If Erin Lee had known what her 12-year-old daughter would be exposed to during an afterschool “art club” last May, she would have never allowed her to go.

It began innocently enough. Lee received a text from her daughter asking if she could stay late for an “art club” at Wellington Middle School near Fort Collins, Colorado.

What happened next, though, would change their lives forever.

The “art club” was actually a meeting of the school’s Genders & Sexualities Alliance (GSA) club, a group dedicated to supporting homosexuality, transgenderism, and other nontraditional ideas about gender and sexuality.

When the leader told Amanda (name changed to protect the minor) she must be “queer” if she didn’t feel sexually attracted to anybody, and that she must be “transgender” if she didn’t feel fully comfortable in her own body, the shy little girl suspected something wasn’t right.

According to Amanda, that same leader told her not to tell her parents about what would be discussed that day.

The woman in charge, Kimberly Chambers, who works as a “health equity initiatives coordinator” for Larimer County and director of the pro-LGBT organization SPLASH Youth of Northern Colorado, also handed out her personal contact information to the children and urged them to contact her anytime.

Chambers’ organization has boasted of teaching children ages 12 to 16 about “polyamory”—relationships with multiple sexual partners simultaneously—and other controversial ideas.

During the afterschool GSA club, according to Amanda, Chambers explained to the children that their family homes may not be a “safe space,” but that there were “resources” available. She also handed out transgender flags and stickers that Amanda understood were supposed to represent the children in the club.

As soon as Lee picked up her daughter at school, it was clear that something was “off,” the mother told The Epoch Times in a series of interviews about the incident.

Amanda, looking confused, showed her mother the transgender paraphernalia she had received from Chambers. The transgender flag represented her, Amanda told her mom.

“My heart started racing and my mind blacked out,” Lee recounted. “I was in so much shock that I struggled to get out any words.”

Even though the GSA leader at school had told Amanda it was OK to lie to her parents, Amanda knew better. Over the days that followed, she told her parents everything, Lee said.

Amanda’s parents could hardly believe what they were hearing. Lee, who has described herself as an “ally of the LGBTQ community” and said she has a history of voting “pretty progressively on social issues,” was appalled.

But that would be just the beginning of an ordeal that continues to haunt the family.

The Fallout 

Amanda never went back to the school after that. Instead, her parents put her in a local Christian school, even though it meant Lee would have to work nights to afford it. But as Lee and her husband saw it, there was no other choice.

Despite being pulled out of Wellington Middle School, the family’s difficulties grew.

After the lesson, Amanda began to wonder whether she might truly be queer and transgender. Her mental state began to rapidly deteriorate, her mother said.

Multiple family members confirmed that prior to what Lee describes as the “grooming” of her daughter at school, Amanda never showed any signs of “gender dysphoria,” the term used by psychiatrists to describe discomfort with one’s biological sex.

Afterward, though, it was hard for the girl to shake the idea.

Lee and her husband, who was outraged by the ordeal, struggled for months with how to talk to their daughter about what had happened.

“We didn’t want to say something that would push her further into this dark hole or further into this transgender label,” Lee said. “And we did exactly what the trusted adults who indoctrinated her told her we would do. We played right into their narrative.”

Weeks after the incident, as her mental state got worse, the parents decided to take Amanda to a therapist. The therapist also ended up being “queer,” and sought to affirm the young girl’s confusion about her gender.

By December, between the COVID isolation and the questions surrounding her gender, Amanda’s mental state was spiraling downward, Lee said.

The pediatrician immediately prescribed powerful psychotropic drugs for depression—medications that she has since been weaned from—in an attempt to deal with the crisis.

“I don’t know if that fear will ever go away,” Lee said about her own concerns. “I don’t expect to ever stop being struck with sadness about what happened.”

Fighting Back 

The more she thought about the whole ordeal, the more Lee realized she had to do something.

First, she contacted Chambers, the woman who Lee says “groomed” her daughter and who also sometimes works as a substitute teacher for the district. “Her response was alarming,” Lee said. “It was delusional. She doubled down on her actions.”

Next she contacted the principal, who seemed empathetic but confirmed that secret GSA meetings with children were an intentional part of creating a “safe space” at school.

There are more than two dozen self-proclaimed LGBTQ children in the small middle school, according to social media posts by SPLASH. And the district is determined that they be “affirmed” without parental involvement, Lee said.

After all that, Lee spoke out at a school board meeting and contacted all its members by email. None responded. When she was finally able to sit down with two of them, they both “supported everything that transpired and refused to address any of my concerns.”

Finally, exasperated and realizing her first call would have been to the police if this had occurred on a playground or any other setting, Lee contacted the sheriff’s office.

While law enforcement was deeply sympathetic to her plight, and urged her to speak out loudly, there was nothing they could do from a legal perspective, Lee said.

District officials, meanwhile, saw nothing wrong with what had occurred, Lee said. Indeed, some expressed shock that a parent would be upset over the incident.

As Lee fought back, school officials were working on their next move.

Among other tactics, documents and communications obtained by The Epoch Times revealed a discussion about the possibility of reporting the parents to child-welfare authorities.

When Chambers was informed by the art teacher that Amanda’s parents had not been sending her to school since the incident, Chambers wrote back urging her to consider filing a report and have child-protection officials visit the home.

“If that persists, you’ll want to talk to admin about doing a well-child check or whatever is within the policies of the school,” Chambers wrote, describing upset parents as “barriers” and citing an “extreme case” in which a family did not allow their transgender child to leave the home unsupervised.

Lee was flabbergasted after receiving the documents.

“I knew this woman was evil, but I didn’t see this coming,” she said. “This teacher and Kimberly [Chambers] forced us to pull our child out of school by creating an unsafe environment, then discussed sending CPS into our home because we pulled her out, at our most vulnerable moment as a family—that they caused.”

“If my child had indicated that we were not affirming her pronouns and trans identity, I believe the authorities would’ve taken our child away,” Lee added. “And everyone involved knew this.”

District and LGBT Activists Respond 

The Epoch Times reached out to Chambers for comment, asking whether she considered non-affirmation of a child’s gender ideas to be abuse and seeking confirmation about the story details.

“Given the private nature of this specific youth and family’s needs, I’d like to share with you a couple of Colorado and National resources around gender identity to help inform your article rather than provide any comment,” she said before providing a number of links on transgenderism and legal issues.

Wellington Middle School referred inquiries to the district. A message left on the principal’s phone was not immediately returned.

Poudre School District Executive Director of Communications Madeline Noblett told The Epoch Times that the district couldn’t comment on “specific student matters.”

When asked about policies on getting child protection services involved in cases such as Amanda’s, Noblett noted that all district staff are “mandated reporters” under Colorado law. That means they are required to report suspected child abuse.

Noblett didn’t respond to follow-up questions about district policy on whether parents’ refusal to support their children transitioning to a new gender constitutes abuse.

“It is the role of the Department of Human Services to investigate the suspected/reported case; to determine whether the child is safe; to determine if abuse occurred; and to provide appropriate services to the family,” she said.

However, the district aims to “create and uphold equitable, inclusive, and rigorous educational opportunities, outcomes, and experiences for all students,” she said.

“As a district, we are committed to making our schools safe spaces in which all students can learn,” Noblett said, adding that the district has “a LGBTQIA+ coordinator who works to advance the resources, support, inclusion, and advocacy of LGBTQIA+ students, staff, and families.”

“Gay Straight Alliances were established as safe spaces for members of the LGBTQIA+ community, allies, and any individual to come together with the goals of ensuring inclusivity, safety, and support,” Noblett said.

When asked how GSA adult leaders were trained, the communications director said there were no training requirements to lead any club in the district. However, GSA leaders could use resources from the GSA network and from One Colorado, the network’s state affiliate.

