Chad Felix Greene is a gay columnist and, just in case you want to know where his allegiances lie, he’s got both the rainbow flag and the transgender flag in his Twitter bio. He is pro-LGBT, and he wants everyone to know it. But like many others (like the Gays Against Groomers group), he is disturbed by what he sees happening in American schools. On November 3, he posted a thread on Twitter that everyone needs to read (I see he now deleted it, but Rod Dreher screen-captured it). Here’s what Greene said:
My 12 year old niece who has very suddenly come out as asexual and trans has been cutting herself. She’s broken down crying with her mother that she isn’t queer enough to be accepted by her friends.All of her friends have suddenly come out as trans. The most disturbing is she is thinking of suicide… My niece broke down and told my mom she wishes she could just be a little girl. She thinks she’ll let her mom down if she’s not queer. She doesn’t want to think about any of it. It’s too much for her.
That paragraph is about a 12-year-old girl who thinks she needs to identify as LGBT in order to fit in because everyone’s doing it. This is precisely what Dr. Lisa Littman called a “social contagion,” and it is happening everywhere. I’ve heard from parents in Canada that it is the “in” thing in high school to identify somewhere on the ever-expanding LGBT spectrum—as basically anything but straight. “Cis”—shorthand for “cisgender,” or a straight kid—is used as an insult or to dub someone boring or prudish. In the UK, a mother wrote an agonizing op-ed detailing how teen girls are concerned that if they identify as straight, they’ll be seen as “dumb and boring.”
From preschool on, children are told that they can construct their own identity, piece by piece, without any relation to biology or reality in general. They are given myriad options; they are encouraged to explore their “gender identity” and “sexuality”; and most significantly, they are celebrated and affirmed by everyone—their teachers, their peers, their followers on social media, and LGBT activists—if they identify as anything but straight. If you’re a kid having a tough time—and which kid doesn’t?—identifying as LGBT is your ticket to the in-crowd. From government on down, society exists to affirm you.
This is all ugly enough. But where it gets horrifying is the fact that many of these children are being given puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and permanent, mutilating surgeries. I recently spoke with a young girl who had her breasts surgically removed at age 15 before realizing it was a mistake. It was heartbreaking. I want to draw your attention to a savagely powerful open letter posted a Substack called “Parents With Inconvenient Truths About Trans,” which collects the personal stories and essays by parents who have had their lives and the lives of their children destroyed by gender ideology.
