for any hospital that provides pediatric interventions of this horrific variety.

Since I believe there should be no federal tax subsidies for any medical services except for military, this is a very obvious and easy-to-accept move. For those who love socialism, and wince at anyone spending a dime of their own money on their own health, this may seem like the thin end of the wedge, the beginning of an anti-socialized-medicine agenda. Would that were true. What it is, at present, is the insertion of a modicum of common sense into an issue where goofy postmodernism has recently dominated.

And we can tell our pixillated-by-the-propaganda leftist friends that the investigation and declaration Kennedy & Co. have produced rely heavily on European reports and regulations. That might appease them. Why, their beloved ultra-progressive European “social democrats” see the danger of transing kids. Maybe they, too, will finally come around.

TWV