May 25, 2021
Dear Friends and Family,
This is Segment 15 of the Nihilism series, titled “Transgender Identity: Minors.” This segment supports Nihilism, so it is appropriate to restate its definition: “a viewpoint that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded, and their existence is senseless and useless.” In fact, the assertion that the social justice warriors have and continue to overhype the transgender issue creating unintended consequences which are hurting a lot of people may be true.
My Takeaways:
Next:
Next week’s segment will wrap up the philosophy section of the series. It is devoted to analyzing how the “Social Justice Movement” is impacting our society.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
This is Segment 15 of the Nihilism series, titled “Transgender Identity: Minors.” This segment supports Nihilism, so it is appropriate to restate its definition: “a viewpoint that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded, and their existence is senseless and useless.” In fact, the assertion that the social justice warriors have and continue to overhype the transgender issue creating unintended consequences which are hurting a lot of people may be true.
My Takeaways:
- The overhyping by the social justice warriors has resulted in a transgender craze, most particularly with adolescent girls.
- The craze is often perpetrated and reinforced in schools via sex education and peer pressure, misinformation via the internet, some LBGTQ medical profession advocates, and LBGTQ education.
- In nearly 70% of these cases the assumed dysphoria resolves itself.
- The craze also extends to prepuberty children some of whom are influenced to use puberty blockers and/or testosterone both of which can be injurious to those taking such drugs.
- Parents are often intimidated or bullied into accepting the craze. In other situations, teachers, medical professionals and/or the transgender crazed child will hide the supposed gender dysphoria from their parents.
- Many trans adults apologize for the trans activists that claim to speak in their name.
- The craze is not unique to the U.S. as it is also prevalent in the United Kingdom (England and Scotland specifically)
- In many states biological boys are permitted to compete in a girls sport simply by self-identifying as a girl (no use of any sex hormones or any testing of testosterone levels is required).
- All the hype and resulting craze appears to be initiated and fueled by LGBTQ advocates and their supporters seeking transgender legislation. So much of the hype is with a political objective.
Next:
Next week’s segment will wrap up the philosophy section of the series. It is devoted to analyzing how the “Social Justice Movement” is impacting our society.
Happy Learning,
Harley
NIHILISM: GOOD OR BAD? – SEGMENT 15
TRANSGENDER IDENTITY: CHILDREN – EXCERPTS
INTRODUCTION – A PROBLEM: Gender dysphoria is characterized by a severe and persistent discomfort in one’s biological sex. It typically begins in early childhood – ages two to four – though it may grow more severe in adolescence. But in most cases – nearly 70% -- childhood gender dysphoria resolves itself. Historically, it afflicts a tiny sliver of the population (roughly 0.01%) and almost exclusively boys. Before 2012 there was no scientific literature on girls ages 11 to 21 ever having developed gender dysphoria. In the last decade that has changed dramatically. The Western world has seen a sudden surge of adolescents claiming to have gender dysphoria and self-identifying as “transgender.” For the first time in medical history, natal girls are not only present among those so identifying – they constitute the majority. Why? What happened? How did an age group that had always been the minority of those afflicted (adolescents) come to form the majority? Perhaps more significantly – why did the sex ratio flip: from overwhelmingly boys to majority adolescent girls?
This is a story Americans need to hear. Whether or not you have an adolescent daughter, whether or not your child has fallen for this transgender craze, America has become fertile ground for this mass enthusiasm for reasons that have everything to do with the cultural frailty: parents are undermined; experts are over-relied upon; dissenters in science and medicine are intimidated; free speech truckles under renewed attack; government healthcare laws harbor hidden consequences; and an intersectional era has arisen in which the desire to escape a dominant identity encourages individuals to take cover in victim groups. Transgender success stories are everywhere told and celebrated. They march under the banner of civil rights. They promise to breach the next cultural frontier, to shatter one more basis of human division. But the phenomenon sweeping teenage girls is different. It originates not in traditional gender dysphoria but in videos taken with girlfriends – hands and breath held eyes squeezed shut. For these girls, trans identification offers freedom from anxiety’s relentless pursuit; it satisfies the deepest need for acceptance, the thrill of transgression, the seductive lilt of belonging. The internet, which provides an endless array of transgender mentors who coach adolescents in the art of slipping into a new gender identity – what to wear, how to walk, what to say. Which internet companies sell the best breast binders which organizations send them for free and guarantee discreet packaging so that parents never find out. How to persuade doctors to supply the hormones you want. How to deceive parents – or it they resist your new identity, how to break away entirely.
