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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In my eight years with IFI, I have had good experiences with journalists, including even leftist journalists. They have largely treated me graciously and chosen comments from our interviews that accurately represented IFI’s positions on issues. Last week, however, that streak came to a screeching halt. I had an experience that bore out the charges of bias leveled against the mainstream press.

After reading my article on the Chicago Public Schools new “guidelines” that permit gender-dysphoric students and teachers to use opposite-sex restrooms and locker rooms, Bettina Chang, a writer for Chicago Magazine, interviewed me for some twenty minutes on IFI’s views of the guidelines. When her article came out two days later, I was, to put it mildly, surprised.

The bias of Chang is evident not only in the space allotted to quotes from leftists but also in the particular quotes from our 20-minute interview she chose to include and in her remarkable defense of her bias.

Amount of space allotted to leftists vs. conservatives

Chang included quotes from representatives of four far-left, pro-“LGBT” organizations: The Center on Halsted, Illinois Safe Schools Alliance, Chicago Gender Society, and Howard Brown Health.

Chang included quotes from one conservative organization: Illinois Family Institute.

She used 33 words from The Center on Halsted, 101 words from the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance, 86 words from the Chicago Gender Society, and 75 words from Howard Brown Health. She also paraphrased additional ideas from these organizations.

From our 20-minute interview, Chang used 8 words.

The 8 words she chose from our interview represented two points, one of which had nothing to do with the substance of the arguments against the use of opposite-sex restrooms by gender-dysphoric students, and the other misrepresented what I said.

Interview comments to Chang

To better understand the problems with her article and her defense of it, it’s important to know more about my initial answers to her questions.

I explained that IFI believes restrooms and locker rooms should correspond to students’ objective, immutable sex rather than their feelings about their sex because physical embodiment as male or female is profoundly meaningful and is the source of feelings of modesty and the desire for privacy.

I asked rhetorically why gender-dysphoric boys should be permitted to go to the bathroom, change clothes, or shower with only girls but girls should be denied that right.

I suggested that if curtains and stalls provide sufficient privacy to separate objectively male students from females, then there remains no reason to maintain any single-sex restrooms for any students.

I asked how the Left can be sure that if there is a mismatch between mind and body, the error rests with the body and not the mind.

Chang asked me to respond to the Leftist belief that prohibiting gender-dysphoric students from sharing restrooms with opposite-sex students is equivalent to prohibiting blacks from sharing restrooms with whites, which I did both in our initial conversation and an email that followed. Here was my response:

The only difference between blacks and whites is skin color, which is analogous to eye or hair color. So, would skin color (or eye or hair color) be relevant to restroom, locker room, shower, or shelter usage? Of course not. Even whites have diverse skin, eye, and hair colors. No one suggests that any of those color differences are relevant to feelings of modesty or the desire for privacy. So, any imposed separation was generated not by feelings of modesty or the desire for privacy. Rather, imposed separation of races in restrooms was motivated by racism.

Now with regard to sex, virtually everyone—including gender-dysphoric persons and homosexuals—acknowledge that men and women are substantively and significantly different. When homosexuals claim they are attracted only to persons of the same sex, they are implicitly and necessarily saying men and women are different, and those differences include bodily differences. When gender-dysphoric persons say they don’t want to use restrooms or locker rooms with persons of their same sex, they are saying there are fundamental and significant differences between men and women, and those differences include bodily differences. In fact, the intense desire to have an opposite-sex body is the central desire of virtually all gender-dysphoric persons. They are necessarily saying that their desire to use opposite-sex restrooms is based on those physical differences. They are demanding privacy based on sex differences while denying that privacy to others.

And if the demand for privacy based on objective sex differences is equivalent to racism, then why is the demand of gender-dysphoric persons for privacy based on sex differences not equivalent to racism? If separate restrooms for men and women are analogous to separate restrooms for blacks and whites, then are separate restrooms for gender-dysphoric males and non-gender-dysphoric males analogous to separate restrooms for blacks and whites as well? They are acknowledging sex differences and demanding to have those desires accommodated. So, why are sex differences meaningful only for those who have gender dysphoria but not for those who don’t?

