We need to know whether treatments benefit most children who receive them.

Follow this authorMegan McArdle's opinions

Surely Levine, who is a pediatrician and herself a transgender woman, hadn’t suggested lowering guardrails designed to protect vulnerable adolescents from potentially lifelong complications?

Yet surely, if Levine had not done these things, the administration could have come up with something more forceful than the tepid non-denial it pointed me to in a follow-up New York Times article: “Adm. Levine shared her view with her staff that publishing the proposed lower ages for gender transition surgeries was not supported by science or research, and could lead to an onslaught of attacks on the transgender community.”

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The Times article also contained a new announcement, made shortly after the Levine story broke: The White House is now opposed to gender surgery for minors.

This is far too small a response. The allegations against Levine need to be investigated, and if they are true, she needs to be replaced — not only because she will have endangered children, but also to send the message that, when it comes to figuring out the proper medical treatment of children, politics never comes before science.

Too much of the debate over this topic focuses on the legal, political and philosophical questions, too little on the empirical ones that matter most. Such as: Do these treatments benefit most kids who receive them? If so, by how much? And if only some kids benefit, how can the others be identified before starting life-altering treatments such as hormones and surgery?

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Consider that, as this story was unfolding, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to Tennessee’s ban on gender-transition care for minors. Come fall, the justices will assemble in their robes to hear lawyers solemnly argue, and next June or July they are expected to rule on whether this ban violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

But until we have better information about how well treatments work, this makes no sense. If medical interventions help gender-dysphoric children lead longer, happier lives, then states should permit them because that’s the right thing to do, not because refusing might be discriminatory. If the interventions don’t help kids — or don’t help enough kids, and it’s not possible to reliably identify which ones benefit — then, obviously, children should not be harmed in the name of gender equality.

Maybe you think these answers are already known — that, as we keep hearing, gender-transition treatments for children are “medically necessary,” “evidence-based” and........

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