Gillian Ford of One Colorado didn’t specifically address questions about how GSA adult leaders are trained, whether it’s standard practice to tell children not to talk to their parents about these issues, or whether the escalating parental outrage was appropriate.

“Schools are often places where LGBTQ+ young people don’t feel safe or included,” said Ford, whose pronouns are listed as “she, her, hers” in her email signature.

“Since 2011, One Colorado has worked with both statewide education associations, as well as local educators, parents, and students to create and sustain the Colorado Gender and Sexuality Alliance (GSA) Network to support and empower LGBTQ+ young people and their allies against the bullying, harassment, homophobia, and transphobia in their schools.”

National and State Trends 

What happened to the Lee family in Northern Colorado is hardly an isolated incident, experts told The Epoch Times.

“At first, we wanted to believe it was an isolated incident,” Lee said. “We didn’t want to believe that there could be such evil in our public school system, in our local government, in our community.”

What happened to Lee’s family is part of an accelerating national trend. Numerous European nations are witnessing similar phenomena.

The Epoch Times spoke with other families across the nation who had similar experiences, but almost none were willing to go on record due to fears of retaliation by government officials and activists.

While the American College of Pediatricians describes teaching children that it’s normal or healthy to impersonate the opposite sex as “child abuse,” larger and more established associations have taken a different approach.

A new “puberty guide” for children between 9 and 12 published by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) claims that boys can menstruate and that girls can experience erections.

“Most babies who are born with a penis grow up feeling like a boy on the inside too. That’s called being cisgender (cis- means ‘same’),” the guide states. “But there are some babies born with a penis who grow up feeling like a girl on the inside. That’s called being transgender (trans- means ‘cross’ or ‘opposite’).”

According to a recent report published in the journal Pediatrics, almost one in ten children surveyed now identify as “gender diverse,” far more than traditionally believed.

Other surveys show even higher numbers. One from UCLA found over one-fourth of California teens were viewed by peers as “gender non-conforming.”

Those numbers are rising rapidly.

Pam Benigno, director of the Education Policy Center at Colorado’s free-market think tank the Independence Institute, told The Epoch Times that she has heard numerous “disturbing stories” from parents across the state about their children coming home from school confused about their gender.

“I spoke with a dad who told me that without his knowledge, staff from his daughter’s middle school drafted a transition plan for his daughter to become a male,” Benigno said. “This is not uncommon. In fact, teachers have been ordered not to tell parents if students take on a new identity while at school.”

Districts across the state, under the guise of being “inclusive,” are “pushing a radical-left agenda on children” and have even “adopted the non-scientific theory that gender identity is fluid,” she said.

This includes hiring “queer” organizations to smash traditional notions of normalcy in the minds of students, she added.

A recently published paper by The Independence Institute aims at helping parents ensure transparency in school curricula. But parents must be vigilant and protect their children from “devastating emotional and sometimes physical harm,” Benigno said.

Conservative states are no exception to the trend. In Utah, state controlled-substance data revealed a 10,000 percent increase between 2015 and 2020 in the number of minor girls undergoing medical transitions.

In Ludlow, Massachusetts, a major lawsuit by parents against the school district is alleging that education officials encouraged children to experiment with alternate gender identities and hide it from their parents.

Andrew Beckwith, president of the Massachusetts Family Institute who is involved in the case, is dealing with a surge in such cases in his state.

“We see the same aggressive attack on the integrity of the parent-child relationship here in Massachusetts,” he replied when asked about parallels between Lee’s story and what’s taking place there.

“Many of the LGBTQ activists want to brand traditional sexual morality as ‘child abuse,’ and their accomplices in child services terrorize families who won’t just go along with this agenda,” he said, calling these sorts of policies an “appalling and dangerous violation of the rights of parents.”

“What is happening in Ludlow is part of a larger national agenda to deliberately circumvent the authority of parents over the mental health and religious beliefs of their children,” Beckwith said. “School officials around the country are secretly affirming, or even promoting, discordant gender identities in young children.”

The Biden administration has started threatening legal action against local communities, schools, states, and other institutions that don’t submit to the transgender agenda.

Warning to Parents 

As a result of the ordeal, Lee has lost all trust in the media, the government, the medical profession, and the public school system.

“Now I don’t trust a single person in the public school system,” she told The Epoch Times. “Not a single one.”

Lee said she has been in contact with numerous attorneys about the case as she considers her legal options. She is still seeking counsel.

Today, Amanda is doing much better, her parents say.

But in an effort to help protect other families from similar situations, the family has decided to continue sounding the alarm while encouraging parents to become more aware and get more involved.

Among other suggestions, Lee is also urging parents to remove their children from public school.

“Get them into private schools if you can afford it,” she said. “Get them into homeschool co-ops or homeschool them yourself.”

This article was originally published by The Epoch Times.

Extreme sexualization and LGBTQ+ indoctrination of children at younger and younger ages in public schools is now ubiquitous nationwide—and it’s part of a much broader agenda that goes well beyond just encouraging confusion and promiscuity for its own sake.

The real goal is ultimately to destroy the nuclear family as the foundation of civilization, experts say. As Karl Marx and countless other totalitarians understood, the state will step in to fill the void left by the family unit. In short, sex-ed is aimed at undermining the very building blocks of society.

In the not-too-distant past, so-called sex-education for young children and normalizing gender confusion in tax-funded schools would have been unthinkable and even criminal.

Today, the most extreme forms of sex education imaginable—including encouraging young children to engage in fornication, sodomy, group sex, abortions, and even “sex-change” surgeries—is a reality in the United States and beyond.

If it were not for exceptions offered to school employees in state obscenity laws, it would still literally be a crime to give children much of the material being used in classrooms nationwide under the guise of “sex education.”

But the worst is yet to come. If the well-funded sex-education behemoth gets its way, sexualization of children in schools masquerading as “health” and “Comprehensive Sexuality Education” (CSE) will undermine the final restraints on unchecked government control over the individual.

Liberty, family, and civilization are all in the cross-hairs now. The stakes could not be higher.

What It Looks Like in School

Virtually all of the curricula being used to teach sex to children are deeply problematic to anyone with a shred of decency, modesty, or common sense.

In many states and districts, the sexualization starts as early as kindergarten, with children being introduced to homosexuality, gender fluidity, homosexual parenting, “anatomy” that includes graphic images of genitalia, and more. Oftentimes, the sexualization and LGBT material is mandated under state law.

One of the most frequently used resources in public schools across America that has been endorsed by state and local officials nationwide as “compliant” with state mandates is known as “Rights, Respect, Responsibility” (3Rs).

Created by sexual revolutionaries at Advocates for Youth, a partner of tax-funded abortion giant Planned Parenthood, the program has shocked parents from across the political spectrum—for good reason.

Starting as young as kindergarten or first and second grade, children learn (pdf) that girls can supposedly have male genitalia and vice-versa. This self-evidently fraudulent claim is emphasized over and over again throughout the child’s younger years, causing widespread confusion among impressionable youngsters.

When they become teens, the program teaches them about “pansexuality,” among other absurdities and perversions.

Throughout elementary school, children are exposed to obscene images that have been widely condemned as pornographic, including “cartoons” in books such as “It’s Perfectly Normal.” The book features cartoon images of naked children, sexual intercourse, children masturbating, and more.

Under 3Rs, by the time the children are around 11, they are taught how to seek out information about sex on the internet. The children are constantly taught to rely on Planned Parenthood for information and “services,” too.

Before becoming teens, they learn about “making changes in the world” through “LGBT advocacy.”

At around age 12, abortion is introduced as an “option” to deal with unwanted pregnancies. And by age 13, years before they reach the legal age of consent, the children are taught how to obtain various forms of contraception and birth control.