So, from all those comments, here is what Chang wrote:

But acknowledgement remains an obstacle for conservative groups. Suburban-based Illinois Family Institute posted a blog this week decrying the CPS policy. The author, Laurie Higgins, says she does not believe the medical consensus that transgender people are mentally healthy, adding that “physical embodiment” of a sex should dictate bathroom use—though the group has no plans to petition CPS for changes to the policies because “that’s for community members to do,” she says.

That’s it.

While she got IFI’s position correct that we believe restroom use should correspond to physical embodiment as male or female, she conveniently omitted the reasons we believe that. She also omitted the points about the incoherence and inconsistency of the CPS guidelines that I raised through rhetorical questions. She did, however, manage to include six words about the unimportant point that IFI is not getting directly involved in efforts to overturn the CPS guidelines.

Chang’s defenses of her bias 

Even more interesting are Chang’s defenses of her imbalance.

First she told me “Sadly my editor has cut down the portion where I quoted you because he wanted me to focus on Chicago-only groups.”

Then she told me this stunner, which oddly has nothing to do with the location of IFI’s office:

[I]n writing the story, I could not ignore that your opinion is based on factual inaccuracies.

We address the question of balance by looking at accuracy as well as representation. It is your personal belief that transgender people are mentally ill, which is why you are against the policy. I think that’s important for our readers to know, and I included that in the article. I asked follow up questions to get a better view of how you came to that conclusion, but the reasoning you provided was too far outside the facts to responsibly report. [emphasis added]

Her rationalization of bias is remarkable for two reasons, the first of which is that I never said that “transgender people are mentally ill.”

Second, Chang is factually and absolutely incorrect when she claims that my opposition to gender-dysphoric persons using opposite-sex restrooms is based on my “personal belief that transgender people are “entally ill.” In point of fact, I told her specifically that IFI opposes gender-dysphoric persons in opposite-sex restrooms and locker rooms because we believe objective, immutable physical embodiment as male or female is deeply and profoundly meaningful and is the source of the desire for privacy and feelings of modesty.

Here’s what I said when she went fishing for a statement from me about the mental health of gender-dysphoric persons: I asked how leftists can be sure that if there’s a mismatch between mind and body, the error rests in healthy, normally functioning bodies. And I said that the highly politicized mental health community is prescribing protocols that do not advance health.

What’s more remarkable still are the opinions of leftists that Chang evidently believes are based on factual accuracies and, therefore, suitable for print:

• From the Center on Halsted: “It’s a great day for gender-diverse students in CPS.” What is the “fact” on which this opinion is based? Gender-diverse students may have the opinion that it’s a great day, but what is the objective and accurate fact upon which that opinion is based? What is the objective factually accurate definition of “great”?

• From the Center on Halsted: “This is an affirmation of their viability as human beings.” What does this even mean? And what is the objective factual accuracy on which the opinion that affirmation of viability of gender-dysphoric persons as “human beings” requires allowing them in opposite-sex restrooms? What is the objective factual accuracy supporting the implicit opinion that people who oppose opposite-sex persons in their restrooms view gender-dysphoric persons as not viable human beings?

• From the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance: “Obviously it’s helpful when people have the support of their parents, but if it’s not possible, it’s great that a student can still be who they are in school.” What is the objective factual accuracy on which the opinion that it’s “great” that a student can pretend he or she is the opposite sex at school? What is the objective factual accuracy on which the opinion that parental support requires affirmation of the desire to be the opposite sex is based?

• From the Chicago Gender Society: “You’re not born with hate. You have to be taught hate. Like we’ve seen in North Carolina and Mississippi in recent months.” What is the objective factual accuracy on which the opinion that people who oppose opposite-sex persons in restrooms hate them?

• From Harold Brown Health: “So for kids to have the option to be in a safe environment…it’s a new day. A clean slate.” What is the objective factual accuracy on which the opinion that allowing gender-dysphoric girls in boys restrooms and locker rooms enhances school “safety.” What is the objective factual accuracy on which the opinion that allowing gender-dysphoric students to use opposite-sex restrooms and locker rooms creates a “clean slate”?

Apparently, leftists believe that opinions must be based on “factual accuracies” as defined by them. Hint: These factual accuracies are actually assumptions with which leftists agree.

So much for fair and balanced reporting and intellectual diversity.

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