Democrats call the education legislation signed by Florida governor Ron DeSantis a “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Republicans argue that it’s geared toward protecting the innocence of younger students and parents’ fundamental rights.
Underneath the questions over whether it would prevent homosexual — but not heterosexual — teachers from mentioning their partners in passing is a philosophical debate on the transgender issue.
Those who support heavy-handed school instruction on gender theory — and continued involvement in engaging students with questions about its applicability to themselves — believe these lessons would constitute a process of enlightenment. One that would merely lift the veil for some students who were always this way but just didn’t know it. They think that gender dysphoria is a physical condition caused by a male body hosting a female brain or vice versa.
This attitude is the one affirmed by the medical establishment; the American Medical Association asserts that “empirical evidence has demonstrated that trans and non-binary gender identities are normal variations of human identity and expression,” while the American Academy of Pediatrics can find “no evidence that risk for mental illness is inherently attributable to one’s identity” as transgender or non-binary.
On the other end of the spectrum are those who hold that gender dysphoria is a psychological phenomenon in which people who are wholly male or wholly female and yet are under the misimpression that they have the opposite brain, or were meant to be the opposite of what they are. An additional component of this understanding of transgenderism is that it’s suggestible, or has a “social contagion” aspect to it. In other words, if you tell kids struggling with mental-health issues that perhaps it’s because they were born with a gender identity opposite their sex, and point to others who have reached the same conclusion, they may very well just accept that as the answer to their problems.
If you hold the former view, which is enforced with zeal by the cultural zeitgeist, you can’t very well support the Florida bill. You’d be withholding the cure to what ails a not-insignificant number of American children.
If you hold the latter view, how could you not support a measure that would prevent the spread of a dangerous misdiagnosis that would not only bring further inner turmoil, but set kids on a “treatment” plan that could leave them sterilized?
Behind all of the debates over whether one side is composed of groomers and the other is indifferent to the suicide rate among transgender youth is this central one. Conservatives should spend their energy winning it.