By FRC's Dan Hart
On October 15 during a town hall event, Joe Biden said something truly disturbing: "The idea that an 8-year-old child or a 10-year-old child decides, 'you know, I decided I want to be transgender' ... there should be zero discrimination." Let's pause and think about that for a second. Should 8-year-old children, who often can't make up their mind about what they want for lunch, be given completely free reign to "change" their gender through drugs that permanently block normal growth and cause irreversible sterility and through surgery that mutilates their bodies? Joe Biden thinks they should, and he has promised to "flat-out change the law" to make sure that not even the child's own parents have any say in the matter.
Abigail Shrier, who authored the must-read new book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, joined the eighth episode of FRC's Pray Vote Stand 2020 webcast series and framed the transgender issue bluntly. "One in four teenagers are now identifying as some version of LGBTQ," she noted. "Starting as young as kindergarten in public schools, we're indoctrinating gender confusion. And then the moment the child has a revelation 'oh, I must be trans,' we immediately affirm them. So this is something that we are very much pushing-facilitating, and then in sort of a monstrous way, patting ourselves on the back for accepting what we've actually made a foregone conclusion, which is the permanent medicalization of a whole generation of children."
As Shrier tragically observed, parents who dare question the new transgender orthodoxy are being threatened with loss of custody of their gender-confused children, and powerful medical accrediting organizations are forcing doctors to affirm gender confusion despite any misgivings they might have.
So what's at the heart of all this? "There are so many things," Shrier said. "America is a lot less religious than we used to be and you're seeing some of the effects of that. We've lost our herd immunity to moral idiocy, which I think our population used to generally have."
What can parents do to protect their children? "Get your daughter off social media," Shrier pleaded. "Social media is so toxic ... we've been able to tie it to their [high] rates of mental anxiety, depression, and suicide ... it opens them up to a world of influences that are frankly quite bad and to adults you would not want in your home. The other thing is we must oppose gender ideology in the schools ... there is no reason we can't show compassion to a transgender person without indoctrinating an entire population in gender confusion."
Dr. Michelle Cretella of the American College of Pediatricians joined the program to underscore how the Left is doing the very thing that they routinely accuse conservatives of doing: ignoring the science. "Children confused about their sex will go to a doctor... they will give them a blocker. Puberty blockers prevent those children from going through normal sexual, bone, and brain development. This is very serious. Even if those kids eventually come off the blockers, there is some early evidence that they will have permanent bone loss. The FDA is looking into reports of young women who were exposed to the puberty blockers earlier in life who now have permanent mental health issues ... and seizure disorders."
But as Dr. Cretella pointed out, there is a hopeful path forward for children who are confused about their gender. "If we can affirm them as the boys and girls that they are ... the vast majority of these young children will outgrow their gender confusion by the time they're young adults." Indeed, an American Psychiatric Association study found that almost 90 percent of all gender-confused children outgrow their feelings. The evidence is clear: "What these children need is good psychological care and counseling, not dangerous medications," Dr. Cretella said.
What is truly insidious is that the Democratic Party wants to outlaw this much needed counseling. Could the voice of values voters be any more critical on November 3?
Be sure to watch the entire eighth episode of Pray Vote Stand, which also features California pastor Amado Huizar, who led a petition decrying a "Drag Queen Story Hour" targeting children at a local library as well as two legislators -- Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Calif.) and State Representative Fred Deutsch of South Dakota -- who are taking a stand and fighting to pass important legislation that would protect gender-confused children from permanent physical and psychological damage.