Between 2009 and 2017, the number of high schoolers who contemplated suicide increased 25%. The number of teens diagnosed with clinical depression grew 37% between 2005 and 2014. And the worst hit – experiencing depression at a rate three times that of boys – were teenage girls. Among preteen girls ages ten to fourteen, rates of self-harm are up 189% since 2010, nearly triple what they were only six years before. Why the sudden spike in anxiety, depression, self-harm? “Social media” was the sociologist’s immediate reply. The iPhone was released in 2007. By 2018, 95% of teens had access to a smartphone and 45% reported being online “almost constantly.” Carefully curated and “face-tuned,” their photographs set a beauty standard no real girl can meet. And they sit constantly in a girl’s pocket, feeding fears of inadequacy, fueling obsession over her flaws – all the while exaggerating them. Even under the best of circumstances, teenage girls have been cruelly unforgiving critics of their own bodies – and each other’s. But today, social media supplies the microscope and performs the math.
Many of the adolescent girls who fall for the transgender craze lead upper-middle-class lives. They are often stellar students. Until the transgender craze strikes, these adolescents are notable for their agreeableness, companionability, and utter lack of rebellion. They’ve never smoked a cigarette; they don’t even drink. They’ve also never been sexually active. Many have never had a kiss – with a boy or girl. Many have never masturbated. Their bodies are a mystery to them, their deepest desires under-explored and largely unknown. But they are in pain – lots of it. The internet never gives them a day – or even an hour – of reprieve. They want to feel the highs and lows of teenage romance, but most of their life occurs on the iPhone. As a transgender therapist put it to me, “A common response that I get from female clients is something along these lines: “I don’t know exactly that I want to be a guy. I just know I don’t want to be a girl.”
This is the story of the American family – decent, loving, hardworking and kind. It wants to do the right thing. But if finds itself set in a society that increasingly regards parents as obstacles, bigots, and dupes. We cheer as teenage girls with no history of dysphoria steep themselves in a radical gender ideology taught in school or found on the internet. Peers and therapists and teachers and internet heroes egg these girls on. But here the cost of so much youthful indiscretion is not a piercing or tattoo. It’s closer to a pound of flesh. Some small proportion of will always be transgender. But perhaps the current craze will not always lure troubled young girls with no history of agender dysphoria, enlisting them in a lifetime of hormone dependency and disfiguring surgeries. If this is a social contagion society – perhaps – can arrest it. No adolescent should pay this high a price for having been, briefly, a follower.
THE SHRINKS: Dr. Blanchard does not believe the adolescent girls who suddenly identify as trans in adolescence necessarily have gender dysphoria at all. He believes they are likely a mixed bag of a least three groups: (1) some kids who are going to be transgender no matter what therapy they’re given; (2) kids who would naturally have outgrown their dysphoria on their own and proceeded to live as gay adults; (3) “some contingent of teenage girls who just have borderline personality disorders and who have a kind of faux gender dysphoria, which they have identified as the locus of their unhappiness.” “People develop gender dysphoria in isolation of models. They didn’t need prompting from a friend, a school assembly, of a YouTube influencer to realize their dysphoria, it simply was.”
PUBERTY BLOCKERS: Sex hormones like testosterone don’t only target the sex organs. They also shower the brain. There is good reason to believe they participate in an adolescent’s neurological development. Why on earth would doctors liberally prescribe drugs that block it? Far from being “neutral” the psychosocial effects seem closer to radical. Suppression of normal bone density development and greater risk of osteoporosis, loss of sexual function, interference with brain development and possibly suppressing peak IQ are all risks puberty blockers carry. These risks increase dramatically if an adolescent goes straight from puberty blockers to cross-sex hormones. In that case infertility is almost guaranteed – and sexual development and potential for orgasm may be foreclosed for good. Shortly after cross-sex hormones are introduced permanent changes result. If a biological girl regrets her decision and stops taking testosterone, her extra body and facial hair will likely remain, as will her clitoral engorgement, deepened voice, and possibly even masculinization of her facial features.
“BOTTOM SURGERY” – PHALLOPLASTY: Whereas 36% of biological females identifying as “trans men” have had top surgery and another 61% desire it, according to the U.S. Transgender Survey of 2015, only 3% have had phalloplasty and only 13% even want it.