Gender Confusion

Throughout the curriculum, which is aligned with the National Sex Education Standards (pdf) developed by Advocates for Youth and other advocates of sexualizing children, young people are led to believe that they can choose their gender and that they may have been born in the wrong body.

Worse, they are taught how to act on it, putting them at risk of seeking out dangerous hormonal and surgical “treatments” with lifelong consequences. Studies show most children confused about their gender end up growing out of it by adulthood.

This indoctrination is despite the fact that the American College of Pediatricians (pdf) argues it’s “child abuse” for adults to try to convince children that a life of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal or healthy.

Another frequently used resource is “Teaching Tolerance” (now known as “Learning for Justice”) created by the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

As part of promoting “tolerance” to children, the SPLC recommends the highly controversial book “10,000 Dresses” by Marcus Ewert for students in kindergarten through second grade.

Among other lessons, the book teaches the children, typically aged 5 through 8, to ignore their parents and impersonate the opposite sex if they feel they were born in the “wrong” body.

Numerous state education bureaucracies and officials have endorsed the extreme SPLC program despite the objections of parents.

Making matters worse, those officials sometimes act on it, too. From California to Florida, school districts are using “Gender Transition Plans” to help students start “transitioning” to a new gender, even without the consent of parents.

Public-school efforts to confuse children have been so successful that a 2017 UCLA study found more than one in four California children ages 12 through 17 are now “gender non-conforming.”

Even in ultra-conservative Utah, state prescription data show that the number of minor girls undergoing “gender transition” processes increased by about 10,000 percent from 2015 to 2020.

Dangerous Lies and Propaganda

While the creators of the 3Rs program claim it is “medically accurate” to comply with state law, that is objectively false.

On a worksheet for 7th graders purporting to outline the risks of various sex acts, for example, children ages 11 and 12 are taught “anal sex using a condom correctly” is a “low risk” activity.

In reality, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that they are only 60 to 70 percent effective in preventing HIV even with perfect and consistent use. The Food and Drug Administration has never approved condoms for anal sex.

In other words, children who believe the sex-ed lies being taught in government schools are at serious risk of becoming infected with deadly venereal diseases.

Similarly, consider Planned Parenthood’s “Healthy, Happy and Hot“ booklet (pdf), which tells youth infected with HIV that they do not have to inform their partners about their infection. In fact, the document even claims that laws requiring disclosure “violate the rights of people living with HIV.”

Another Planned Parenthood sex-ed document (pdf) recommends teaching children 10 and under that “sexual activity” can be part of “commercial sex work,” and that they have a “right” to “decide when to have sex.”

The same toolkit encourages teaching children under 10 about homosexuality, masturbation, gender fluidity, and more. It also teaches them that they have a “right” to abort their unborn child.

Planned Parenthood, funded by the American taxpayer, is one of the world’s largest peddlers of sex-ed resources. Its materials are used and promoted in government schools worldwide.

Incredibly, despite the group’s rhetoric about “choice,” women’s rights advocate Reggie Littlejohn has repeatedly exposed Planned Parenthood’s cooperation with the Chinese Communist Party’s forced abortions and other brutal population-control schemes.

The Last Taboos

The pervasive sexualization of children in public schools is now pushing the boundaries against one of the last taboos: pedophilia, pederasty, and adult sex with children.

Under California’s LGBT mandate for schools, the Brea Olinda Unified School District (BOUSD) was caught including ancient Greek men’s proclivity to have sexual relations with boys—considered child rape in every state in the union—as part of teaching children LGBT history.

When confronted by outraged mother Stephanie Yates of Informed Parents of California, BOUSD Assistant Superintendent of Curricula Kerrie Torres said the children were being taught about it “because we are talking about historical perspectives of how gender relations and different types of sexual orientations have existed in history.”

Yates, the mom, sounded incredulous. “So sex between a man and a boy is a sexual orientation?” she asked.

The assistant superintendent held her ground. “It’s something that occurred in history, and so this is really important for us to include,” Torres said.

Despite there being a video of the exchange, frantic “fact checkers” tried unsuccessfully to quell the outrage, bizarrely defending the lessons.

But the truth is there for all to see. Increasingly, public schools are working to normalize sexual relationships between adults and children.

The message throughout 12 years of sexualization and indoctrination in school in essentially all the sex-ed major programs is simple: If there’s “consent,” nothing else matters, anything goes, and there are no rules when it comes to sex.

This view flies in the face of the teachings of all the world’s major religions and civilizations for thousands of years. In fact, it’s practically unprecedented in human history, with the possible exception of what the Bible records in Sodom and Gomorrah.

Outside ‘Sex Ed’ and Intersection With Critical Race Theory

Even outside of sex-ed classes, where in some states parents can technically opt their children out, the extreme sexualization and perversion has reached epidemic levels.

In English classes, for instance, children are told to read abominable “books” that feature extremely graphic descriptions of sexual acts and sexual violence.

There is also an intersection between the radical sexualization and the Critical Race Theory indoctrination exposed in part 19 of this series.

One exercise with endless variations that has been deployed in government schools nationwide has children “deconstruct” their identities and examine their “power and privilege” based on their race, gender, and sexual identity.

As part of the scheme, children are taught that being “cisgendered” (not transgender) or “heterosexual” gives them power and privilege, along with being white, while being transgender or homosexual makes them oppressed.

In such an exercise forced on 7- and 8-year-old government-school victims in Silicon Valley, the children were offered an example to drive the point home: “a white, cisgender man, who is able-bodied, heterosexual, considered handsome and speaks English has more privilege than a Black transgender woman.”

Just like Marxists have divided populations for over a century, children are classified into “oppressor” or “oppressed” categories based on whatever fault lines the subversives can concoct—with “sexuality” and “gender” now a key part of the mix.

Global Problem

This is not just happening in America. The United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (UNESCO), exposed in an earlier part of this series, is at the forefront of the effort to sexualize children worldwide, and especially in the West.

Indeed, many of the most outrageous elements of America’s most frequently used “sex-education” programs are perfectly consistent with UNESCO’s 2018 “International technical guidance on sexuality education.”

Citing Planned Parenthood’s ideologically driven “research” and “evidence” more than 20 times, the UN sex-ed standards call teaching children about “sexual pleasure” before they hit 10.

Incredibly, by age 5, children are supposed to describe how “gender and biological sex” are supposedly “different.”

By age 9, the UN guidelines teach children about masturbation and call for children to “describe male and female responses to sexual stimulation.” Children should also “demonstrate respect for diverse practices related to sexuality” and “explain how someone’s gender identity may not match their biological sex” by 9, the standards say.

By 12, children are expected to believe that “non-penetrative sexual behaviors” are “pleasurable” and less likely to result in infection than normal sex. The UN’s “learning objectives” demand that 12-year-olds “support the right for everyone” to “express their sexual feelings.”

Critics have blasted this as “grooming” children.

The UN document even includes helpful tips for educators on how to handle outraged parents and religious leaders concerned about the indoctrination.

Of course, there’s a reason the UN sex-ed document calls for sexualization of children “from the beginning of formal schooling.”

As UN LGBT czar Vitit Muntarbhorn put it in a 2017 interview with an Argentinian newspaper, to change the mentality of the population in favor of new sexual norms, “it is so important to start working with young people, the younger the better.” (Emphasis added).

Real Agenda

The focus on sex and perversion is clearly and literally ubiquitous in government schools across America and beyond. But why?

This was not seen as even acceptable until very recently—much less necessary. In fact, prior to the grotesque pseudo-science of pervert Alfred Kinsey, it would have been considered a criminal offense to subject children to these obscenities.

Advocates of sexualizing children as early as possible typically frame their arguments in terms of reducing STDs and unwanted or teen pregnancies while pursuing nebulous notions of “health” and “reproductive freedom” or “reproductive justice.”

