The world’s richest man has it right. Last Friday Elon Musk tweeted, “[a]ny parent or doctor who sterilizes a child before they are a consenting adult should go to prison for life.”

Twenty years ago this would not have been a controversial statement. The general response would have been, “of course.” But today it is a position at the very edge of a massive chasm that exists between the left and the right. How did this happen, and why?

It is not as if Elon Musk is a distant observer, who emerges from his executive suite from time to time to issue statements just to weigh in on current controversies. For him it is also a personal matter. A month ago, Musk’s 18-year-old son by a previous marriage filed a a petition for a name change in the Santa Monica Superior Court. He also petitioned for a new birth certificate, changing his sex to female. The wide rift that exists in our culture, apparently is equally as wide within the billionaire’s own family.

So called “trans-affirming care” — puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgery — have been restricted, banned or are under consideration in 15 states: Indiana, Idaho, West Virginia, Kentucky, Georgia, Iowa, Tennessee, Mississippi, South Dakota, Utah, Florida, Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas and Kansas.

In the remaining states the care remains legal and several have passed or are attempting to pass laws that will make the states trans sanctuaries.

A bill is under consideration to do just that in Illinois, but it has remained in the Assignment Committee since February, with no other action taken so far. California, by law, already is a trans sanctuary and in Minnesota legislation has passed in the House to become a sanctuary state. By Executive Order, Governor Tim Walz already has required protection for “gender-affirming” care since March 8th.

In Colorado, Governor Jared Polis signed a bill on April 14^th making that state the third official sanctuary state. On April 12^th, the Washington State House passed an amended version of a Senate Bill that protects runaway trans children and allows them to get hormone therapy and surgery without parental consent, although the Department of Children, Youth and Families has to be involved.  That bill apparently needs Senate approval before being sent to the Governor. Many other states are taking up this issue as well.

The Biden Administration is fully behind “trans-affirming” care and has declared it “settled science.” Biden, himself, just released a statement opposing H.R. 734, a bill that would require children to play on teams that align with their biological sex. The President says if it reaches his desk, he will veto it.

It is simply incredible and nonsensical that this deep divide exists. Even Saturday Night Live, which was once a comedy show, took up the issue over this past weekend. In an unfunny skit with Molly Kearney, the show took shots at several red states for banning what she called “health care for trans kids.” The left refuses even to look at the possibility that chemicals that sterilize, and surgery that mutilates and sterilizes children could be viewed as destructive, not helpful.

Anyone who speaks out against medical intervention for children risks condemnation and even physical assaults. Those who favor medical intervention become completely unhinged by any challenge to their views, making it impossible to have a civil debate. There is no debate, according to the left, pointing to the endorsement of “gender-affirming” care by the American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, Children’s Hospital Association, and others as confirmation for their position.

We cannot get a coherent answer to the question of why these organizations support such care, when in Europe, where trans hormone therapy and trans surgery started, the medical clinics are being shut down. The preferred therapy there is now talk therapy.

Why the difference?

Popular bloggers, Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster, recently hosted Jamie Reed on their podcast, Triggernometry. Reed is the whistleblower who exposed the destructive transgender care practices at Washington University Transgender Clinic in St. Louis, MO. The clinic currently is under criminal investigation by the Missouri Attorney General.

Reed is a gay woman who is married to a transgender man and worked in the clinic managing the care for the clinic’s patients for the last several years. Initially it was expected the clinic would care for 50 or so patients a year, but 50 turned into hundreds, then thousands.

Kisin asked Reed how she explained this explosion of trans-identifying children. While Reed’s observations cannot be generalized to other populations, she has come to a few conclusions based on the thousands she saw. Her view was interesting.

She observed that white children in the U.S. are indoctrinated to believe they are privileged, and because of that they are seen as “oppressors.” Many are desperate to escape that label. Because they are white, it is difficult for them to claim a different race or ethnic identity. They can’t claim poverty when their family is affluent, and they find it too difficult to identify as gay or lesbian. It is easier for them to claim to be non-binary or trans. Trans seems to be the path of least resistance to become a member of an oppressed group, freeing them from condemnation as an oppressor.

She didn’t explain what accounts for other racial or ethnic groups who identify as trans, other than to say that most of the upsurge, she believes, is fueled by social media. These children are encouraged to join the oppressed class. She said if you took most of these kids to a farm in Montana and took away their phones, it would be better for them than the treatment they receive in gender clinics. The idea they were trans would most likely vanish.

Doctors, too, are affected by social and professional pressures. More important, she said, is that each medical professional is merely a “cog in a spinning machine.” The machine involves multiple professionals, each one carrying out his or her specific task. If any one of them stops or does something different the entire machine breaks down. Each professional performs his assigned task to the best of his ability, without the necessity to evaluate the entire spinning machine. That is someone else’s responsibility. They don’t think about it.

It reminds me of an examination of the people who were involved in Hitler’s death camps. Both Hannah Arendt and Christopher Browning looked at the phenomena of seemingly normal people committing mass murders in places like Auschwitz and multiple other concentration camps.

Both authors pointed to the Nazis using a division of labor as a way that allowed each worker an out. They were just one cog in a very large wheel, disconnected from ultimate responsibility for the mass exterminations. Someone else was responsible for designing the machine and keeping it going, not them.

The church, too, has taken sides on transgender divide, many of them coming down on the side of genital mutilation in the name of love, as the church from Revelation’s Thyatira might have taken. Most won’t adopt a position, being too cowardly to pick a side, much like the church at Laodicea would have done.

Very few follow the model of the church at Philadelphia, which faithfully followed God’s will.

Today the church is not driving the culture. It is being driven by it, transformed by it. Nothing is going to change in Chicago, or Springfield, or Washington D.C. until the church stands up and becomes an instrument of both truth and grace. That looks like that’s a long way off, but it could happen overnight if enough Christians answer the call.

Can you hear it?

