Transgender Rights and Child Abuse

At some point, hopefully in the not-so-distant future, people will look back at the transgender rights movement and ask themselves: What were we thinking?

In the name of settled science pediatricians and other medical professionals are embracing the notion that a child is whatever he believes that he is. Pediatrician Michelle Cretella is not the first to challenge the current orthodoxy, but she does an excellent job of addressing this mass delusion.

Here, for your edification, a few salient excerpts. Since there is no biological basis for transgender beliefs, physicians have had to invent a psychological basis.

Cretella remarks:

The transition-affirming view holds that children who “consistently and persistently insist” that they are not the gender associated with their biological sex are innately transgender.

(The fact that in normal life and in psychiatry, anyone who “consistently and persistently insists” on anything else contrary to physical reality is considered either confused or delusional is conveniently ignored.)

The point is almost too obvious to repeat, but we seem clearly to be in the realm of delusional beliefs here.

Once a child persuades everyone that he is not a he or that she is not a she, the medical profession begins a series of interventions:

The transition-affirming protocol tells parents to treat their children as the gender they desire, and to place them on puberty blockers around age 11 or 12 if they are gender dysphoric.

If by age 16, the children still insist that they are trapped in the wrong body, they are placed on cross-sex hormones, and biological girls may obtain a double mastectomy.

So-called “bottom surgeries,” or genital reassignment surgeries, are not recommended before age 18, though some surgeons have recently argued against this restriction.

Of course, you are dealing with children. And you are ignoring the fact, Cretella adds, that the vast majority of children who believe that they are not who they are will eventually change their minds:

Even the American Psychological Association’s Handbook of Sexuality and Psychology admits that prior to the widespread promotion of transition affirmation, 75 to 95 percent of pre-pubertal children who were distressed by their biological sex eventually outgrew that distress. The vast majority came to accept their biological sex by late adolescence after passing naturally through puberty.

And, of course, as I have mentioned here, the new age of transgender rights has caused a spike in the number of confused children who want to belong:

But with transition affirmation now increasing in Western society, the number of children claiming distress over their gender—and their persistence over time—has dramatically increased. For example, the Gender Identity Development Service in the United Kingdom alone has seen a 2,000 percent increase in referrals since 2009.

But, transgender rights advocates insist that if children are not mutilated with hormone treatments and surgery, they will commit suicide. The claim does not withstand scrutiny:

Adults who undergo sex reassignment—even in Sweden, which is among the most LGBT-affirming countries—have a suicide rate nearly 20 times greater than that of the general population. Clearly, sex reassignment is not the solution to gender dysphoria.

Of course, it amounts to little more than systematic child abuse, and child torture:

These professionals are using the myth that people are born transgender to justify engaging in massive, uncontrolled, and unconsented experimentation on children who have a psychological condition that would otherwise resolve after puberty in the vast majority of cases.

Today’s institutions that promote transition affirmation are pushing children to impersonate the opposite sex, sending many of them down the path of puberty blockers, sterilization, the removal of healthy body parts, and untold psychological damage.

These harms constitute nothing less than institutionalized child abuse. Sound ethics demand an immediate end to the use of pubertal suppression, cross-sex hormones, and sex reassignment surgeries in children and adolescents, as well as an end to promoting gender ideology via school curricula and legislative policies.