Gender Ideologues’ Alarming Campaign to Get Kids While They’re YoungBernard Lane
29 Mar 2022
In the debate about the wisdom of medicalised gender change for the young, there is a common refrain meant to expose the moral panic and ignorance of sceptics. No young person, we are told, gets any medical intervention before puberty. This may be true, but it obscures the more telling fact that very young children at school are exposed to influences that may put them on a one-way path to lifelong medicalisation.
In a Canadian primary school, a six-year-old girl was reportedly upset and puzzled after her teacher showed the class a YouTube video entitled He, She, and They?!?—Gender: Queer Kid Stuff #2. The video stated that “some people aren’t boys or girls.” Another day, the teacher asked the children to place themselves on a gender-spectrum diagram. The six-year-old put herself at the “girl” end of the spectrum, only to be told by the teacher that “girls are not real, and boys are not real.”
The girl’s family say school authorities refused to take any action over these lessons, which were given in 2018. Although the family moved the daughter to another school, they say the disorienting effect of having her foundational identity as a girl undermined has been “severe and long-lasting.” A human-rights complaint brought on the girl’s behalf finally reached a full tribunal hearing this month.
In England, a six-year-old boy reportedly came home confused because his school was allowing another boy to identify as female and wear a dress. The six-year-old’s parents say they were warned by school authorities that anyone who “could not believe” that boys identifying as girls were actually girls, or anyone who refused to use female pronouns, “would be viewed by the school as being transphobic.”
At a middle school in California, a sixth-grade girl called Jessica was allegedly influenced by teachers to join an Equality Club, where she was told she might be transgender and bisexual. Her mother’s lawyer says the teachers “told these kids, do not tell your parents, and specifically Jessica’s mom, do not tell them, they cannot be trusted.”
“They gave them reading materials about transgenderism,” the lawyer says. “They secretly changed the pronouns, but when in front of the parents, referred to their children by their birth pronouns. Behind the parents’ back, in the school, [they] used their new identity. All this was done secretly.”
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Before the recent enthusiasm for early social transition and the Dutch-protocol treatments, most patients diagnosed with gender dysphoria in early childhood grew out of it, many of them emerging as healthy, unmedicalised young people who identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual.
Canadian clinical psychologist Ken Zucker, a world authority on youth gender dysphoria and editor of the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, argues that early social transition is itself a psychosocial intervention that is likely to make dysphoria persist, rather than “desist” as it used to.
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Source:
https://quillette.com/2022/03/29/gender-idoelogues-alarming-campaign-to-get-kids-while-theyre-young/