Read more:

Analysis: Illinois One of 29 States Allowing Boys to Play Girls’ High School Sports (Prairie State Wire)

The Trans Quagmire – How We Got Here (Thomas Hampson)

[VIDEO] Transgenderism is The Most Dangerous Extremist Movement in The U.S. (Tucker Carlson)

[VIDEO] Riley Gaines Speaks Out Against Trans-Insanity in Women’s Sports

[VIDEO] Transgender Agenda Run Amuck (Fox News Channel)

New CA Bill Requires Foster Parents to Swear Allegiance to LGBT Ideology (California Family Council)

Opposing Transgenderism Is Not Genocide (Oliver Perry)

30 Transgender Regretters Come Out Of The Closet (The Federalist)

[PODCAST] Generation Indoctrination: Inside the Transgender Battle (Christian Post)

During the mid-90’s, international condemnation was directed at the practice of female circumcision, a euphemism for female genital mutilation. When people became aware of this barbaric procedure practiced in some countries, people all over the world, including the people in the United States, quickly responded by passing legislation outlawing the procedure for minors. The U.S. Law, The Female Genital Mutilation Act of 1996, outlawed the procedure in all 50 States and it made it a crime to take a child to another country for that purpose as well. It passed with substantial bipartisan support.

The surgery was common in some Muslim countries to prevent young girls, and women, from becoming sexually aroused. This mutilation of young girls surgically created sexual disfunction in hundreds of thousands of girls and woman across the globe. Tens of thousands of immigrant girls were affected in the United States before it was stopped.

People everywhere abhor harming children.

So where is the outrage over the practice of chemically and surgically mutilating children under the euphemism of “gender affirming care?” This kind of care is even more destructive than “female circumcision.”

Gender affirming care is not care at all.

Recipients of such treatment are forever rendered incapable of having children or even experiencing a normal sexual response. Once started on the path of changing their sexual identity, which is biologically impossible, the boy or girl will be dependent on medical intervention for the rest of his or her life. In addition, these interventions cause other, sometimes very serious, medical issues that have to be addressed as well.

Despite the investment of tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars, the patients remain the same. If they were born male, they will die male. If they were born female, they will die female. Any change is merely cosmetic, a series of very expensive chemical and/or surgical distortions of their bodies.

In the United States, it is full speed ahead on promoting transgender medical interventions for children. The American Academy of Pediatrics promotes “an affirm only/affirm early policy.” And the current administration claims that “gender affirming care” is settled science, the preferred method to treat gender dysphoria.

But that is a lie. It is far from settled science. There is a growing body of evidence that medical interventions are exactly the wrong thing to do.

The organization, Do No Harm, “a diverse group of physicians, healthcare professionals, medical students, patients, and policymakers” takes issue with this claim. A recent study they conducted compared treatment approaches between the United States and European Countries.  The study found that:

“Northern and Western Europe, which share the United States’ broad support for transgenderism, reject the gender-affirming care model for children . . . [T]hese countries now discourage automatic deference to a child’s self-declarations on the grounds that the risks outweigh the benefits, while also calling for months-long psychotherapy sessions to address the co-occurring mental health problems.”

The Tavistock Gender clinic for children in London, which was a model for the establishment of other such clinics around the world, actually shut down last year. Meanwhile gender clinics for children are opening up and expanding all over the United States.

Not only the Do No Harm group is pushing back against the medical interventions. A study just released this year by Abbruzzese, Levine and Mason on “The Myth of ‘Reliable Research’ in Pediatric Gender Medicine: A critical evaluation of the Dutch Studies—and research that has followed” found that there is very weak to no empirical support for chemical and surgical treatments for pediatric transgender patients. Their conclusion is that no such treatments should be administered unless and until there is empirical evidence the treatments work. Currently there is no such evidence. There is no empirical evidence sufficient to justify medical interventions.

So I ask again, where is the outrage over the practice of chemically and surgically mutilating children under the euphemism of “gender affirming care?” Why has this become a political issue instead of purely an issue of what is best for the child? Why are so many doctors perfectly willing to perform surgery on children to remove their ovaries and testes, to destroy the penises and vaginas, to remove the uterus and breasts of girls—all healthy organs, sterilizing them forever. Even the chemicals sterilize them.

Why? And how can anyone remain silent about this legally sanctioned horror show?

Recently, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, University of Virginia Children’s Hospital, Boston Children’s Hospital, Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Transgender Health Clinic, and Akron Children’s Hospital have been under fire for engaging in experimental cross-sex hormone-doping on gender-confused teens—some effects of which are risky and irreversible—and for performing mutilating surgeries on the healthy sexual anatomy of minors. These Mengelesque procedures are beginning to pierce the consciences of Americans. While the growing outrage over what scores of hospitals and gender clinics are doing is a very good thing, it’s troubling that it’s taken this long.

Seven years ago, I wrote about Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago performing a double mastectomy on a 17-year-old girl from Grayslake, Illinois, whose birth name is Emily Paschal. How many more healthy breasts of minors have surgeons at Lurie lopped off since 2015?

The doctor who began Emily—now “Emmett”—on a path to affirming her metaphysical confusion via drugs was the infamous and ubiquitous homosexual, Dr. Robert Garofalo, who was profiled in a 2015 article titled “The Change Agent” published in Chicago Magazine. The profile reveals that Lurie’s lurid clinic was the brainchild of activist Garofalo:

Garofalo’s clinic, one of only 25 of its kind in the nation and the first to open in the Midwest, is pushing the boundaries of treatments for the growing population of transgender kids. In the past, patients this young were often redirected through “corrective” therapy to more gender-typical behaviors; Garofalo and his 25-person team take a much different approach: They aid these patients in transitioning.

Garofalo believes he’s “helping” confused children, who often suffer from co-morbidities like autism spectrum disorder, anxiety, and depression, “become their authentic selves.” By “authentic selves,” Garofalo is referring to what adolescents’ confused, troubled minds desire years before their brains are fully developed.