Despite the fact that the explosion in teen pregnancies and venereal disease coincided with the sexualization of children in school by sexual revolutionaries, the tax-funded behemoths behind the push pump out endless junk studies purporting to support their fraudulent claims.

But obviously, if children were not having sex outside of marriage, the problems that “sex education” purports to solve would virtually cease to exist.

In short, there’s a much darker agenda at work. The sex “educators” themselves barely bother to hide it anymore.

Consider SIECUS, the group that grew out of Kinsey’s perverted pseudo-science. While it was once known as the Sexual Information and Education Council of the United States, now it is just SIECUS: Sex Ed for Social Change. And indeed, “social change” is the goal—radical, horrifying “social change.”

As far back as 1979, the CDC admitted there was an ulterior motive. In a report headlined “An Analysis of U.S. Sex Education Programs and Evaluation Methods,” researchers revealed that the “goals” of sex education in American schools had become “much more ambitious” than parents realized. Those goals included “the changing of … attitudes and behaviors.”

The government has long understood the consequences of this. Late psychoanalyst Dr. Melvin Anchell, who worked on President Lyndon Johnson’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, warned that these sexual indoctrination programs targeting children cause “irreparable harm” to their victims—damage that lasts their entire lives.

Among other dangers, Anchell identified severe damage to children’s future marriages, families, relationships, and lives. In some cases, it can even contribute to psychopathy, suicide, and mass murder, he warned.

Long before that, communist revolutionaries sought to demonize marriage and obliterate the family, too, producing unprecedented disaster. Consider, for example, the horrifying experience of Soviet Russia in the decade after the Bolshevik Revolution.

Sexual revolutionaries in the West have understood this for over a century, too. Atheist “psychiatrist” Dr. Wilhelm Reich, a self-styled “Freudo-Marxist” who was a Communist Party member and an associate of sex fanatic Sigmund Freud, saw what he first termed the “sexual revolution” not as an end in-and-of itself.

Instead, Reich saw it as a means to obliterate the family, and thereby facilitate the destruction of religious values. Ultimately, the hope was to achieve the breakdown of Western civilization by destroying the familial transmission belt by which values are passed on from one generation to the next.

The goal: allow Marxism to truly take root on the blank canvas created by the destruction of the old order.

To that end, Reich strongly encouraged “sex education” in school to “divest parents of their moral authority.”

As the family and the church are weakened through the unleashing of sexual anarchy via “sex education,” the government steps in and takes over in the roles formerly reserved for those two divinely ordained institutions.

The World in the Cross-hairs

Sharon Slater, president of Family Watch International and co-chair of the national Protect Child Health Coalition, told The Epoch Times that the goal is eventually to get the world onboard with this new value system.

“If they can raise up a generation indoctrinated in their harmful abortion rights, promiscuity rights, and radical transgender ideology, they will have indoctrinated the future leaders of the world,” she said.

“In fact, CSE is the number one tool of the abortion rights and LGBT rights lobby to promote their agendas worldwide by shaping the views of youth,” added Slater, who works to counter the agenda at the UN.

One of the most important tools created by her organization is a documentary called “The War on Children: The Comprehensive Sexuality Education Agenda.” It shines a light on the horrors being forced on children.

“CSE is a dangerous worldwide agenda intended to sexualize children at the youngest ages,” she explained. “I couldn’t sleep at night knowing what I knew and knowing most parents had no idea their children were being taught such harmful things.”

Sex Educators Sound the Alarm

Even former sex-ed teachers have blown the whistle on the subversive agenda behind sex ed. Monica Cline, for instance, spent a decade working as a comprehensive sex educator with Planned Parenthood before defecting and starting an organization dedicated to countering that.

“A big piece of this, which for some people, it’s something I think [is] hard for them to understand, is that there is a huge movement through socialism that really wants to do away with the nuclear family,” she explained to The Daily Signal, noting that abolishing private property is also part of the agenda.

“Sex education is a big piece of that, because when you teach children to dehumanize themselves, to take intimacy and family and marriage out of sex, even to the point of killing your own children through abortion, you are essentially killing the family,” Cline continued. “You’re destroying the family.”

Encouraging people to “read any curriculum” being used in sex-ed programs to see the tactics and graphic nature of the material, Cline noted that parents are always cut out of the picture when it comes to sex education.

“They want the children dependent on the government, or on public health, whatever it may be, but they do not want the children to be depending on the parent anymore,” she said. “And so, all of this really is to break down the family. And they’re essentially … we’re watching it happen.”

Disintegration of Family, Sterility, Slavery

In extended comments to The Epoch Times, Kimberly Ells, author of “The Invincible Family” and a longtime researcher and activist against the global sexualization of children, warned that the radical CSE programs have dangerous objectives that must be resisted.

“He who wins the youth wins the future,” she explained, echoing a common axiom. “So if government schools shape children’s views on sex, gender and family formation—and if those views reject the family as the core of civilization—then the core of civilization is up for grabs, and the government intends to grab it.”

Among other concerns, Ells warned that these programs are undermining parental authority, family values, and even family formation by encouraging children to reject their parents’ teachings and view sex as merely a pleasurable “right,” rather than part of a stable marriage.

The results of undermining family and marriage were predictable: over 40 percent of American children are now born out of wedlock (pdf), with almost one in four American children now living in a single-parent household.

The consequences of this family disintegration are horrific—and the problem is getting worse. But even beyond the crime, dependence, and poverty is the danger of tyranny stepping in to fill the void left by parents and families.

“Children who become slaves to the sexual appetites of their bodies early are more likely to become slaves in other areas of their lives,” added Ells, who has spoken at the UN.

Teaching children to reject biological sex as a relevant characteristic of one’s identity is even more nefarious. “At its core, this two-pronged ideology rejects the biological family—based on physiologically oppositional sex—as the fundamental unit of society,” she said.

“The T in LGBT is by far the most problematic,” Ells warned. “Same-sex marriage annihilates the idea that men and women are complementary. But transgenderism annihilates the idea that men and women inherently exist at all.”

Already, she said, legal movements around transgenderism are setting the stage for the “marginalization” of mothers, fathers, and families by law.

“When parents’ ties to their children are obscured or weakened it creates an environment hospitable to government intervention and socialist-communist revolution,” Ells continued. “That is why Marx’s Communist Manifesto openly called for the ‘abolition of the family.’”

“Dethroning the family creates a void that can and must be filled—though it is impossible to adequately fill it,” she said. “If we are to avoid the disembowelment of the family and the domination of the state that follows its disembowelment, we must resist efforts to cancel biological sex.”

Ells called on parents and policymakers to resist the erasing of male and female and end funding for UN agencies peddling the dangerous agenda. She also urged the removal of “sexual rights” advocates such as Planned Parenthood from schools and an end to CSE programming at all levels.

Protecting Children

Governments and school boards all across America have failed in their duty to protect children from the ubiquitous evils that now pervade the so-called “public education” system masquerading as “health” and “tolerance.”

In an earlier part of this series, the gut-wrenching history of this abusive sexualization of children in school was exposed featuring extensive interviews with Dr. Judith Reisman, who recently passed away. It literally goes back to perverts who sexually molested large numbers of children under the guise of “science.”

Americans are now confronted with a tax-funded monster that threatens not just the innocence of their children, but their liberties, families, and even the very future of their civilization.

Obviously, government at all levels has failed to protect children from the dangerous agenda they themselves unleashed. That leaves parents as the last barrier.

If the grotesque sex-ed extremism destroying America and her youth is going to be stopped, it will be up to loving moms and dads to lead the fight.

This article as originally published by The Epoch Times, and is one report in a series of articles examining the origins of government education in the United States.

More information:

Reasons to Exit Illinois Government Schools

Illinois School Proficiency FAILURE

Did You Know?

