Dr. Rachel Levine, appointed by President Biden as assistant health secretary, will be the first openly transgender federal authority confirmed by the Senate, and her nomination was applauded by transgender rights advocates.
But Dr. Levine’s confirmation hearing became briefly combative on Thursday, when Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, opened his questioning to the nominee with a speech on “genital mutilation” and a request to see if she supported gender reassignment surgery and hormone therapy for minors. (An earlier version of this post incorrectly reported the day of the hearing.)
“Are you willing to let a minor take things that prevent his puberty, and do you think he can get it back?” Mr. Paul, who is an ophthalmologist, said at one point. “You give a woman enough testosterone to make her beard grow – do you think she’ll look like a woman again when you stop testosterone?”
Dr. Levine replied calmly that “transgender medicine is a very complex and nuanced field, with robust research and treatment standards”, which she would be happy to discuss with him.
The confrontation exposed the profound shift Washington is undergoing as President Biden takes office, undoing the policies of his predecessor, former President Donald J. Trump, who has worked aggressively to undermine transgender rights. Biden, on the other hand, is trying to make his administration more receptive to the LGBTQ community.
Biden lifted Trump’s ban on transgender service in the army. LGBTQ references are now common and visitors to the White House website are asked if they wish to provide their pronouns when filling out a contact form: she / he, he / he or they.
And while the Senate hearing was going on, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, called a press conference to call Congress to adopt the Equality Act. , which would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include protections for LGBTQ people.
Since Mr. Biden appointed her, Dr. Levine has been subject to attacks on social media and conservative media that claimed, without evidence, that she advocated gender reassignment surgery for minors, which is generally not done in the United States.
Dr. Levine, a pediatrician who previously focused on adolescent eating disorders and mental health, was also the liaison of the LGBTQ community to the Office of Diversity at Penn State College of Medicine.
Her detractors seized a speech she gave in 2017, describing hormone therapy as a standard of care for young transgender people, and also in a tweet she posted in January 2020 about a study showing that young transgender people with access to HIV-blocking drugs puberty have a lower risk of suicide.
“This study is important because it is the first to show this specific association,” Dr. Levine wrote.
No other Republicans followed Paul’s line of questioning, and Democrats ignored his comments until Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington, who chaired the hearing, praised Dr. Levine for his “careful and clinically informed response. ”Ms. Murray added:“ It is really critical for me that our nominees are treated with respect and our questions focus on their qualifications and the work ahead of us, rather than on ideological and damaging misrepresentations like the ones we heard from the senator. Paul ”.