Chicago Magazine writes about one patient of Garofalo, a boy (i.e., an actual boy) who was named David at birth, then became “Jae” in 2013, then became “Diana” in 2015 when Garofalo recommended he start doping estrogen:

It wasn’t until she [sic] was 12 and saw an episode of Oprah about transgender women that she [sic] realized her [sic] situation was more complicated. She [sic] asked her [sic] mom to make an appointment with Garofalo. The doctor immediately put her [sic] on Lupron, a treatment for prostate cancer and fibroid tumors that also happens to suppress puberty.

As with so many adolescents today, David diagnosed himself.

Prior to starting David/Jae/Diana on the estrogen-doping regimen, Garofalo gave him and his mother Lisa Salas the requisite consent form:

“There are a lot of wishy-washy statements here,” Garofalo continues as he hands them the form. “That’s because there haven’t been many studies on the long-term effects of estrogen on young people.” He pauses to look at Diana’s mother. “I wish I could tell you everything that’s going to happen, but I can’t. There’s just so much that we don’t know yet.”

And with that, the diabolical Garofalo proceeded.

Lurie was initially leery of Garofalo’s proposed gender clinic, but J.B. Pritzker’s deep-pocketed, burly, cross-dressing cousin James/ “Jennifer” Pritzker ensured it come to fruition:

Leading the way through this uncharted water is Garofalo, a 49-year-old HIV-positive cancer survivor who readily admits he doesn’t have all the answers. Since he opened the clinic—thanks to a significant grant, matched by Lurie, from a foundation run by Jennifer Pritzker, the billionaire investor and philanthropist who came out as transgender in 2013—Garofalo has emerged as a leader in the adolescent transgender field. He travels the world to speak on the topic, is regularly brought in by medical schools and hospitals to train young pediatricians, and serves as a primary investigator on a National Institutes of Health research grant focusing on transgender people.

For those who don’t know, the Pritzkers are essential members of the cabal to socially construct their deviant beliefs about “transgenderism”–or what investigative journalist Jennifer Bilek more accurately calls “synthetic sex identities,” (SSI)–in every corner of American life.

Chicago Magazine gets nervily close to indicting Garofalo’s disturbing vision for gender-confused youth but ultimately bails by using the passive voice to avoid saying who questions Garofalo’s actions:

Garofalo’s treatments have to be seen as a radical form of medical improvisation, and that scares some folks.

Garofalo has historically been an outlier in the unholy quest to harm children:

Both the Endocrine Society and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health recommend waiting until patients are 16 to begin them on cross-sex hormone treatment. But Garofalo and other doctors at the clinic … will start patients as young as 14 on hormones. … Garofalo has had patients as young as 15 undergo top surgery.

Remember, this was written over seven years ago.

Matt Walsh recently exposed a Vanderbilt University Medical School doctor admitting that disfiguring minors makes big bucks for hospitals, not to mention for counselors, endocrinologists, pediatricians, surgeons, and the maker of Lupron.

Garofalo and his minions at Lurid make sure they squeeze money out of everyone they can to fund their dirty work:

Transgender treatments aren’t cheap—Lupron, for example, costs $8,500 to $18,000 a year—but Garofalo works with his patients, including those on Medicaid, to help get insurance companies to cover the medications. “Nearly every patient who comes through the door gets a denial initially from their insurance,” says Ginny Scheffler, the clinic’s nurse, who spends a good bit of her time writing appeals on behalf of patients. But even those without coverage can get treatment at Lurie thanks to private donations, including one from the Chicago transgender filmmaker Lana Wachowski of The Matrix fame.

Because of the profitability of creating synthetic sex identities for minors, because of the social contagion nature of “trans” identification, because of the terror instilled in parents by profiteers and ideologues, and because of the collaborationist silence of those who know the movement is evil, a low estimate of the number of children ages 6-17 who were diagnosed with gender dysphoria in 2021 is over 42,000. That is 42,000+ children who are being exploited and harmed for profit and for the social and political goals of adults who want to normalize their perverse desires.

And now we have public elementary schools reading picture books to little ones that affirm leftist beliefs about cross-sex impersonation. We have public libraries dragging in drag queens to read stories to toddlers. We have policies that enable teachers to keep secrets from parents about their children’s cross-sex impersonation at school. We have an organization committed to finding “trans”-complicit adults to appropriate wayward confused children from their parents. And perhaps the most alarming recent development is a bill sponsored by deviant California State Senator Scott Wiener and signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom that empowers “California courts to strip parents [from other states] of custody if a [non-parent] person takes the parents’ child to California and arranges for the child to receive gender transition procedures.”

“Trans”-cultism did not emerge on the cultural scene suddenly in the last two years. It didn’t emerge suddenly in 2015 after the disastrous Obergefell U.S. Supreme Court decision. “Trans”-cultism has been metastasizing for decades, destroying the hearts, minds, and bodies of children and teens; corrupting schools; shattering families; undermining First Amendment rights; and sexually integrating private spaces and sports.

Illinois Family Institute (IFI) has been warning about it for almost fifteen years, and so we have been watching with mixed feelings the long-anticipated, desired, and prayed-for anti-“trans”-cult movement grow.

We are thankful that at last parents and others on both sides of the political aisle are speaking out against the evil of “trans”-cultism. We are also sad and frustrated that it has taken so long for Americans in large numbers to speak out against this evil, resulting in untold numbers of children being grievously and irreparably harmed.

One of my first articles after being hired by IFI in the fall of 2008 was about lesbian Laurel Dykstra who had written a how-to article on ideologically grooming preschoolers into the “trans” cult. Her article, titled “Trans-Friendly Preschool,” was published in 2005.

My article, titled “Soulless Teaching,” summarizes Dykstra’s suggestions for indoctrinating preschoolers. Here are some of the claims and recommendations Dykstra, now a pastor, made 17 years ago. See if anything sounds familiar:

• She said that the “gender binary system…. is harmful to everyone.”

• She moralized that “It is not enough for classrooms, teachers, and schools to be ‘open’ or ‘non-judgmental’; they need to be actively trans-positive.”

