Gender Ideology, from the Classroom to the Clinic

T he fight over gender-confused children and how, or whether, it is appropriate to interfere with their sexual development will increase in intensity under a Biden-Harris administration. During his campaign, Biden promised to pass the Equality Act — a law that has already passed the House and would redefine sex to include “gender identity” in the 1964 Civil Rights Act — within 100 days of his presidency. When asked by one voter, the parent of an 8-year-old “transgender daughter,” at the ABC October town hall what he intended to do about the Trump administration’s transgender policies, Biden responded, “I will flat-out just change the law.” Then, with characteristic ambiguity, he added: “The idea that an eight-year-old child or ten-year-old child decides, ‘You know I decided I want to be transgender. That’s what I think I’d like to be. It would make my life a lot easier.’ There should be zero discrimination.”

So does Biden approve or disapprove of medicalizing gender-confused youth?

Certainly, the mainstream American media approve wholeheartedly. In one recent report, CNN highlights that “since the start of the 2020 legislative session, at least six states have proposed to restrict transgender minors’ access to gender reassignment treatments, including surgery and hormone therapy.” These states include South Dakota, Florida, Missouri, Colorado, and South Carolina. The story cites Ryan Thoreson, a Yale Law School lecturer and “an LGBT rights researcher” at Human Rights Watch calling such laws “unusual” as well as “alarming.” CNN concludes that “access to healthcare might be the latest, and perhaps most extreme, attempt to curb transgender rights among state legislatures.”

But in reality, the debate is not about “transgender rights” at all (gender-dysphoric people have the same rights and health-care options as everyone else), but whether it should be legal to permanently alter the fully functioning bodies and sexual development of physically healthy children. Progressive pundits frame the debate as being between the enlightened Left and the regressive Right, but this narrative collapses under scrutiny. For instance, Netflix recently promoted a series called The Baby-Sitter’s Club starring a 9-year-old “transgender girl,” Kai, whose mother previously told Good Housekeeping how she had come from a fundamentalist Christian community. Kai’s mother noticed that, as a baby, he preferred girls’ things, but she wasn’t initially “ready to face the fact that my one-and-a-half-year-old child was a girl.” Two years later, after “sidelong glances and questions” from friends and inquiring about Kai’s “feminine behavior,” her family began “questioning whether Kai was gay,” before ultimately arriving at the conclusion that he must be transgender. For anyone paying attention, this — the attempt to physically change a child’s body because he is exhibiting behavior the parent deems inappropriate for his sex — is clearly the real conversion therapy.

The claim that it amounts to “conversion therapy” to try to help psychologically reconcile a child with his or her sex is not only preposterous, but also flies in the face of decades of research into “gender dysphoria,” as well as basic facts that scientists have long known about the developing brain. As Dr. C Allan Hopewell, a senior neuropsychologist in the state of Texas, explained in a court deposition last year, the fact that children “can’t make rational decisions” and are “very easily influenced” is “settled science,” “at the level of Galileo’s statement of how the Earth revolves around the sun.” A child does not possess the mental maturity to be able to consent to hormonal and surgical “sex-change” interventions. These concerns help explain why the British parliament recently introduced new measures to protect gender-confused under-18s from “irreversible” harm. The current rules allow for children to begin hormone therapy as young as 12 and without their parents’ consent. Keira Bell, a 23-year-old woman who underwent gender reassignment in her mid-teens but now regrets her decision, believes she should never have been allowed to make that decision and is suing the state-run north-London clinic that performed her surgery.

The apparent implication of Biden’s ABC town hall reference to “the idea that an 8-year-old child or 10-year-old child decides, ‘You know I decided I want to be transgender’” as if “that will make [his or her] life a lot easier” seems to be that a child couldn’t possibly declare a transgender identity — the only basis for which a transgender diagnosis is needed — unless it was organic. But this assumption flippantly disregards the effect of socialization that occurs when we introduce gender propaganda into the classroom.

This is already widespread across the United States. Home-learning websites, such as “Brainpop,” slyly promote gender ideology, stating that “while ideas about gender often spark strong debate, many arguments stem from a lack of understanding. The language and vocabulary around gender have evolved significantly over the last few decades, as we have come to better understand the diversity of both biology and human experience,” and recommending ways for parents to talk to their children about gender. In Scotland, a book called “Brenda is a Sheep,” about “identity and acceptance” (i.e., a wolf who identifies as a sheep and is naively accepted by the flock as such), is to be used with five-year-olds in public schools, seemingly encouraging children to abandon the basic principles of safety where the “identity” of a predator is concerned.

Where children are concerned, gender ideology necessitates forthright and determined opposition. As we’ve seen in the U.K., it doesn’t matter whether this opposition comes from the left and the right. What matters is that it is strong, persistent, and uncompromising.