This warning delivered by the prophet Hosea is true not only regarding knowledge of God’s existence, nature, and redemptive purposes but also regarding knowledge of the world in which we live and move and have our being. Right now, the bodies of children are being destroyed by lack of knowledge about human sexuality, and Christians who should know better largely say and do nothing. The foundation for right action is knowledge, which far too many Christians lack regarding the stunning “trans” revolution—a revolution the likes of which the modern world has never seen and too few understand.

The Illinois Family Institute hopes to play a small role in remedying the serious problem of lack of knowledge through our upcoming Worldview Conference on the “trans” ideology.

We are rapidly moving to a cultural place in which all public recognition of the reality and meaning of sexual differentiation will not be merely eradicated but outlawed. If any of the following surprises or troubles you, you need to attend the Worldview Conference:

• Countless children will be chemically sterilized and surgically mutilated.

• Many more children will fall victim to the phenomenon of “social contagion.” Emotionally, psychologically, socially, intellectually, morally, and spiritually vulnerable and malleable children will be provided a distorted lens through which they will misinterpret confusing, uncomfortable, and/or distressing thoughts and feelings.

• All previously sex-segregated spaces or activities will become by law sexually integrated. No more single-sex restrooms, locker rooms, showers, shelters, jails or prisons, semi-private hospital rooms, nursing home rooms, dorm rooms, athletics, clubs, or travel tours. If state and federal laws prohibit discrimination based on sex and on “gender identity,” there remains no legal way to maintain sex-segregated spaces. If men who identify as “trans” are permitted in women’s spaces, then “cisgender” men must be allowed in as well because discrimination based on “gender identity” is impermissible.

• The safety of girls and women will be jeopardized by the presence of men who claim to “identify’’ as women in women’s private spaces.

• First Amendment speech, association, and religious exercise protections will erode.

• Language rules will be instituted that will prohibit the use of some words and mandate the use of others. Failure to submit will result in fines or jail time.

• Public schools, where many parents due to financial stresses resulting from death, divorce, desertion, or disabilities must place their children, will teach explicitly through curricula and implicitly through bathroom, locker room, and athletic policies and practices, that in order to be compassionate and inclusive, children must share private spaces with opposite-sex peers. This in turn teaches that biological sex has no meaning relative to feelings of modesty and the desire for privacy when engaged in intimate activities.

• Public decency laws will be repealed. For example, society will be forced to treat women who pretend to be men and have obtained falsified birth certificates and driver’s licenses that identify them as men but choose not to have mastectomies as if they are men. Since men are permitted to be topless at public beaches, pools, and parks, so too will women who pretend to be men.

• Social media monopolies, rapidly becoming the primary means of conducting business and communicating information and ideas, will ban anyone who uses language or expresses ideas that “trans” ideologues oppose.

• Biological, adoptive, and foster parents who reject the science-denying “trans” ideology and, as a result, refuse to allow their confused children to socially, chemically, or surgically “transition” will face loss of custody or the inability to adopt or foster.

• People—including children—will be taught that those who care about the biological sex/anatomy of their romantic partners are “transphobic.” Dissenters will be bullied.

Big Brother will continue to be enjoined to oppress dissenters, and resistance will be futile.

What Christians urgently need is knowledge and a willingness to suffer—also known as courage. In the fervent hope of serving both needs, the Worldview Conference in just a few weeks will host four leaders on the national stage who have both knowledge of the “trans” ideology and the willingness to say and do what far too many Christians shamefully refuse to say and do.

The conference will include two Q & A sessions following presentations by the following speakers:

• Michelle Cretella: Pediatrician and Executive Director of the American College of Pediatricians

• Walt Heyer: Former “transgender,” author, and contributor to Public Discourse

• Denise Shick: Daughter of cross-sex-identified man, and Founder & Director of Help 4 Families

• Doug Wilson: Senior Fellow of Theology at New St. Andrews College, pastor, author, and homeschooling father

Please come, learn, and be challenged to do more to protect the hearts, minds, bodies, and rights of our children and grandchildren. If we are willing to endure minor persecution now, perhaps our grandchildren won’t be forced to endure worse in the years to come.

“Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evil people and impostors will go on from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.  But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.” (2 Tim. 3:12-15)

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Worldview-Recording-3.mp3

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The Transgender Ideology:
What Is It? Where Will It Lead? What is the Church’s Role?
Click here for more information.

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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