• Dykstra recommended that when talking to preschoolers, teachers should say things like “‘Well, most men have penises, but some don’t,’” and “‘Some girls grow up to be men.’”

• She urged teachers to “Encourage kids to question their assumptions. ‘How do you know that that person is a woman? Could a man wear a dress?’”

• She instructed teachers to “Call children by the name and the pronouns they choose.”

• She recommended accessorizing classrooms with a “Tranny Teddy. Have a non-gendered toy/doll/puppet…. Do not use pronouns and give this creature a variety of gendered clothing, such as a skirt and tie. If asked, say ‘Oh, Binker isn’t a boy or a girl.’”

• She suggested having a “Butch/Femme Day. Why not teach kids language like butch/femme, as an alternative to boy/girl or male/female? You could have dress-up days to play deliberately with gender, like ‘Fabulous and Fearless Day’ or ‘Capable and Campy.’”

• She encouraged teachers to “Invite a drag performer or transsexual person who would be willing to share their story and a photo album.”

• When reading picture books to preschoolers, Dykstra recommended “switching pronouns, avoiding them altogether, or using alternative pronouns.”

• Dykstra rationalized using deceit in the face of parental opposition: “For ‘stealth practitioners’ (i.e., teachers in a transphobic setting), these classroom suggestions can be implemented without fanfare to create a more just and welcoming classroom.”

I reiterated her recommendations again in a 2018 article titled “Queering Government Schools: Just Say No.”

In 2017, when leftists everywhere were promoting the specious claim that the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) supports the social, chemical, and surgical “transitioning” of minor children and teens, I wrote an article exposing the disturbing way the AAP developed its position on the treatment of gender-dysphoric children. That article, titled “Do 66,000 Pediatricians Really Support the AAP’s Trans-Affirmative Policy,” outlines the secret process by which the AAP ensured its policy would reflect only leftist views.

The following year, 2018, I wrote an article titled “55 Members of the American Academy of Pediatrics Devise Destructive ‘Trans’ Policy,” exposing in greater detail the position of the AAP select-committee on harming children through profitable-but-medically-unsubstantiated protocols.

By the way, Lurid’s creepy Dr. Robert Garofalo has been instrumental in the social construction and imposition of the AAP’s non-science-based “trans” affirming policy.

In 2017, I wrote an article titled, “Things You Don’t Hear About Gender Dysphoria,” which lists 13 bulleted facts about gender dysphoria in minors and the health risks and grotesque nature of the “treatments” from which hospitals are profiting handsomely.

And still the medical cultists march on, surgical weapons unsheathed.

There are steps churches, parents, and other concerned citizens can take to begin to undo the damage done by synthetic sex identitarians and their apostles. In addition to removing your children from schools that affirm synthetic sex identities, watch and discuss these three documentaries with your children and in church youth groups:

Dysconnected: The Real Story Behind the Transgender Explosion 

Whose Children Are They? 

What is a Woman?

Written by Patience Griswold

Amid growing international pushback on the transgender movement’s so-called “gender affirmative” approach to gender dysphoria and the rush to give minors experimental treatments including puberty-blockers, cross-sex hormones, and irreversible surgeries, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) has released new draft guidelines recommending a less radical approach than they have held to in the past.

Rather than immediately rushing adolescents into a lifetime of hormone “treatments” and surgeries, the draft guidelines recommend mental health evaluation and several years of monitoring for adolescents with gender dysphoria, although they continue to encourage harmful and irreversible procedures after that.

WPATH, an international organization headquartered in Minnesota, plays an extremely influential role in the use of so-called “treatments” such as cross-sex hormones and “gender transition” surgery. Throughout the rest of the draft guidelines, WPATH continues to recommend so-called “gender affirmative treatments” that have caused permanent harm to young people and adults, yet the proposed draft offers slightly more protection to adolescents struggling with gender dysphoria than recommendations from major medical associations in the U.S. WPATH’s shift, slight though it is, also shows that on an international level, the transgender movement is recognizing that they may be held accountable for the damage they have caused.

WPATH’s draft guidelines added a chapter on adolescents requiring a full mental health evaluation and several years of monitoring before receiving cross-sex hormones or surgery. The guidelines continue to recommend irreversible surgeries for minors, including mastectomies for girls as young as 15 and “bottom surgery” for 17-year-old girls, although they do not recommend similar surgery for boys under 18. The guidelines also removed requirements that adults receive mental health evaluation, despite the fact that many adults who have detransitioned have spoken up about how the mental health struggles that were driving their gender dysphoria were not adequately addressed when they sought help.

At the same time, if WPATH adopts these guidelines, multiple major medical associations in the U.S., including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychological Association, and the Endocrine Society will be out of step with international standards, advocating an even more radical approach than WPATH. These associations encourage a so-called “gender affirmative” approach known as the “Dutch protocol,” originated by a doctor in the Netherlands who has since cautioned against his own approach. This protocol encourages medically “transitioning” children, disregarding the fact that puberty-blockers and cross-sex hormones can lead to dangerous complications including stunted bone growth, pulmonary embolisms, increased risk of heart attacks, and permanent loss of fertility.

Attempting to live in denial of biological reality is always harmful. No amount of surgery or cross-sex hormones can ever change the fact that a man is a man, and a woman is a woman, down to every single cell. People struggling with gender dysphoria deserve compassion, and true compassion never reinforces lies.

The New York Times’ coverage of WPATH’s new guidelines claims that “transition” improves mental health outcomes. However, the best studies show that this is not the case, and the studies that have been used to prop up this narrative are riddled with methodological flaws. One study claiming to show that “transition” improved mental health actually showed the opposite, a fact that the authors of the study eventually acknowledged.

Sadly, the LGBT lobby is actively working to penalize counselors and mental health professionals who would offer compassionate support to minors struggling with gender dysphoria. 20 states have implemented so-called “conversion therapy” bans and, and the five largest cities here in Minnesota have adopted them. These counseling bans interfere with the client-patient relationship and deny help to kids who are struggling with gender dysphoria, insisting that the only option that should be available to them is to be rushed to “transition,” even as a growing number of young people and adults who have detransitioned speaking out about how they have been harmed by transgender ideology.