CONCLUSION: I have nothing but respect for the transgender adults I’ve interviewed. They were among the most sober, thoughtful, and decent people I had come to know in the course of writing this book. But I was concerned about another population, too, one I considered more vulnerable. A population we seem to have abandoned in pursuit of identity politics and progressive bona fides. A group that should, by right, be making us awfully proud, but instead seems to be teetering on the edge of disaster, the brink of despair – teenage girls. They hold the very possibility for our future. If only they weren’t tearing themselves apart.
Expressing concern about teens suddenly identifying as trans has become politically unwise and socially verboten – hateful by definition – an alleged assault on all transgender people, genuine and ersatz. But of course, the social contagion captivating teens has nothing to do with those who suffer gender dysphoria since childhood and, in adulthood, fashioned for themselves a transgender life. The fanatics – both transgender and, just as often, not – exploit an honest struggle that besets this tiny few to bully and harass any who might point out the sudden craze captivating our despairing young. Many trans adults I talked to apologized for the trans activists that claim to speak in their name. It’s important to remember that activists are the most extreme members of any group. All the institutions we’ve built to keep young people from making irreparable mistakes have failed them. The universities, the schools, the doctors, the therapists, and even the churches have been won over by a dogged ideology that claims to speak for a more important class of victim.
Source: Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing our Daughters by Abigail Shrier (2020).
THE VIEW OF A SEXOLOGIST AND NEUROSCIENTIST: Transgender activists have gained much political ground through the use of the narrative that being trans is similar to being gay – a person is born this way, it cannot be changed, and to question this is harmful to a trans person’s well-being. The ironic thing is that many of these children are indeed gay, and by being persuaded to transition, they are actually undergoing a new form of conversion therapy. Parents across the board are consequently being encouraged to monitor for signs of gender – atypical behavior in their children. Those parenting gender dysphoric kids are also irresponsibly being told that 41% of transgender children have attempted suicide (even though children under 18 were not part of the study) and that their child has a high likelihood of becoming part of this statistic. The misuse of this statistic is dishonest and cruel. But it is effective, which is why it continues to spread. Parents who wouldn’t otherwise allow their kids to make basic decision about what they’re having for dinner or what time they’re going to bed will support a child’s wish to undergo potentially irreversible medical interventions. Critics of the “trans kids” movement will frequently accuse these parents of being irresponsible and unfit to parent, but that’s not necessarily what it’s about. Logical, otherwise wary parents are having their deepest, most natural fear exploited by being told this is what their child needs to survive. Across all eleven long-term studies ever done on gender dysphoric children, between 50% to 90% desist by puberty. Desistence refers to the phenomenon of gender dysphoria remitting. A child who has desisted will no long feel dysphoric about their birth sex. These kids, who would fall into the early onset are more likely to grow up to be gay in adulthood, not transgender.
Source: The End of Gender by Dr. Debra Soh (2020).
THE PROFESSION: Dr. Johanny Olson-Kennedy is at present the medical director of the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. This is the largest transgender youth clinic in the U.S. and is one of our recipients of a taxpayer-funded National Institute of Health grant for a five-year study on the impact of puberty blockers and hormones on children. A study for which, as it happens, there is no control group. In her career Dr. Olson-Kennedy has, by her own admission regularly issued hormones to children as young as 12. And in an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association she says that a number of girls as young as 13 had been put on cross-sex hormones for fewer than six months before they were given surgery. This means that girls as young as 12 have been given these life-changing drugs. Furthermore, progress reports show that as of 2017 children as young as eight have become eligible for such treatments. Olson-Kennedy is skeptical about the idea that some 12-or-13-year-olds might not be in a position to make an informed and irreversible decision.
Source: The Madness Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity by Douglas Murray (2019).
THE GAY, LESBIAN AND STRAIGHT EDUCATION NETWORK (GLSEN): The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network describes itself as “the leading national organization fighting to end anti-gay bias in K-12 schools. GLSEN states it is working to make sure all primary and secondary school students accept all of their classmates – regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity expression. Gender identity expression in kindergarten? I for one, and no doubt you as well, believe we should let children be children without having to “learn” about homophobia, especially when it’s used as a pretext to gain access to a child.