How to Rescue Our Children

“Comprehensive” Sex Education

For Parents, Grandparents and Church Leaders

Overcoming Objections

Attendees of the 2019 Illinois Family Institute Worldview Conference had the privilege of hearing Dr. Michelle Cretella’s presentation, “Transgender Ideology: Child Abuse and the Erasure of Human Rights.”

In this presentation, Dr. Cretella addresses the distinction between the scientific reality of biological sex and the manmade, social construct of gender. She also details the wide-ranging, disastrous consequences that will result if conservatives and Christians remain passive in the face of the erroneous transgender ideology that is embraced and promoted in many pediatricians’ offices, our children’s classrooms, and in the media–especially media targeted to children and youth under the age of 18.

Dr. Cretella is the executive director of the American College of Pediatricians (a pro-life and pro-family alternative to the American Academy of Pediatrics, now led by radical, left-wing physicians), a board-certified general pediatrician specializing in adolescent mental and sexual health, and a staunch pro-life advocate.

Please watch this important message regarding the “trans” ideology steamroller that is obliterating scientific fact and common sense in our nation and the world. We believe you will find it very informative.

A Night With Rev. Franklin Graham!
At this year’s annual IFI banquet, our keynote speaker will be none other than Rev. Franklin Graham, President & CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Christian evangelist & missionary. This year’s event will be at the Tinley Park Convention Center on Nov. 1st. You don’t want to miss this special evening!

Learn more HERE.

Join the Illinois Family Institute for our annual Worldview Conference, featuring an illustrious group speakers who will expound on the “trans” ideology that is sweeping throughout the world. It is sad to see how this science-denying and incoherent ideology has captured the hearts and minds of many Americans and is doing grievous harm, especially to children. Far too many Christians are ill-informed or misinformed on all aspects of the issue, including the threat it poses not only to the hearts, minds, and bodies of those who suffer from gender dysphoria but also to speech rights, religious liberty, physical privacy, and public decency laws.

Join us to be better informed about this pernicious cultural trend, and how we should respond.

Saturday, March 16, 2019 at Stone Church
10737 Orland Pkwy, Orland Park, IL
$20 per person / $50 per family / Lunch is not included.

Morning Sessions: 10:00 AM —12:00 PM

Session 1: Walter Heyer: “Transgenderism: The Consequences”
Session 2: Dr. Michele Cretella, “Child Abuse, Female Erasure & the Death of ALL Human Rights”

Afternoon Sessions: 1:00 PM — 3:00 PM

Session 3: Denise Shick: “Her story; The Impact on Family”
Session 4: Pastor Doug Wilson: “Sanity as Insurrection”

Q & A Panel with Laurie Higgins and our guests: 3:00 PM

Click HERE for more information about our speakers and a printable flyer.

Despite a lack of evidence proving the safety and efficacy of chemical and surgical interventions and social “transitioning” for those who experience gender dysphoria, “progressives” plow forward mutilating the healthy bodies and manipulating the psychology of children who feel they are or wish they were the sex they are not.

The science-denying, incoherent “trans” ideology affects all of society. The end game for “trans” activists and others in cultic thrall to this superstition is not access for a few boys and girls or men and women to opposite-sex private spaces and sports. The end game is the eradication of all public recognition of sex differences everywhere for everyone. Think about what that means:

• It means children will be raised under the delusion that their anatomy signifies nothing. All that matters is “gender identity.” It means society will tell them that no one—not doctors, parents, or anyone else—knows if they’re male or female.

• It means putting at risk the psychological welfare of students, particularly younger students and those already struggling with other issues, including autism; depression; anxiety; body dysmorphia; eating disorders; OCD; and the effects of molestation, family dysfunction, and bullying. Introducing the “trans” ideology, which teaches the disordered nonsense that a boy can be a girl or vice versa, to at-risk children will confuse and disturb them and will provide a distorted lens through which they may misinterpret their experiences.

• It means that we must all pretend that humans with congenital penises and fake breasts sashaying through our women’s locker rooms in the altogether are women. (Many who identify as “trans” don’t believe surgery is necessary to pass as the opposite sex, which is why you’ll hear terms like “chestfeeding men” or claims like “women can have penises.”)

• It means that at public pools, beaches, and parks, our children will see topless women who pretend to be men but opt to keep their breasts.

• It means that men’s roommates in semi-private hospital rooms may be biological women. And it means women who seek sanctuary from abusive boyfriends and husbands in shelters may be forced to share rooms or private facilities with biological men.

• It means many of us will lose jobs if we refuse to refer to colleagues by incorrect pronouns, which is to say, if we refuse to lie.

• It means that our taxes will continue to subsidize the indoctrination of children with the “trans” ideology through government schools

• And it means the sterilization and mutilation of the healthy bodies of children.

Since the “trans” ideology is metastasizing throughout the sinews of American life—including our schools—all stakeholders must understand the “trans” orthodoxy better. In previous articles, I provided questions that anyone who affirms the “trans” ideology should be asked.[1] In this article, I provide information of which many are unaware, that may be useful to anyone opposing co-ed private spaces in schools, and that should make society reevaluate the barbaric path we’re treading:

• At birth, doctors identify the sex of babies. They do not assign them a “gender.” A person’s sex can never change. Biological sex is not a disorder, illness, deficiency, shortcoming, or error. Scientists and other medical professionals have recognized that biological sex is a neutral, objective, and immutable fact of human nature. Likewise, puberty is neither a disease nor a disorder.

• There is no conclusive, research-based evidence proving that if there is incongruence between one’s objective, immutable, biological sex (and its attendant healthy, normally functioning anatomy and physiology) and one’s subjective, internal sense of being male or female that the problem resides in the body rather than the mind.

• The article “Hormone Therapy for the Treatment of Gender Dysphoria” in the May 19, 2014 issue of the highly respected Hayes Directory reports that the use of hormones and surgery to treat gender dysphoria in adults is based on “very low quality of evidence” and that the use of hormones and surgery to treat gender dysphoria in children and adolescents has no evidence base.[2]

• There are health risks and complications attendant to the use of puberty-suppressing drugs. Boys whose puberty is suppressed will have micro-penises which present surgical problems if they should one day seek vaginoplasty (i.e., there isn’t enough skin to turn into “vaginas,” so more complicated and risky procedures must be used). The health risks of the off-label use of puberty-blockers for the treatment of gender-dysphoria include the arrest of bone growth, decrease in bone density, the “prevention of sex-steroid-dependent organization and maturation of the adolescent brain, and the inhibition of fertility by preventing the development of gonadal tissue and mature gametes for the duration of treatment.”

• “There is an obvious self-fulfilling nature to encouraging a young boy with GD to socially impersonate a girl and then institute pubertal suppression. Given the well-established phenomenon of neuroplasticity, the repeated behavior of impersonating a girl alters the structure and function of the boy’s brain in some way—potentially in a way that will make identity alignment with his biologic sex less likely. This, together with the suppression of puberty that prevents further endogenous masculinization of his brain, causes him to remain a gender non-conforming prepubertal boy disguised as a prepubertal girl.”[3]

• Some of the effects of the off-label use of cross-sex hormones are permanent and long-term risks are unknown:

– Sterility and voice changes are permanent for both men and women.

–An interagency statement published by the World Health Organization states that “sterilization should only be provided with the full, free and informed consent of the individual” and that “sterilization refers not just to interventions where the intention is to limit fertility… but also to situations where loss of fertility is a secondary outcome…. Sterilization without full, free and informed consent has been variously described by international, regional and national human rights bodies as an involuntary, coercive and/or forced practice, and as a violation of fundamental human rights, including the right to health, the right to information, the right to privacy.”[4] Since parents or guardians must provide consent for hormonal interventions, and since parents are not being made aware of the experimental nature of the off-label use of hormones for the treatment of gender dysphoria, or of the fact that most children with gender dysphoria outgrow it by late adolescence if otherwise supported through natural puberty, parents and guardians are unable to provide fully informed.

