On Tuesday, news broke that Joe Biden will nominate Dr. R. Levine, a pediatrician and Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Health, to the position of assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This is a peculiar nomination given that, early in the Wuhan virus pandemic, Dr. Levine became nationally known for both deadly and selfish behavior. But that’s all water under the bridge. What matters is that Dr. Levine, a biological male, thinks he is a woman. With qualifications like that, who’s going to quibble about actual competence?

R. Levine is a biological male who believes that he is a woman. Everybody knows this is a lie. How can we tell? Because of the incredible pride with which the left trumpets Dr. Levine’s so-called transgender status. Here’s an example, from CBS:

President-elect Joe Biden announced Tuesday that he has nominated Dr. Rachel Levine to serve as assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. If confirmed by the Senate, Levine would be the first openly transgender federal official in a Senate-confirmed role, according to the Biden-Harris transition team. 

Levine, who is the secretary of health for Pennsylvania, is currently leading the state's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

If Dr. Levine actually were a woman, as he claims to be, he would not be “transgender.” He would simply be a woman nominated for a government office which, at the start of the third decade of the 21st century, is entirely unexceptional.

Dr. Levine’s body dysmorphia, however, qualifies him for a job that, as a practical matter, should be withheld from him on grounds of both competence and decency. In May, when the number of COVID deaths in Pennsylvania was escalating, Levine moved his 95-year-old mother out of the care facility in which she was living, because of the COVID crisis. This came two months after Levine turned Pennsylvania’s nursing homes into abattoirs:

In March, Levine ordered long-term care facilities in the state to continue to accept coronavirus patients who had been discharged from hospitals but un­able to return to their homes, the Bucks County Courier Times reported.

Of the state’s 3,806 coronavirus deaths, 2,611 had occurred in nursing homes and long-term-care ­facilities, according to ABC27.

By August 2020, Pennsylvania’s nursing home deaths were so high that the Department of Justice initiated an investigation, as well as investigating deaths in nursing homes in New York, New Jersey, and Michigan. As of this writing, 32,113 Pennsylvania nursing home residents have been infected and 7,327 have died.

It’s clear, though, from Biden’s statement about the nomination, that the new administration is not interested in Levine’s competence. It is interested only in the identity-politics boxes that can be marked off with the Levine nomination:

“Dr. Rachel Levine will bring the steady leadership and essential expertise we need to get people through this pandemic — no matter their zip code, race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability — and meet the public health needs of our country in this critical moment and beyond,” Mr. Biden said in a statement. “She is a historic and deeply qualified choice to help lead our administration’s health efforts.”

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris called Levine “a remarkable public servant with the knowledge and experience to help us contain this pandemic, and protect and improve the health and well-being of the American people.”

As always, I want to state that I have no animus towards people whose body dysmorphic disorder is such that they are strangers in their own skin. I find it incredibly tragic and, when I am in the company of such people, I treat them with respect and kindness.

Having said that, a culture cannot survive if it makes public policy out of people’s sad delusions. One day, when the dust finally settles, people will look back in wonder at the notion of entrusting a major nation’s health policies to a person with a track record of bad and selfish decisions, solely because that person has body dysmorphia.

IMAGE: Dr. R. Levine. YouTube screengrab.