Children and teens with gender dysphoria deserve better than to be treated as guinea pigs for the sake of advancing radical gender ideology. WPATH’s guidelines, while they offer slightly more protection than they have in the past, are dangerous and recommendations from the AAP, APA, and ES are even more so.

This article was originally published by the Minnesota Family Council.

In their quest to restrict liberty, impose morality, and control culture, leftists who claim fealty to science—including soft, pseudo, semi, and specially selected science—often neglect to share all the science available. From “trans”-cultic practices to faux-comprehensive sex ed to Covid-19, leftists cherry-pick science to justify their abuse of power.

With schools opening and COVID surging, leftists who care more about exploiting children for ideological purposes than protecting them are once again abusing science, this time to justify mask mandates for children. Justifying mandates necessitates concealing inconvenient science that stands in the way of their expansionist goal of cultural conquest.

First, a personal note in hope of forestalling accusations that I am biased against COVID-mitigating efforts or that I do not take COVID-19 seriously: I have been vaccinated.

On August 20, 2021, New York Magazine’s Intelligencer website published an article by David Zweig about the CDC’s summary published in May of a large study on the efficacy of COVID-19 mitigation measures including masks. Zweig’s article, titled “The Science of Masking Kids at School Remains Uncertain,” exposes what was omitted by the CDC in its summary. As the Delta variant spreads and increasing numbers of local and state governments are either mandating masks on children over two years old or being vilified for prohibiting mask mandates, these omissions become even more indefensible.

Zweig describes the study:

It covered more than 90,000 elementary-school students in 169 Georgia schools from November 16 to December 11 and was, according to the CDC, the first of its kind to compare COVID-19 incidence in schools with certain mitigation measures in place to other schools without those measures.

The relatively little press coverage on the study focused exclusively on the CDC’s public summary, which found “that masking then-unvaccinated teachers and improving ventilation” were associated “with a lower incidence of the virus in schools.”

Curiously, the CDC’s summary omitted some additional findings derived from the study:

These findings cast doubt on the impact of many of the most common mitigation measures in American schools. Distancing, hybrid models, classroom barriers, HEPA filters, and, most notably, requiring student masking were each found to not have a statistically significant benefit. In other words, these measures could not be said to be effective.

Zweig explains more about the nature of these omissions:

[T]he decision not to include the null effects of a student masking requirement (and distancing, hybrid models, etc.) in the summary amounted to “file drawering” these findings, a term researchers use for the practice of burying studies that don’t produce statistically significant results.

A null effect or null result “is a result without the expected content: that is, the proposed result is absent.” Zweig is saying that choosing not to include in the summary the null effects is analogous to file-drawering, which is a form of publication bias. It’s an attempt to conceal findings for reasons unrelated to science, likely in this case for political reasons.

Dr. Vinay Prasad, author and associate professor in University of California, San Francisco’s Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics criticized the file-drawered findings:

“That a masking requirement of students failed to show independent benefit is a finding of consequence and great interest. … It should have been included in the summary.”

Absence of control groups in virtually all other studies purporting to show mask efficacy for children renders those studies meaningless:

Over and over, studies and reports on children in schools with low transmission rates claim in their summaries that masking students helped keep transmission down. But looking at the underlying data in these studies, masks were always required or widely worn, and implemented in concert with a variety of other interventions, such as increased ventilation. Without a comparison group that didn’t require student masking, it’s difficult or impossible to isolate the effect of masks. (emphasis added)

The omitted findings provide information critical to decisions regarding mandatory masking of children in that such masking is not without risks. Dr. Elissa Schechter-Perkins, the director of Emergency Medicine Infectious Disease Management at Boston Medical Center warns:

“[T]here are real downsides to masking children for this long, with no known end date, and without any clear upside. … I’m not aware of any studies that show conclusively that kids wearing masks in schools has any effect on their own morbidity or mortality or on the hospitalization or death rate in the community around them.”

Dr. Lloyd Fisher, president of the Massachusetts chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) agrees:

“Mask-wearing among children is generally considered a low-risk mitigation strategy; however, the negatives are not zero, especially for young children. … It is important for children to see facial expressions of their peers and the adults around them in order to learn social cues and understand how to read emotions.”

Between the health risks of masks for children and the absence of data demonstrating the efficacy of masks in mitigating the transmission of COVID-19, it’s surprising that the CDC and AAP recommend masking all children in school over two years old.

Zweig also reports that the “U.K., Ireland, all of Scandinavia, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy—have exempted kids, with varying age cutoffs, from wearing masks in classrooms,” with results that should be reassuring to parents whom the CDC hopes to frighten into submission:

Conspicuously, there’s no evidence of more outbreaks in schools in those countries relative to schools in the U.S., where the solid majority of kids wore masks for an entire academic year and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

The rapid spread of the Delta variant has provided fuel to the fiery demands to mask all children over two.

A common argument right now is that the emergence of the Delta variant changes everything. Currently, some regions of the U.S. are seeing a surge of infections and hospitalizations among young people. But the numbers coming out of Britain continue to suggest that Delta is not more virulent–that is, it does not cause more severe illness on an individual basis to unvaccinated people–despite being more contagious. A pediatric immunologist at a major university hospital … said, “It is not biologically plausible that the same variant somehow is more dangerous for kids in the U.S. than it is in the U.K.”

If leftists stop bellowing “Follow the science” for a moment to catch their breath, someone should ask for their scientific studies proving conclusively that masking children prevents COVID-19 transmission and proving that the health benefits outweigh the costs. But don’t waste too much time waiting for their evidence. As Dr. Prasad recently wrote about the science behind the CDC’s masking policy,

The CDC cannot “follow the science” because there is no relevant science. The proposition is at best science-y; a best guess based on political pressure, pundit anxiety, and mechanistic understanding.