–For biologically healthy men who take estrogen to treat their subjective, internal feelings about their sex, there is an “increased risk of liver disease, increased risk of blood clots (risk of death or permanent damage), increased risk of diabetes and of headaches/migraines, heart disease, increased risk of gallstones, and increased risk of noncancerous tumour of the pituitary gland.”[5] Breast tissue growth in men who take estrogen is permanent.

–For biologically healthy women who take testosterone to treat their subjective, internal feelings about their sex, there is an increased risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and possibly of breast cancer, ovarian cancer, or uterine cancer. Taking testosterone can have a “destabilizing effect” on “bipolar disorder, schizoaffective disorder, and schizophrenia.”[6] “Male”-pattern baldness and body and facial hair growth in women who take testosterone are permanent.

• Surgery (e.g., mastectomy, orchiectomy [i.e., castration]) is irreversible.

• Men who choose penile inversion vaginoplasty are castrated and their penises inverted to fashion a fake vagina (aka “neo-vagina”). For the rest of their lives, surgeons recommend that they use vaginal dilators once a week. Since the skin of fake vaginas is not vaginal tissue, men must also douche 2-3 times per week for the rest of their lives.

• Some men are unable to have inversion vaginoplasty. For example, because 18-year-old boy and reality TV star Jazz Jennings, who was recently castrated, started puberty blockers so young, his penis was the size of a prepubertal boy’s penis, and, therefore, too small to provide enough skin for a fake vagina. In these cases, skin from the colon or small bowel is used:

This technique… is naturally self-lubricating…. Since the secretion is digestive there is a risk of malodor and frequent secretions, and secretions are constant rather than only with arousal. Wearing panty liners or pads may be necessary for the long term. Bacterial overgrowth (diversion colitis) is common and may present with a greenish discharge…. The bowel lining is also not as durable as skin. Use of intestinal tissue also places the vagina at risk of diseases of the bowel including inflammatory bowel disease, arterio-venous malformations (AVM) or neoplasms [i.e., abnormal growths].[7]

• The Christian Medical and Dental Association “believes that prescribing hormonal treatments to children or adolescents to disrupt normal sexual development for the purpose of gender reassignment is ethically impermissible, whether requested by the child or the parent.”[8]

• The Catholic Medical Association (CMA) “urges health care professionals to adhere to genetic science and sexual complementarity over ideology in the treatment of gender dysphoria (GD) in children. This includes especially avoiding puberty suppression and the use of cross-sex hormones in children with GD. One’s sex is not a social construct, but an unchangeable biological reality.”[9]

• Neuroscientist, professor of neurology at the University of Pennsylvania, and author of The Teenage Brain, Dr. Frances Jensen, explains that,

Teenagers do have frontal lobes, which are the seat of our executive, adult-like functioning like impulse control, judgment and empathy. But the frontal lobes haven’t been connected with fast-acting connections yet…. But there is another part of the brain that is fully active in adolescents, and that’s the limbic system. And that is the seat of risk, reward, impulsivity, sexual behavior and emotion. So they are built to be novelty-seeking at this point in their lives. Their frontal lobe isn’t able to say, “That’s a bad idea, don’t do that.” That’s not happening to the extent it will in adulthood.

• The oft-cited suicide rate of 41% for those who identify as “trans” is based on an erroneous understanding of a study by the Williams Institute—an understanding that ignores the acknowledged and serious limitations of the study.[10] There is no evidence that surgery or chemical disruption of normal, natural and healthy development or processes reduces the incidence of suicide.[11] J. Michael Bailey, Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University, and Dr. Raymond Blanchard, former psychologist in the Adult Gender Identity Clinic of Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) from 1980–1995 and the Head of CAMH’s Clinical Sexology Services from 1995–2010, have written the following[12]:

–Children (most commonly, adolescents) who threaten to commit suicide rarely do so, although they are more likely to kill themselves than children who do not threaten suicide.

–Mental health problems, including suicide, are associated with some forms of gender dysphoria. But suicide is rare even among gender dysphoric persons.

–There is no persuasive evidence that gender transition reduces gender dysphoric children’s likelihood of killing themselves.

–The idea that mental health problems–including suicidality–are caused by gender dysphoria rather than the other way around (i.e., mental health and personality issues cause a vulnerability to experience gender dysphoria) is currently popular and politically correct. It is, however, unproven and as likely to be false as true.

• There is no phenomenon of women trapped in men’s bodies or vice versa, or of men having women’s brains or vice versa. Science has not proven that the brains of transgender individuals are “wired differently” than others with the same biological sex. In other words, there is no conclusive evidence of a “female brain” being contained in a male body or vice versa.[13] In fact, it is impossible for an opposite-sexed brain to be “trapped” in the wrong body. Every brain cell of a male fetus has a Y chromosome; female fetal brains do not. This makes their brains intrinsically different. Additionally, at 8 weeks gestation, male fetuses have every cell of their body—including every brain cell—bathed by a testosterone surge secreted by their testes. Female fetuses lack testes; none of their cells—including their brain cells—experience this endogenous testosterone surge.

• “[C]urrent studies on associations between brain structure and transgender identity are small, methodologically limited, inconclusive, and sometimes Even if they were more methodologically reliable, they would be insufficient to demonstrate that brain structure is a cause, rather than an effect, of the gender-identity behavior. They would likewise lack predictive power, the real challenge for any theory in science.”[14]

• Desistance is “the tendency for gender dysphoria to resolve itself as a child gets older and older.”[15] The best research to date suggests that without social or medical “transition” most (60[16]-90%[17]) gender-dysphoric children will come to accept their biological sex after passing naturally through puberty. [18] While “12- 27% of ‘gender variant’ children persist in gender dysphoria; that percentage rises to 40% amongst those who visit gender clinics.” Research shows that persistence rates rise significantly among those who are given puberty-blockers and “gender-affirmative psychotherapy,” thus suggesting that such interventions lead minors “to commit more strongly to sex reassignment than they might have if they had received a different diagnosis or a different course of treatment.”[19]

• Detransitioning is the process by which someone who has been identifying as the opposite sex, presenting himself or herself as the opposite sex, taking cross-sex hormones, and possibly had surgery rejects his or her “trans” identity and accepts his or her objective, immutable biological sex. The American College of Pediatricians confirms what “detransitioners” assert: There are many possible post-natal, environmental causes for gender dysphoria: Family and peer relationships, one’s school and neighborhood, the experience of any form of abuse, media exposure, chronic illness, war, and natural disasters are all examples of environmental factors that impact an individual’s emotional, social, and psychological development.[20]

• “Mounting evidence over the last decade points to increased rates of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and autism traits among children and adults with gender dysphoria…. It is possible that some of the psychological characteristics common in children with ASD—including cognitive deficits, tendencies toward obsessive preoccupations, or difficulties learning from other people—complicate the formation of gender identity.”[21] A study published in May 2018 “further confirmed a possible association between ASD and the wish to be of the opposite gender by establishing increased endorsement of this wish in adolescents and adults with ASD compared to the general population controls.”[22]

• J. Michael Bailey and Dr. Raymond Blanchard explain the phenomenon of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD):

The typical case of ROGD involves an adolescent or young adult female whose social world outside the family glorifies transgender phenomena and exaggerates their prevalence. Furthermore, it likely includes a heavy dose of internet involvement. The adolescent female acquires the conviction that she is transgender. (Not uncommonly, others in her peer group acquire the same conviction.) These peer groups encouraged each other to believe that all unhappiness, anxiety, and life problems are likely due to their being transgender, and that gender transition is the only solution. Subsequently, there may be a rush towards gender transition…. We believe that ROGD is a socially contagious phenomenon in which a young person–typically a natal female–comes to believe that she has a condition that she does not have. ROGD is not about discovering gender dysphoria that was there all along; rather, it is about falsely coming to believe that one’s problems have been due to gender dysphoria previously hidden (from the self and others). Let us be clear: People with ROGD do have a kind of gender dysphoria, but it is gender dysphoria due to persuasion of those especially vulnerable to a false idea.[23]

