This article brought to you by Maryland Muckraker.

On Thursday at a church in Carroll County, Maryland Moms for Liberty hosted a Gender Ideology Town Hall open to everyone in partnership with The Heritage Foundation and The Leadership Institute, that was keynoted by born Marylander and conservative luminary Ryan Anderson, an early critic of transgender ideology with his 2018 book When Harry Became Sally.

Anderson deconstructs transgender craze

Anderson deconstructed the transgender craze for the audience of probably two-hundred concerned citizens and elected officials from Carroll and across the state, detailing how the Obama-era Department of Health and Human Services twisted the concept of discrimination with Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which effectively codified into regulation the replacement of “sex” with “gender”, turning equal treatment for the sexes into exact same treatment for the sexes — all while a social contagion took root resulting in an explosion of youths identifying as nonbinary.

He spoke about the safety issues that come from men being allowed in sex-segregated spaces for women, like bathrooms and jails. And the athletic opportunities woman would be deprived of because of men like Lia Thomas, the mediocre ivy-league swimmer who declared himself a woman and promptly rose to the top of the girls podium with a bulge, an absurd story originally captured by Washington Examiner columnist Christopher Tremoglie.

St. Joseph Medical Center and Johns Hopkins

Anderson’s speech had local tie-ins as well, referencing how St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson, a Catholic facility adhering to the National Catholic Bioethics Standard which disallowed gender affirmation as of 2017, was ruled to have discriminated against a woman who wanted her uterus removed so she could become a man but was denied the surgery, a supposed violation of the aforementioned provision in the Affordable Care Act.

And he talked about Paul McHugh, the maverick Johns Hopkins researcher and psychiatrist who concluded in the late 1970s that offering sex-change operations was “cooperating with mental illness”, thus putting a stop to the surgeries that had been taking place at the institution since 1966 after John Money, a Hopkins professor, originally conceived of gender identity after experimenting on a boy who had his penis seared off during a botched circumcision and convinced his family to raise him as a girl.

‘We will eventually win this’

Anderson concluded saying “we will eventually win this”, because you can only struggle against reality for so long. It will just be a matter of body count. He anticipates medical malpractice lawsuits being the straw that will break the transgender camel’s back, prompting this writer to wonder what former Carroll County State’s Attorney candidate and renowned medical malpractice lawyer David Ellin would think on the subject.

Before Anderson took the stage, Carroll County M4L chair Kit Hart, previously the recipient of the national Joyful Warrior Award, welcomed everyone and thanked the event’s sponsors, including Heritage and Leadership, but also the Maryland Family Institute, a new nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting parental choice in education and marriage in a state increasingly hostile to local autonomy and the nuclear family.

She thanked St. Stephens Church for providing the venue despite backlash from noisy activists, then confirmed there are nine, soon to be ten M4L chapters in Maryland. Then the Anne Arundel County M4L chapter chair spoke briefly, quoting Thomas Paine, calling on everyone to “detect and expose delusion and error”. It is at least the second time the statewide organization has quoted the muckraking English pamphleteer who triggered the American revolution, the first being a billboard in Eldersburg last year that read: “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace”.

A $5 billion dollar emerging market

All this comes just days after Democrats in the Maryland General Assembly passed the Trans Health Equity Act into law, which will expand the gender-affirming treatments covered by Medicaid in the state, while simultaneously removing the stipulation that patients be over the age of 18. Carroll Delegate Chris Tomlinson spoke out against the bill on the House floor, telling the story of detransitioner Chloe Cole, who Anderson mentioned in his remarks as well.

The sex reassignment surgery market will reach $5B nationwide by 2030 according to Grand View Research, with Maryland set to become a leader in the emerging market.