Leftists love their science-y fictions, which enable them to win by deception rather than by force.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Science-Y.mp3

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The recently released policy statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) in support of chemical and surgical interventions for children and teens who experience gender dysphoria, or who falsely believe they are the sex they are not, or who wish they were the sex they are not is being trumpeted far and wide by “progressives” and “progressive” organizations. That document, dripping with leftist, politically-constructed language, is titled, “Ensuring Comprehensive Care and Support for Transgender and Gender-Diverse [TGD] Children and Adolescents.”

First some facts:

1.) The policy was created by only 28 medical doctors, 2 psychologists, 1 nurse practitioner, 1 social worker, and 1 person with a PhD in behavioral sciences. At least 4 of those involved in creating the policy are not members of the AAP.

2.) In addition to the 33 people listed as writers, contributors, or liasons at the conclusion of the policy, only about another dozen members of a board would have voted on it.

3.) The policy was not presented to all 67,000 members of the AAP for a vote, nor are minority reports solicited. In fact, most of the 67,000 AAP members would not have seen the policy before it was released to the public.

So, all we know is that fewer than 60 members of the 67,000-member AAP created and voted for the new policy affirming the chemical sterilization and surgical mutilation of minors. One would think the mainstream press would include this salient information when reporting on the destructive and politicized policy.

You can read the AAP recommendations here, but a plain-speaking summary should suffice. According to the AAP,

• The medical and mental health communities should embrace and affirm the anti-science “trans” ideology by chemically sterilizing and surgically mutilating minors.

• All health records should identify only the subjective, internal feelings of minors about being “male, female, somewhere in between, a combination of both, or neither” and should conceal the biological sex of minors who seek to pass as the opposite sex.

• Insurance plans should cover all Mengelian science experiments performed on minors in their futile quest to become the sex they are not and never can be.

• Pediatricians should actively promote the “trans” dogma in public schools, community organizations, and the law.

• Federal government research should “prioritize research that is dedicated to improving the quality of evidence-based care for youth who identify as TGD.”

Note what the AAP doesn’t recommend.

• It doesn’t recommend that medical and mental health communities should provide comprehensive, biological-sex-affirming health care in a safe, clinical space.

• It doesn’t urge medical and health care professionals to ascertain when a patient’s feelings first emerged or to determine the presence of comorbidities (i.e., other conditions present simultaneously).

• It doesn’t call for research into 1. the safety of lifelong cross-sex hormone-doping, 2. the effect of social “transitioning,” and chemical and surgical interventions on desistance/persistence rates, 3. the rate of detransitioning/sex-change regret, 4. the phenomenon called “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria,” or 5. all the possible causes for the “high rates of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, self-harm, and suicide” among adolescents who self-identify as “gender diverse,” which could include abuse, molestation, social ostracism, bullying, and family breakdown.

Do the 33 AAP members know with absolute certainty that in every case of feelings of incongruence between a child’s objective, immutable biological sex and his internal feelings about his sex, the error rests with his sex and not his internal feelings?

Maybe the 33 AAP members could explain why adolescents who experience incongruence between their anatomical wholeness and their internal sense of themselves as amputees (i.e., those with Body Integrity Identity Disorder) should not be permitted surgical intervention to achieve a sense of congruence. Why is it justifiable to amputate the healthy breasts or testicles of those who identify as “gender diverse” or “trans” but not justifiable to amputate a leg below the knee in order to alleviate the feelings of incongruence that those with Body Integrity Identity Disorder experience? Why shouldn’t we allow “amputee wannabes” to socially transition at school even without surgery by being permitted use of wheel chairs and handicapped parking, and allowed more time for passing periods? Why shouldn’t school forms be required by law to falsely identify bodily whole students as having orthopedic impairments?

The 33 AAP members cite the non-medical, highly political Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) whose sole reason for existence is to exploit government schools in its quest to normalize homosexuality and the “trans” ideology. GLSEN’s non-medical, non-objective claim cited by the AAP is that schools that prohibit co-ed restrooms are guilty of having “antibullying policies” that don’t provide “specific protections for gender expression.” Never mind that sex-segregated restrooms provide specific protections based on biological sex. That doesn’t matter to either GLSEN activists or the 55 people who devised and voted for this boneheaded AAP policy.

While wandering through the thicket of citations carefully selected by the 33 AAP members, I made an interesting discovery. The AAP policy statement cited an article titled “Gender Variance and Dysphoria in Children and Adolescents,” which in turn cited an AAP document titled, “Childhood Gender Nonconformity: A Risk Indicator for Childhood Abuse and Posttraumatic Stress in Youth,” which examines the prevalence of abuse among “gender nonconforming” children. That AAP article states this:

Our study cannot determine the causal relationship between abuse and gender nonconformity; in other words, the extent to which nonconformity is a risk factor for abuse versus an indicator of abuse. (emphasis added)

The 33 members of the AAP’s pro-sterilization/pro-mutilation contingent likely don’t want the public to learn that it’s possible that childhood abuse may cause gender nonconformity, just like “trans” activists don’t want the public to learn that the well-known phenomenon of “social contagion” may lead to adolescent self-identification as “trans.”

One of the contributors to the AAP pro-sterilization/pro-mutilation policy is Dr. Robert Garofalo. He is the openly homosexual, HIV-positive doctor who is the Division Head of Adolescent Medicine at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. In a May 2015 Chicago Magazine profile of him titled “The Change Agent,” Garofalo admits that he “has had patients as young as 15 undergo top surgery.” That was then… this is now, and now double-mastectomies are ravaging the healthy bodies of girls as young as 13.

Another contributor to the new AAP policy and chief architect of the first policy is Dr. Ellen Perrin. A Tufts University profile of Perrin reports that for her, “pediatrics is more than just medicine; it’s a vehicle for social change.” A 2006 Boston Globe profile of Perrin says, “Politics, specifically politics with a progressive tincture, is in Dr. Ellen Perrin’s blood.” Further Perrin, who was “chair of Pro Family Pediatricians—a group of pediatricians opposed to the Federal Marriage Amendment,” shared that “[a]dvocacy is one of the things I do.”