• Brown University Researcher Dr. Lisa Littman conducted a survey of parents whose children developed Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria. Littman writes,

In recent years, a number of parents have been reporting in online discussion groups… that their adolescent and young adult (AYA) children, who have had no histories of childhood gender identity issues, experienced a rapid onset of gender dysphoria. Parents have described clusters of gender dysphoria outbreaks occurring in pre-existing friend groups with multiple or even all members of a friend group becoming gender dysphoric and transgender-identified in a pattern that seems statistically unlikely based on previous research. Parents describe a process of immersion in social media, such as “binge-watching” Youtube transition videos and excessive use of Tumblr, immediately preceding their child becoming gender dysphoric. These descriptions… raise the question of whether social influences may be contributing to or even driving these occurrences of gender dysphoria in some populations of adolescents and young adults…. The worsening of mental well-being and parent-child relationships and behaviors that isolate teens from their parents, families, non-transgender friends and mainstream sources of information are particularly concerning. More research is needed to better understand rapid-onset gender dysphoria, its implications, and scope.”[24]

• The number of children “being referred for transitioning treatment” in England has increased 4,400% for girls and 1,250% for boys, which has resulted in calls from members of Parliament for an investigation.[25]

• Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID) shares several features with gender dysphoria. BIID is a condition in which “Sufferers… experience a mismatch between their physically healthy body and the body with which they identify. They identify as disabled. They often desire a specific amputation to achieve the disabled body they want.”[26] As with some cases of gender dysphoria, scientists say there is evidence for neurological involvement as a cause of the experience of BIID,[27] and yet physicians largely oppose elective amputations of healthy anatomical parts:

According to the principle of nonmaleficence physicians must not perform amputations without a medical indication because amputations bear great risks and often have severe consequences besides the disability…. for example, infections [or] thromboses.  Even though some physicians perform harmful surgeries as breast enlargement surgeries, this cannot justify surgeries that are even more harmful. Even if amputations would be a possible therapy for BIID, they would be risky experimental therapies that could be justified only if they promised lifesaving or the cure of severe diseases and if an alternative therapy would not be available. At least the first condition is not fulfilled in the case of BIID, and probably the second is not fulfilled either. Above all, an amputation causes an irreversible damage that could not be healed, even if the patient’s body image would be restored spontaneously or through a new therapy…. But since all psychiatrists who have investigated BIID patients found that the amputation desire is either obsessive or based on a monothematic delusion, and since neurological studies support the hypothesis of a brain disorder (which is also supported by the most influential advocates of elective amputations), elective amputations have to be regarded as severe bodily injuries of patients.[28]

• The American College of Pediatricians, “a national medical association of licensed physicians and healthcare professionals who specialize in the care of infants, children, and adolescents” and that split from the American Academy of Pediatrics because of its politicization of the practice of medicine, describes puberty-suppression, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries variously referred to as sex-change, sex reassignment, gender reassignment and gender confirmation surgeries as child abuse.”

• Lisa Simons, pediatrician at Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, stated in a PBS Frontline documentary that “‘The bottom line is we don’t really know how sex hormones impact any adolescent’s brain development….’ What’s lacking, she said, are specific studies that look at the neurocognitive effects of puberty blockers.” [29]

• Kenneth Zucker, one of the world’s leading authorities on gender dysphoria, states that,

Identity is a process. It is complicated. It takes a long period of time… to know who a child really is…. There are different pathways that can lead to gender dysphoria…. It’s an intellectual and clinical mistake to think that there’s one single cause that explains all gender dysphoria…. Just because little kids say something doesn’t necessarily mean that you accept it, or that it’s true, or that it’s in the best interest of the child…. Little kids can present with extreme gender dysphoria, but that doesn’t mean they’re all going to grow up to continue to have gender dysphoria.[30]

• Eric Vilain, a geneticist at UCLA who specializes in sexual development and sex differences in the brain, says the studies on twins are mixed and that, on the whole, “there is no evidence of a biological influence on transsexualism yet.”[31]

• Sheila Jeffreys, lesbian feminist scholar, warns against the “transgendering” of children: “Those who do not conform to correct gender stereotypes are being sterilized and they’re being sterilized as children.”[32]

• Heather Brunskell-Evans, social theorist, philosopher, and Senior Research Fellow at King’s College, London, UK, and Michele Moore, Professor of Inclusive Education and Editor-in-Chief of the world-leading journal Disability & Society, critique the “transgender” ideology:

[O]ur central contention is that transgender children don’t exist. Although we argue that ‘the transgender child’ is a fabrication, we do not disavow that some children and adolescents experience gender dysphoria and that concerned and loving parents will do anything to alleviate their children’s distress. It is because of children’s bodily discomfort that we argue it is important families and support services are informed by appropriate models for understanding gender. Our analysis of transgenderism demonstrates it is a new phenomenon, since dissatisfaction with assigned gender takes different forms in different historical contexts. The ‘transgender child’ is a relatively new historical figure, brought into being by a coalition of pressure groups, political activists and knowledge makers…. Bizarrely, in transgender theory, biology is said to be a social construct but gender is regarded as an inherent property located ‘somewhere’ in the brain or soul or other undefined area of the body. We reverse these propositions with the concept that it is gender, not biology, which is a social construct. From our theoretical perspective, the sexed body is material and biological, and gender is the externally imposed set of norms that prescribe and proscribe desirable behaviours for children. Our objection to transgenderism is that it confines children to traditional views about gender.[33]

• Stephanie Davies-Arias, writer, communication skills expert, and pediatric transition critic, writes that “changing your sex to match your ‘gender identity’ reinforces the very stereotypes which [transgender] organisations claim to be challenging… as, in increasing numbers, boys who love princess culture become ‘girls’ and short-haired football-loving girls become ‘boys’. Promoted as a ‘progressive’ social justice movement based on ‘accepting difference’, transgender ideology in fact takes that difference and stamps it out. It says that the sexist stereotypes of ‘gender’ are the true distinction between boys and girls and biological sex is an illusion.”[34]

• Increasing numbers of young men and women experience “sex-change regret” and are “detransitioning.” Unfortunately, some effects of “medical transitions” are irreversible. A BBC documentary includes “Luke,” a young biological woman who regrets taking cross-sex hormones and having a double mastectomy at age 20 shares her experience:

The assumption from the outset was that if I said I was transgender, then I must be. Nobody, at any point, questioned my motives. The only cure for this would be hormones and surgery…. I became very self-conscious of my body. I was developing breasts and periods which, for me, felt like there was an alien crawling out of the inside of my body.  I became very depressed. I thought the only explanation for my gender dysphoria must be that I was actually a man. I was struggling with self-harm and had attempted suicide on a number of occasions and was very much told by the community that if you don’t transition, you will self-harm and you will kill yourself. I became convinced that my options were transition or die. I didn’t understand that the degree of disconnect from and hatred of my body could be considered a mental health problem…. The darkest moment was when I realized that I had actually looked normal for a girl. That I had actually been slim and pretty. That my body hadn’t been grotesque the way I thought it was. Now, as a result of having transitioned, I will always have a female body that is freakish. I will always have a flat chest and a beard and there’s nothing I can do about that…. Nobody wants to question the received knowledge that transition is the only option because nobody wants to be the one person that puts their head up and says “hang on, I don’t think this is all right”.… If I was talking to a gender-dysphoric girl who hated her body the way I hated mine, I would tell her to get out into the mud, to climb trees, to find ways of inhabiting her body on her terms.[35]

• While the American Academy of Pediatrics has formally endorsed chemical and surgical interventions and social “transitioning” for children and teens who wish they were the sex they are not, no one knows exactly how many of the 67,000 academy members agree with this position since only about 55 members created and voted on it. [36]

It is unconscionable for anyone who cares about children and the future of America to remain ignorant of and silent on this issue.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Surprising-Stuff.mp3

Footnotes:

[1] https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/homosexuality/questions-restrooms-locker-rooms-leftists-must-answer/

[2] http://www.hayesinc.com/hayes/htareports/directory/sex-reassignment-surgery-for-the-treatment-of-gender-dysphoria/. Accessed 3.24.16.

