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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why the difference?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you hear it?

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Read more:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opposing Transgenderism Is Not Genocide (Oliver Perry)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As with so many adolescents today, David diagnosed himself.

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

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

And with that, the diabolical Garofalo proceeded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remember, this was written over seven years ago.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dysconnected: The Real Story Behind the Transgender Explosion 

Whose Children Are They? 

What is a Woman?

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The God-rejecting, science-denying, incoherent “trans” ideology lurches on destroying lives, aided and abetted by ignorant people like Illinois’ Governor J.B. Pritzker who is using an administrative rule to force Illinoisans to pay for “gender reassignment” surgery and risky cross-sex hormone-doping through Medicaid.

The term “gender reassignment surgery” is absurd. Physicians do not “reassign” or “confirm” gender. Nor do they reassign, confirm, or change a person’s sex. The surgery Pritzker seeks to make taxpayers fund in this morally and fiscally bankrupt state is surgery that mutilates healthy bodies in order to enable those who suffer from gender dysphoria to pass as the sex they are not and never can be. Such medical malpractice is lucrative for surgeons and pharmaceutical companies but grievously harmful to its victims. Forcing Illinoisans to subsidize it is a social, political, and moral injustice.

At the same time, however, more and more brave souls are emerging on the cultural scene to fight back against the heart-, mind-, and body-destroying “trans” ideology often at great personal cost.

The number of men and women “detransitioning” grows, and they’re trying to warn others through websites like Sex Change Regret and Pique Resilience Project about the numerous problems—intellectual, moral, social, political, and medical—that are integral to the “trans” ideology.

Conservative and “progressive” women—including self-identifying lesbians—have created an organization called Hands Across the Aisle to oppose the implementation of “gender identity theory” through legislation and to prevent the sexual integration of women’s activities and private spaces.

“Gender-critical” radical feminists like Kara Dansky and lesbians Sheila Jeffreys and Julia Beck (who was kicked off of a Boston “LGBT” commission for her belief that only women can be lesbians and for her refusal to use female pronouns when referring to a male rapist who pretends to be a woman) are speaking out.

The Heritage Foundation has held two panel discussions that included lesbians, radical feminists, conservative Christians, and a man who formerly identified as a woman, all who share in common unstinting critiques of the “trans” ideology. (To watch them, click here  and here)

Scholars like Lisa Littman, Lisa Marchiano, Heather Brunskell-Evans, and Rebecca Reilly Cooper are dissecting the “trans” ideology, exposing its weaknesses.

And websites like 4thWaveNow and Transgender Trend, both started by parents of children caught up in the darkness and delusion of the “trans” ideology, are helping each other and the public at large better understand the dangers posed by the wholesale cultural embrace of the “trans” madness, including the embrace of it by medical and mental health communities, which now results in surgeons performing double mastectomies on 13-year-old girls and castrating 16- and 17-year-old boys.

The newest organization to emerge on the scene is The Kelsey Coalition, “a national group of parents whose transgender-identifying children have been harmed by physicians, therapists, and clinics throughout the US.” The Kelsey Coalition is calling for the term “gender identity” to be removed from the Equality Act and from what are called “conversion therapy bans,” which unjustifiably ban conventional counseling protocols.

The Kelsey Coalition has also mounted a critically important campaign to stop an unethical, ideology-driven five-year study of gender-dysphoric minors funded by taxpayers through a $5.7 million grant from  the National Institutes of Health (NIH)to four “gender” clinics—including one at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago headed up by HIV-positive homosexual pediatrician Dr. Robert Garofalo. A profile of Garofalo—who started Lurie’s gender clinic with a huge donation from J.B. Pritker’s male cousin who masquerades as a woman—in Chicago Magazine at the start of the NIH study makes this disturbing claim:

For now Garofalo’s treatments have to be seen as a radical form of medical improvisation.

This study, begun in 2015, uses children as lab rats to study the effects of puberty-blocking drugs and cross-sex hormone-doping on minors. The Kelsey Coalition’s press release states the following:

This NIH study is a five-year observational experiment in which children are treated with powerful drugs to treat a non-medical condition. The basis for inclusion in the study is little more than a child’s self-identification as transgender. There is no control group….

Young children in the study are given puberty-blocking drugs; older children, cross-sex hormones. There is neither FDA approval, nor a single safety study, to support the use of these medications by healthy children and adolescents. According to Dr. Michael Laidlaw, medical consultant to the Coalition,” These drugs will radically alter their endocrine systems, impact sexual function, and fertility, while putting them at increased risk of developing other serious medical health conditions.”

… “In 2017, the protocol was changed mid-study: the minimum age for cross-sex hormone inclusion was decreased from age thirteen to age eight. According to the 2018 progress report, 19 children have been recruited into the new 8-12 year-old cohort.”

The Kelsey Coalition contends this trial is unethical and violates laws protecting human subjects.

Through this study, taxpayers are subsidizing unethical science experiments on children as young as 8 years old.

We’re paying for quack doctors to suppress or prevent puberty, which irrevocably alters formative adolescent social experiences, making it unlikely that children will ever reclaim a proper and true sexual identity:

The impact on sexuality has not yet been studied, but the restriction of sexual appetite brought about by blockers may prevent the adolescent from having age-appropriate socio-sexual experiences.

We’re paying for the cross-sex hormone doping of minors that is supported by zero research assuring its long-term safety and which leaves children permanently sterile.

While forging ahead in its support for this medical barbarism, UnitedHealthcare Oxford ironically states that,

Clinical evidence supporting the use of GnRH analogs [puberty blockers] for the treatment of gender dysphoria is limited and lacks long-term safety data. Statistically robust randomized controlled trials are needed to address the issue of whether the benefits outweigh the clinical risk in its use.

Medical professionals believe cross-sex hormones may increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, blood clots, and cancer. And they believe puberty-blockers may have deleterious effects on bone and neurological development.

Remarkably, even here in the moral and intellectual darkness that engulfs our once great state, glimmers of light offer hope to beleaguered Illinoisans. Two courageous lawmakers are taking bold public stands against the “trans” madness.

State Representative Darren Bailey (R-Louisville) announced he will be sponsoring legislation to block Pritzker’s outrageous plan to force taxpayers through Medicaid to fund medical interventions that disrupt healthy biological processes and mutilate healthy anatomy. And State Representative Tom Morrison (R-Palatine) has sponsored legislation (HB 3515) to ban chemical and surgical interventions for the treatment of gender dysphoria in minors.

Tragically, there are few lawmakers at the state or national level who have the courage and wisdom to take on the “trans” ideology that wreaks havoc on the bodies and minds of men, women, and children; on families; and on the body politic. Illinoisans should support these two courageous and principled lawmakers in every way possible.

Yes, opposition to the “trans” ideology grows but not nearly fast enough. While most Christians lay low to avoid the trials God has promised us and commanded us to count as joy, the “trans” ideology lays waste to the lives and bodies of people for whom we should be willing to lay down our lives.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send a message to Governor Pritzker’s office to let his administration know that you disagree with the misuse of taxpayer funds for Medicaid so-called “gender reassignment” surgeries.  You can also voice your opinion by phone at (217) 782-6830 or (312) 814-2121.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/JB_Pride.mp3

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