Fortunately for children, there’s another medical organization that has sprung up precisely because of the radical positions taken by the AAP: the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds). You may have heard of ACPeds because the very name sends shivers of revulsion (or is it fear) up the spines of “progressives” everywhere. Why? As I asked a year ago, is it because ACPeds is composed of charlatans and snake oil salespersons who received their medical degrees from Rufus T. Firefly’s University of Freedonia?

Nope.

ACPeds is ridiculed because it holds different positions on the treatment of gender-dysphoric minors. Leftists are reluctant to discredit ACPeds based solely on disagreement about treatment protocols because that argument becomes circular: “You can’t trust ACPeds because it doesn’t support ‘gender affirmative’ protocols, and we all know ‘gender affirmative’ protocols are right.”

So, how do liberals attempt to discredit ACPeds which was founded just sixteen years ago? They do so by citing the fact that the number of members is lower than the number of AAP members—which was founded 87 years ago. That’s still a fallacious argument (i.e., appeal to popularity), but it works as a soundbite and it works for the  ignorant among us of which there are many.

Dr. Joseph Zanga, ACPEDS member who serves “as Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at the Medical College of Georgia,” Emeritus Professor of Pediatrics at Mercer University School of Medicine, and is a past president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, further clarified the policy-making process that liberals would likely prefer concealed:

• Policy Statements are produced by 10-12-member Committees or Councils, or Section or more commonly by Section Executive Committees.

• The 10 members of the AAP Board of Directors are elected by the AAP members of their district (elections never garner votes from even 40% of members) and the Executive Committee consisting of the president, president-elect, immediate past-president (elected by the AAP members nationally with equally small numbers voting), and the paid executive director (hired by the Board)

• Statements are sent to the board for review and vote. Often there is discussion at a board meeting. Rarely is there outside opinion sought, and there is never a minority report.

• AAP members often don’t even see the report until after it appears in the media. They have no direct input.

Meanwhile the AAP continues to provide reasons for pediatricians to join ACPEDS. In September 2016, the AAP discredited itself as an impartial, unbiased medical organization when it announced that henceforth it would be partnering with the nation’s largest pro-homosexual/pro-“trans” activist organization, the radical Human Rights Campaign (HRC). I wonder how many of the 67,000 AAP members voted to partner with the HRC.

Here are some HRC recommendations  from its guide for schools:

• “While this guide focuses primarily on transgender youth who are transitioning from male to female or female to male, it is important to note that a growing number of gender-expansive youth are identifying themselves outside the gender binary, and many use gender-neutral pronouns. While it may be more difficult to adapt to gender-neutral pronouns, it is still important to do so in support of the student.”

• “Another crucial element in supporting a transitioning student is giving them access to sex-separated facilities, activities or programs based on the student’s gender identity [including] [r]estrooms, locker rooms, health and physical education classes, competitive athletics, overnight field trips, [and] homecoming court and prom.”

• “Any student who feels uncomfortable sharing facilities with a transgender student should be allowed to use another more private facility like the bathroom in the nurse’s office, but a transgender student should never be forced to use alternative facilities to make other students comfortable.”

Leftists assume that hard science provides all the answers to our ethical questions, and, therefore, we need only defer to our objective scientific organizations to point the way to sexual Shangri-La. But science does not provide answers to moral questions, and our scientific organizations are not objective. When in ten or twenty years the medical community and public at large are faced with the enormity of the harm done to children and teens by the “trans” ideology, I hope feckless doctors, school administrators, teachers, and “progressive” pundits are still around to answer for the damage they facilitated.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

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I’ve read umpteen times that the 66,000-member American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) supports the use of opposite-sex restrooms and locker rooms in schools by gender-dysphoric students. Wowzer! 66,000? That’s a lot of pediatricians.

A few weeks ago I got to ruminating on that mind-boggling claim. It seemed implausible that all 66,000 pediatricians could believe something so radical. So, I set off on a quest to dig into this claim, and what I learned is surprising.

Fortunately for me and my quest, there’s another medical organization that has sprung up precisely because of the radical positions taken by the AAP: the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds). You may have heard of ACPeds because the very name sends shivers of revulsion (or is it fear) up the spines of liberals everywhere. Why? Is it because ACPeds is composed of charlatans and snake oil salespersons who received their medical degrees from Rufus T. Firefly’s University of Freedonia?

Nope.

ACPeds is ridiculed because it holds different positions on the treatment of gender-dysphoria in minors. Leftists are reluctant to discredit ACPeds based solely on disagreement about treatment protocols because that argument becomes circular: “You can’t trust ACPeds because it doesn’t support ‘gender affirmative’ protocols, and we all know ‘gender affirmative’ protocols are right.”

So, how do liberals attempt to discredit ACPeds which was founded just fifteen years ago? They do so by citing the fact that the membership numbers are lower than are the membership numbers in the AAP which was founded 87 years ago. Still a fallacious argument (i.e., appeal to popularity), but it works as a soundbite and it works for ignorant school board members.

In addition to being a fallacious appeal to popularity, it also implies a factual error—or is it an alternative fact? It implies without stating that 66,000 pediatricians support co-ed locker rooms.

How many AAP members support the AAP’s policy on co-ed restrooms/locker rooms?

The truth is we have no idea how many AAP members support co-ed restroom and locker room policies (or puberty blockers, cross-sex hormone-doping, or double mastectomies for minors) because they’ve never been polled. All we do know is the approximate number of members who created and voted on the AAP’s policy on gender-dysphoric students.

Well, more accurately some people know the approximate number of AAP members who imposed this policy on the AAP. I hope to change that.

Dr. Michelle Cretella, a board-certified pediatrician who serves as the president of ACPeds shared this illuminating information about the AAP policy:

AAP Policy is created by fewer than 30 pediatricians without general member input.