[3] http://www.jpands.or g/vol21no2/cretella.pdf

[4] http://www.unaids.org/sites/default/files/media_asset/201405_sterilization_en.pdf

[5] https://apps.carleton.edu/campus/gsc/assets/hormones_MTF.pdf

[6] https://apps.carleton.edu/campus/gsc/assets/hormones_FTM.pdf

[7] http://transhealth.ucsf.edu/trans?page=guidelines-vaginoplasty

[8] https://www.cmda.org/resources/publication/transgender-identification-ethics-statement

[9] http://www.cathmed.org/assets/files/Gender_Dysphoria_Treatment_of_Minors.pdf

[10] http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/AFSP-Williams-Suicide-Report-Final.pdf

[11] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3043071/

[12] https://4thwavenow.com/2017/09/08/suicide-or-transition-the-only-options-for-gender-dysphoric-kids/comment-page-1/

[13] L Mayer, P McHugh, “Part Three: Gender Identity,” The New Atlantis, https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/part-three-gender-identity-sexuality-and-gender

[14] https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/part-three-gender-identity-sexuality-and-gender

[15] https://www.thecut.com/2016/07/whats-missing-from-the-conversation-about-transgender-kids.html

[16] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18981931

[17] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18194003

[18] http://www.sexologytoday.org/2016/01/do-trans-kids-stay-trans-when-they-grow_99.html

[19] https://www.thenewatlantis.com/docLib/20170619_TNA52HruzMayerMcHugh.pdf

[20] https://www.acpeds.org/the-college-speaks/position-statements/gender-dysphoria-in-children

[21] https://www.forbes.com/sites/zhanavrangalova/2017/11/15/growing-evidence-for-a-link-between-gender-dysphoria-and-autism-spectrum-disorders/#26953173153e

[22] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-018-1218-3

[23] https://4thwavenow.com/2017/12/07/gender-dysphoria-is-not-one-thing/

[24] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0202330

[25] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/09/16/minister-orders-inquiry-4000-per-cent-rise-children-wanting/

[26] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/body-integrity-identity-disorder-the-condition-where-sufferers-want-to-be-disabled-a6680306.html

[27] http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2009/03/27/voluntary-amputation-extra-phantom-limbs/

[28]https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15265160802588194 

[29] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/when-transgender-kids-transition-medical-risks-are-both-known-and-unknown/

[30] https://vimeo.com/247163584

[31] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/11/a-boys-life/307059/

[32] https://gendertrender.wordpress.com/2011/04/20/sheila-jeffreys-the-mccarthyism-of-transgender-and-the-sterilization-of-transgender-children/

[33] http://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/64273

[34] http://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/64273

[35] https://vimeo.com/247163584 

[36] https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/homosexuality/55-members-of-american-academy-of-pediatrics-devise-destructive-trans-policy/ 

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The hate business may not be what it used to be – at least on the government level.

The Defense Department has become the latest federal agency to sever ties with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), an Alabama-based, hard-left group whose “hate map” is being used against Christian groups.

Well, bully for the Pentagon for showing that bully to the door.

The DOD’s pullback from the SPLC was reported by the Daily Caller, which said that a Justice Department attorney stated in an email that the DOD “removed any and all references to the SPLC in training materials used by the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute (DEOMI).”

In 2014, the FBI dropped the SPLC from its resources page after congressional staff, acting on behalf of the Family Research Council (FRC) and other Christian groups on the “hate map,” met with FBI officials to discuss their concerns, according to the Daily Caller.

Once hailed for tracking the Ku Klux Klan and other extremists, the SPLC has in recent years been wielded against mainstream Christian organizations over their defense of Biblical sexual morality and marriage.

If you say out loud that men are different from women, you just took a big step toward the “hate map.”  If you say that marriage necessarily involves both sexes, bingo.  And if you say that it’s not loving to steer boys into identifying as girls, you might earn an SPLC mention alongside skinheads and Neo-Nazis.

The SPLC also targets those who oppose illegal immigration and those who believe Islamic expansionism is a threat to freedom.  All in all, the SPLC might want to consider changing its name to Hate, Inc.

In 2015, the SPLC placed presidential candidate Ben Carson, who now heads the Department of Housing and Urban Development, on an “extremist” hate watch list.  After taking considerable flak, the SPLC removed the citation and apologized to Dr. Carson.

But this guilt-by-association ploy is having a huge effect in Silicon Valley, where cyber giants who fancy themselves do-gooders look to the SPLC for guidance.

“Right now, [the SPLC is] cutting off hate groups from sources of financing by pushing digital companies like Amazon not to allow hate groups to use their services,” said SPLC’s founder, direct-mail wizard Morris Dees.

Google, Facebook and Twitter are under congressional scrutiny for allegedly “shadow banning” conservative and religious postings.

“The most dangerous aspect of this high-tech offensive on pro-faith groups and individuals is buried deep in the algorithms of these gatekeepers for the new economy,” said Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel.

Google now supports a “hate news” database that links to articles referencing Liberty Counsel and other Christian groups on the SPLC “hate” list.  The SPLC’s smears have led Amazon Smile, a charity donation program run by Jeff Bezos’ Amazon company, to ban pro-family Christian groups.

Last year, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced a $1 million Apple donation to the SPLC and added a portal so iTunes buyers could donate directly. Big Tech, meet Big Hate.

The SPLC’s perfidy has led to “hate” labels on Christian groups listed in GuideStar, the charity group database, which removed some labels after a public outcry.  Discover/Diners Club is now blocking transactions with some pro-family groups, according to Liberty Counsel’s Mat Staver.

Making false accusations of hate is profoundly hateful, but it’s also lucrative. The SPLC, which has raised millions since its 1971 founding, has fattened its endowment to more than $477 million, according to its latest Form 990.

In August 2017, D. James Kennedy Ministries, for which I have written several books, finally had had enough and filed a defamation lawsuit against the SPLC in Alabama and also sued GuideStar and Amazon.com, Inc.  The ministry withdrew the GuideStar suit but continued the other litigation.  Liberty Counsel also sued GuideStar, but that suit was thrown out last January by U.S. District Judge Raymond Jackson, a Bill Clinton appointee.

In August 2012, Leo Johnson, the building manager at FRC headquarters in Washington, D.C., was shot while preventing an attempted mass murder by a man who said he was inspired by FRC’s presence on the SPLC’s “hate map.”

The shooter, Floyd Lee Corkins II, planned to kill as many people as possible and jam Chick-fil-A sandwiches into their faces to protest Chick-fil-A’s and FRC’s support for natural marriage.  He was sentenced to 25 years in prison in September 2013 for committing an act of terrorism while armed and other offenses.

Apparently, the SPLC did not find this compelling enough to remove FRC from its “hate map,” where it remained until very recently.  However, FRC – along with D. James Kennedy Ministries, the American Family Association, Alliance Defending Freedom, the Ruth Institute, the American College of Pediatricians and many other reputable Christian groups, along with the Jewish-led parents group MassResistance – is still listed on the SPLC’s “Hate Watch” page.

For pro-family activists, it’s become a badge of honor.

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:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/New-Recording-4.mp3

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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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