Democrats leave hearing as Rep. Cammack wants video about gender transition surgeries played

WASHINGTON, D.C. (FLV) – Democrats walked out of a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing last week after U.S. Rep. Kat Cammack, R-Fla., asked to play a video of a physician explaining what gender reassignment surgeries on minors entail.

The committee reportedly debated whether or not tax dollars should go toward children’s hospitals to fund gender reassignment surgeries for minors during the hearing.

During Cammack’s debate time, she asked to play a brief interview clip of University of Oregon’s Health and Science Division gender affirming surgery expert Dr. Blair Peters explaining what gender reassignment surgeries entail.

After Cammack asked to play the clip, some Democrats objected and asked for the committee to be adjourned.

“It’s a medical expert from your side,” Cammack argued to those objecting the video be played.

“As you claim, if we do not understand how these surgeries work, I would like to show a video that articulates how these surgeries are conducted. I think that is completely germane to the conversation that we are having here today,” Cammack continued.

The committee then took a recess, while the minority reviewed the video.

U.S. Rep. Frank Palone, D-New Jersey, reviewed the video and insisted on his initial objection because he said he could not “understand what the person is saying.”

“I looked at the video, but I insist on my objection because I have to be honest, I don’t even understand what the person is saying and so, to me it’s just almost impossible for us to understand what he’s saying and how it relates to what we’re discussing here. Even the authentication is difficult. So I insist on the objection,” Palone said.

The committee then voted whether or not the video could be played, to which 26 members voted yes and 18 voted no.

After the vote, many members walked out of the meeting, refusing to watch the video.

The expert Dr. Blair Peters explained the “unique challenges” that come with performing genital surgeries on minors who are on pubertal suppression and how it is “very new.” He explained what penile inversion, vaginoplasty surgeries and phalloplasty surgeries entails.

“Those of us that do a fairly high volume of genital gender affirming surgery, you know, we’ve maybe done a couple, a handful of pubertally suppressed adolescents as a field and no one’s published on it yet,” Peters said. “OHSU, we’re just putting our first series together as we’re kind of learning and figuring out what works.”

After the video was played, Cammack said her colleagues on the left who left the room prior to the video “don’t want the facts.”

“And as you heard from the specialist who does these surgeries, they don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t understand the long term effects,” Cammack said.

“There is not even published information, peer reviewed information backing up the claims that our colleagues on the left have said, we are here today to fund children’s hospitals, not to mutilate them with experimental surgeries that we do not have science and data that backs up the claims that the left has made today,” Cammack said.

Cammack said she is “very disappointed in [her] colleagues on the left who opted to leave the room in protest and refuse to watch a video from an expert on their own side.”