Dr. Joseph Zanga, who serves “as Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at the Medical College of Georgia” and Emeritus  Professor of Pediatrics at Mercer University School of Medicine,  and is a past president of the American Academy of Pediatrics further clarified the policy-making process that liberals would likely prefer concealed:

• Policy Statements are produced by 10-12 member Committees or Councils, or Section (e.g., School Health, Adolescence, or Bioethics) or more commonly by Section Executive Committees, whose members are nominated by their AAP State Chapter Committees (or members of the Section) and selected by Committees of the AAP Board. Confirmation is by the Board of Directors. Section Executive Committees are elected by the Section members.

• The 10 members of the AAP Board of Directors are elected by the AAP members of their district (elections never garner votes from even 40% of members) and the Executive Committee consisting of the president, president-elect, immediate past-president (elected by the AAP members nationally with equally small numbers voting), and the paid executive director (hired by the Board)

• Statements are sent to the board for review and vote. Often there is discussion at a board meeting. Rarely is there outside opinion sought, and there is never a minority report. 

• AAP members often don’t even see the report until after it appears in the media. They have no direct input.

In contrast, here’s a description of the process by which ACPeds develops policy:

The ACPeds has our entire membership (500 pediatric health professionals) comment and vote upon our statements prior to release. If 25% of our members object to the statement, it will not be released.

In addition, ACPeds partners with other organizations to promote views different from the views for which two dozen AAP members voted:

The 4 physician groups representing over 20K [physicians and other health experts] who affirm that transgender beliefs are a problem of the mind include the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, ACPeds, the Catholic Medical Association, and the Christian Medical & Dental Associations.

Commit this information to memory so that the next time a feckless “progressive” school board member or lawmaker proclaims from on high that the “66,000-member AAP” is in favor of co-ed restrooms and locker rooms, you can clarify that all we know is that fewer than two dozen of the 66,000 members of the AAP created and voted in favor of co-ed restrooms and locker rooms in public schools.

The Executive Committee that wrote the AAP’s “gender affirmative” “trans” policy

According to Dr. Manga, while “there are dozens of AAP Sections” only a “few write policy statements” as the “LGBT Section” did. Below are the names of the seven members of the Executive Committee for the “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Health and Wellness,” Section, which has only 342 members (who were unlikely to have voted on the policy).

IFI learned that at least two of these seven Executive Committee members are homosexual, so while homosexuals constitute about 3.5% of the population, they constitute almost 30% (perhaps even 40%) of this AAP committee. And another of the members has an adult homosexual child:

Dr. Lynn Hunt (lesbian)

Dr. Ellen C. Perrin

Dr. Chadwick Taylor Rodgers

Dr. Anne Theresa Gearhart

Dr. David M. Jaffe (homosexual)

Dr. Joseph A. Waters

Anne Gramiak (not a medical doctor)

A Tufts University profile of one of the chief architects of the AAP policy, Dr. Ellen Perrin, reports that for Perrin “pediatrics is more than just medicine; it’s a vehicle for social change.” According to the profile, Perrin is a “leading expert on same-sex parenting, with her research showing that there is no relationship between parents’ sexual orientation and any measure of a child’s emotional, social, or behavioral adjustment.” Further Perrin, who was “chair of Pro Family Pediatricians—a group of pediatricians opposed to the Federal Marriage Amendment,” shared that “[a]dvocacy is one of the things I do.”

In doing research on the “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Health and Wellness” Section of the AAP, I was unpleasantly surprised to learn that one of the members of the AAP’s Committee on Adolescence is none other than Chicago’s own Dr. Robert Garofalo about whom I’ve written. He is the openly homosexual, HIV-positive doctor who is the Division Head of Adolescent Medicine at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. In a May 2015 Chicago Magazine profile of him titled “The Change Agent,”  Garofalo admits that he “has had patients as young as 15 undergo top surgery.” You read that right. Some Mengelian doctors are performing double mastectomies on physically healthy 15-year-old girls.

The AAP: a partisan political arm of the Human Rights Campaign

In terms of policy positions regarding sexuality, the AAP is now formally a partisan political organization. Six months ago, the AAP began partnering with the nation’s largest pro-homosexual/pro-“trans” activist organization: the radical Human Rights Campaign (HRC), thus discrediting it as an impartial, unbiased medical organization.

Here are some HRC recommendations  from its guide for schools:

While this guide focuses primarily on transgender youth who are transitioning from male to female or female to male, it is important to note that a growing number of gender-expansive youth are identifying themselves outside the gender binary, and many use gender-neutral pronouns. While it may be more difficult to adapt to gender-neutral pronouns, it is still important to do so in support of the student.

Another crucial element in supporting a transitioning student is giving them access to sex-separated facilities, activities or programs based on the student’s gender identity [including] [r]estrooms, locker rooms, health and physical education classes, competitive athletics, overnight field trips, [and] homecoming court and prom.

Any student who feels uncomfortable sharing facilities with a transgender student should be allowed to use another more private facility like the bathroom in the nurse’s office, but a transgender student should never be forced to use alternative facilities to make other students comfortable.

Leftists assume that hard science provides all the answers to our ethical questions, and, therefore, we need only defer to our objective scientific organizations to point the way to Shangri-La. But science does not provide answers to moral questions, and our scientific organizations are not objective. As ACPeds correctly points out, even the practice of medicine is informed by one’s worldview:

The debate over how to treat children with [gender dysphoria] is primarily an ethical dispute: one that concerns physician worldview as much as science. Medicine does not occur in a moral vacuum; every therapeutic action or inaction is the result of a moral judgment of some kind that arises from the physician’s philosophical worldview. Medicine also does not occur in a political vacuum and being on the wrong side of sexual politics can have severe consequences for individuals who hold the politically incorrect view.

If the AAP ever decides to poll its members to find out exactly how many support or oppose the radical policy concocted by the gang of 7, they best make it anonymous because there’s nothing quite like the fury of  liberals who’ve had their views scorned. Just ask Dr. Kenneth Zucker.

This version has been updated to reflect minor corrections.

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