Here’s what the transgender movement is doing to children

By Jonathon Van Maren

Despite a host of warnings from medical experts, the promotion of transgenderism is proceeding apace—and that includes parents cross-dressing their children, treating them as the opposite sex, and horrifyingly, beginning the physical transformation of their girls into boys and boys into girls at a very young age. Some of the “progressive” parents seem downright enthusiastic about having a transgender child, with one mother attempting to raise her son as a girl until a judge stepped in and sent the boy to live with his father, where he promptly returned to normal.

But transgender activists will tolerate absolutely no discussion about this phenomenon, even though it can involve physical mutilation and chemical castration. Lindsay Shepherd, a left-wing student from Laurier University, is still getting demonized by LGBT activists and their “allies” simply for attempting to have a discussion. To ask whether inventing new pronouns is helpful is now “hate speech” or even “violence,” and to suggest that some aspects of transgenderism have not been subject to the intellectually rigorous examination that their potential consequences demand is to be accused of contributing to the death of vulnerable trans people.

Some sane voices still attempt to be heard above the din. Michelle Cretella, for example, recently penned a fascinating and insightful column titled “I’m a Pediatrician. Here’s What I Did When a Little Boy Patient Said He Was a Girl.” The whole thing is worth reading, but especially this bit:

I had one patient we’ll call Andy. Between the ages of 3 and 5, he increasingly played with girls and “girl toys” and said he was a girl. I referred the parents and Andy to a therapist. Sometimes mental illness of a parent or abuse of the child are factors, but more commonly, the child has misperceived family dynamics and internalized a false belief.

In the middle of one session, Andy put down the toy truck, held onto a Barbie, and said, “Mommy and Daddy, you don’t love me when I’m a boy.” When Andy was 3, his sister with special needs was born, and required significantly more of his parents’ attention. Andy misperceived this as “Mommy and Daddy love girls. If I want them to love me, I have to be a girl.” With family therapy Andy got better.

Today, Andy’s parents would be told, “This is who Andy really is. You must ensure that everyone treats him as a girl, or else he will commit suicide.”

As Andy approaches puberty, the experts would put him on puberty blockers so he can continue to impersonate a girl. It doesn’t matter that we’ve never tested puberty blockers in biologically normal children. It doesn’t matter that when blockers are used to treat prostate cancer in men, and gynecological problems in women, they cause problems with memory. We don’t need testing. We need to arrest his physical development now, or he will kill himself.

But this is not true. Instead, when supported in their biological sex through natural puberty, the vast majority of gender-confused children get better. Yet, we chemically castrate gender-confused children with puberty blockers. Then we permanently sterilize many of them by adding cross-sex hormones, which also put them at risk for heart disease, strokes, diabetes, cancers, and even the very emotional problems that the gender experts claim to be treating.

P.S. If a girl who insists she is male has been on testosterone daily for one year, she is cleared to get a bilateral mastectomy at age 16. Mind you, the American Academy of Pediatrics recently came out with a report that urges pediatricians to caution teenagers about getting tattoos because they are essentially permanent and can cause scarring. But this same AAP is 110 percent in support of 16-year-old girls getting a double mastectomy, even without parental consent, so long as the girl insists that she is a man, and has been taking testosterone daily for one year. To indoctrinate all children from preschool forward with the lie that they could be trapped in the wrong body disrupts the very foundation of a child’s reality testing. If they can’t trust the reality of their physical bodies, who or what can they trust? Transgender ideology in schools is psychological abuse that often leads to chemical castration, sterilization, and surgical mutilation.

That perspective has now been nearly entirely banned from the public square, driven away with cries of “Transphobe! Bigot! Hate speech!” In the meantime, trans activists will continue to mainstream the idea that we can commit this horrifyingly permanent social experiment on children not yet old enough to drink a beer or vote—but apparently old enough, pre-puberty, to make decisions that will forever alter the rest of their lives.

If you wonder why trans activists won’t permit that discussion to take place, I don’t blame you. I’m wondering, too. It’s almost as if ideology is more important to them than the children are.

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For anyone interested, my book on The Culture War, which analyzes the journey our culture has taken from the way it was to the way it is and examines the Sexual Revolution, hook-up culture, the rise of the porn plague, abortion, commodity culture, euthanasia, and the gay rights movement, is available for sale here.