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The “Trans”-Cult’s Diabolical Quest for Cultural Hegemony

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?





Opposition to “Trans” Ideology Grows

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 Garofalowho started Lurie’s gender clinic with a huge donation from J.B. Pritker’s male cousin who masquerades as a womanin 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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55 Members of American Academy of Pediatrics Devise Destructive “Trans” Policy

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

First some facts:

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

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

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

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

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

  • The medical and mental health communities should embrace and affirm the anti-science “trans” ideology by chemically sterilizing and surgically mutilating minors.
  • All health records should identify only the subjective, internal feelings of minors about being “male, female, somewhere in between, a combination of both, or neither” and should conceal the biological sex of minors who seek to pass as the opposite sex.
  • Insurance plans should cover all Mengelian science experiments performed on minors in their futile quest to become the sex they are not and never can be.
  • Pediatricians should actively promote the “trans” dogma in public schools, community organizations, and the law.
  • Federal government research should “prioritize research that is dedicated to improving the quality of evidence-based care for youth who identify as TGD.”

Note what the AAP doesn’t recommend.

  • It doesn’t recommend that medical and mental health communities should provide comprehensive, biological-sex-affirming health care in a safe, clinical space.
  • It doesn’t urge medical and health care professionals to ascertain when a patient’s feelings first emerged or to determine the presence of comorbidities (i.e., other conditions present simultaneously).
  • It doesn’t call for research into 1. the safety of lifelong cross-sex hormone-doping, 2. the effect of social “transitioning,” and chemical and surgical interventions on desistance/persistence rates, 3. the rate of detransitioning/sex-change regret, 4. the phenomenon called “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria,” or 5. all the possible causes for the “high rates of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, self-harm, and suicide” among adolescents who self-identify as “gender diverse,” which could include abuse, molestation, social ostracism, bullying, and family breakdown.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nope.

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

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

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

  • Policy Statements are produced by 10-12-member Committees or Councils, or Section or more commonly by Section Executive Committees.
  • The 10 members of the AAP Board of Directors are elected by the AAP members of their district (elections never garner votes from even 40% of members) and the Executive Committee consisting of the president, president-elect, immediate past-president (elected by the AAP members nationally with equally small numbers voting), and the paid executive director (hired by the Board)
  • Statements are sent to the board for review and vote. Often there is discussion at a board meeting. Rarely is there outside opinion sought, and there is never a minority report.
  • AAP members often don’t even see the report until after it appears in the media. They have no direct input.

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

Here are some HRC recommendations  from its guide for schools:

  • “While this guide focuses primarily on transgender youth who are transitioning from male to female or female to male, it is important to note that a growing number of gender-expansive youth are identifying themselves outside the gender binary, and many use gender-neutral pronouns. While it may be more difficult to adapt to gender-neutral pronouns, it is still important to do so in support of the student.”
  • “Another crucial element in supporting a transitioning student is giving them access to sex-separated facilities, activities or programs based on the student’s gender identity [including] [r]estrooms, locker rooms, health and physical education classes, competitive athletics, overnight field trips, [and] homecoming court and prom.”
  • “Any student who feels uncomfortable sharing facilities with a transgender student should be allowed to use another more private facility like the bathroom in the nurse’s office, but a transgender student should never be forced to use alternative facilities to make other students comfortable.”

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

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

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Do 66,000 Pediatricians Really Support the AAP’s “Trans”-Affirmative Policy?

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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