{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://marymiller.house.gov/media/press-releases/icymi-rep-mary-miller-standing-parental-rights", "ICYMI: Rep. Mary Miller is Standing up for Parental Rights", "2022-04-26", "2022", "2022-04", "Republican", "House", "IL", "Mary E. Miller", "M001211", "marymiller.house.gov", "marymiller", "https://marymiller.house.gov/media/press-releases", "scraper", "WASHINGTON - Congresswoman Mary Miller (IL-15) published an opinion piece in the Washington Times and also joined Breitbart News Radio to discuss parental rights over the Biden Administration's push to encourage puberty blockers, hormone therapies, and sex-change surgeries for children who believe they are transgender.\n\nYou can view Congresswoman Miller's opinion piece here and below. You can listen to the interview as well as read the full Breitbart News article on this topic here.\n\n\u2018PolitiFraud\u2019 defends Biden\u2019s push for child sex-change procedures\n\nBy: Congresswoman Mary Miller, Illinois\u2019 15th District\n\nOne of the most disturbing trends during the first year of the Biden Administration has been the effort by the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to engage children to push an extreme left-wing political concept known as \u201cgender ideology.\u201d The Biden Administration has bypassed parents to deliver extremely controversial messages to children about \u201cchanging\u201d their gender through puberty blockers, chemical castration drugs, and sex change operations. In his short Transgender Day of Visibility message, President Biden mentioned \u201cchildren\u201d and \u201ckids\u201d five times.\n\nEarlier this month, during a House Education and Labor Committee Hearing, I asked President Biden\u2019s HHS Secretary if he considers performing sex-change procedures on 12-year-old children to be child abuse. Secretary Xavier Becerra refused to answer the question. I then asked Secretary Becerra if he would confirm that parental consent would always be necessary for these life-altering procedures, and he once again refused to answer the question.\n\nMy questioning of President Biden\u2019s HHS Secretary was based on guidance titled \u201cGender-Affirming Care and Young People,\u201d which was issued by the Biden Administration as a guide for young children on procedures they could purportedly use to \u201cchange\u201d their gender. This guidance was issued by political officials with the goal of injecting leftist politics into medicine, which was once respected as apolitical.\n\nThe Biden guidance recommends telling children that they can change their gender by changing their \u201chairstyles, clothing, name, gender pronouns, and restrooms,\u201d which the Biden Administration disturbingly recommends at \u201cany age.\u201d The Biden guidance specifically states, \u201cfor transgender and nonbinary children and adolescents, early gender-affirming care is crucial to overall health and well-being.\u201d The Biden Administration is engaging in extreme \u201cwoke\u201d politics by encouraging children to take chemical castration drugs and undergo surgeries, and they are lying to children by telling them puberty blockers are \u201creversible.\u201d\n\nI asked President Biden\u2019s HHS Secretary why he claims blocking puberty is \u201creversable,\u201d but he once again refused to answer any questions about this guidance.\n\nThe concerns I raised to the Secretary during the committee hearing were challenged by a left-wing media organization called \u201cPolitiFact,\u201d which claimed that puberty blockers are \u201creversible\u201d and therefore safe for children as young as 10 years old.\n\nHorrified by PolitiFact\u2019s agenda of encouraging 10-year-olds to experiment with puberty blockers, I explained to the left-wing reporter that blocking puberty is dangerous for young children and can lead to irreversible outcomes. I cited the Mayo Clinic\u2019s guidance on puberty blockers, which states that use of GnRH analogues can have long-term effects on growth spurts, bone growth and density, and future fertility. Shockingly, the Mayo Clinic guidance references starting puberty blockers on children as young as 10 years old and giving them injections or implants to prevent puberty for years. Purposely preventing a child's physical development is child abuse, and leftists are targeting young children with radical transgender politics in the classroom and on social media to push them towards a course that will permanently affect their life.\n\nThe Los Angeles Times ran an extensive piece on this topic, which cites practitioners who say many clinicians are rushing teens into medicalization and that \u201csloppy healthcare work\u201d would result in \u201cmore young adults who will regret having gone through this process.\u201d In a thorough follow-up study of sex-reassigned people, extending over 30 years, ten to 15 years after surgical reassignment, the suicide rate of those who had undergone sex-reassignment surgery rose to 20 times that of comparable peers.\n\nAfter admitting in their own article that puberty blockers could cause irreversible effects and acknowledging that I cited the Mayo Clinic as my medical source, \u201cPolitiFraud\u201d still rated my claim as \u201cfalse\u201d because they are a leftist political organization, not a fact-finding organization.\n\nThere is a reason that left-wing PolitiFact chose Easter Sunday, the most holy day of the Christian calendar, to advance their radical agenda of permanently harming young children with these procedures. As a mother and grandmother, I will never stop fighting to protect young children from the Biden Administration\u2019s woke political agenda, and I will never back down to the extremists in left-wing \"media.\"\n\nLast year, parents showed up to school board meetings to voice their outrage at the leftist agenda that is infiltrating our schools. The Biden Administration responded by mobilizing the Department of Justice and FBI to intimidate and harass parents who dared to show up to school board meetings in opposition of the Biden political agenda. Despite these authoritarian tactics, parents voted in record numbers in Virginia and made history on election night. The radical left should never underestimate the power of parents or the love that we have for our children. President Biden has made his agenda crystal clear, and while the left is \u201cwoke,\u201d parents are now awake.\n\n###", 1, "2026-03-30T01:40:41Z", "2026-04-08T02:19:30Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://marymiller.house.gov/media/press-releases/icymi-rep-mary-miller-standing-parental-rights"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.7821647450327873, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}