GLSEN isn’t alone when it comes to using children and the school system to promote the radical gay agenda. A documentary film called It’s Elementary: Talking About Gay Issues in School offers to look at that agenda in action. The film, which actually uses children to move its message, is supposed to show teachers and other educators how to advocate homosexuality, bashes religion, and mocks people who believe homosexuality is wrong. This film, by the way, isn’t languishing in some basement without a hope of being distributed. It has already been aired on 100 stations of the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), and the film’s producers delight in informing us that it has been acquired by nearly 2,000 educational institutions.
Source: The Death of Right and Wrong by Tammy Bruce (2003).
TRANS ISSUES: Every human being should be free to modify their body however they see fit, but only when they’re an adult. Its consistent with how we treat all minors who are considered intellectually incapable of reasoned logic. It’s why we don’t allow kids to get tattoos, buy a firearm, and drink alcohol or smoke until they’re grown up. The idea behind this isn’t random. It’s because a young person’s frontal lobe – the brain’s control panel, which manages problem solving, judgment, and emotion – takes years to fully develop. The general consensus is that the brain’s development is largely finished by 18 years old and fully complete seven years later. Until the former, they must defer to us, the adults who know better. This is a universally held truth, yet we’re now allowing record numbers of young children (some as young as four years old) to change their gender through invasive surgery and potent puberty blockers.
So, let’s respect trans people as individuals the same way we would respect anyone else. But let’s also protect young people from overzealous activists caught up in the wokeness of the day. The trans issue is particularly interesting because it directly affects such an infinitesimally small fraction of the population. While that group of people is worthy of equality and protection, ask yourself why this topic is being relentlessly pushed so hard. Is it genuine concern, or is it another excuse to virtue signal while telling us how to think and feel?
Source: Don’t Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason by Dave Rubin (2020).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
TRANSGENDER IDENTITY: CHILDREN – EXCERPTS
INTRODUCTION – A PROBLEM: Gender dysphoria is characterized by a severe and persistent discomfort in one’s biological sex. It typically begins in early childhood – ages two to four – though it may grow more severe in adolescence. But in most cases – nearly 70% -- childhood gender dysphoria resolves itself. Historically, it afflicts a tiny sliver of the population (roughly 0.01%) and almost exclusively boys. Before 2012 there was no scientific literature on girls ages 11 to 21 ever having developed gender dysphoria. In the last decade that has changed dramatically. The Western world has seen a sudden surge of adolescents claiming to have gender dysphoria and self-identifying as “transgender.” For the first time in medical history, natal girls are not only present among those so identifying – they constitute the majority. Why? What happened? How did an age group that had always been the minority of those afflicted (adolescents) come to form the majority? Perhaps more significantly – why did the sex ratio flip: from overwhelmingly boys to majority adolescent girls?
This is a story Americans need to hear. Whether or not you have an adolescent daughter, whether or not your child has fallen for this transgender craze, America has become fertile ground for this mass enthusiasm for reasons that have everything to do with the cultural frailty: parents are undermined; experts are over-relied upon; dissenters in science and medicine are intimidated; free speech truckles under renewed attack; government healthcare laws harbor hidden consequences; and an intersectional era has arisen in which the desire to escape a dominant identity encourages individuals to take cover in victim groups. Transgender success stories are everywhere told and celebrated. They march under the banner of civil rights. They promise to breach the next cultural frontier, to shatter one more basis of human division. But the phenomenon sweeping teenage girls is different. It originates not in traditional gender dysphoria but in videos taken with girlfriends – hands and breath held eyes squeezed shut. For these girls, trans identification offers freedom from anxiety’s relentless pursuit; it satisfies the deepest need for acceptance, the thrill of transgression, the seductive lilt of belonging. The internet, which provides an endless array of transgender mentors who coach adolescents in the art of slipping into a new gender identity – what to wear, how to walk, what to say. Which internet companies sell the best breast binders which organizations send them for free and guarantee discreet packaging so that parents never find out. How to persuade doctors to supply the hormones you want. How to deceive parents – or it they resist your new identity, how to break away entirely.
Between 2009 and 2017, the number of high schoolers who contemplated suicide increased 25%. The number of teens diagnosed with clinical depression grew 37% between 2005 and 2014. And the worst hit – experiencing depression at a rate three times that of boys – were teenage girls. Among preteen girls ages ten to fourteen, rates of self-harm are up 189% since 2010, nearly triple what they were only six years before. Why the sudden spike in anxiety, depression, self-harm? “Social media” was the sociologist’s immediate reply. The iPhone was released in 2007. By 2018, 95% of teens had access to a smartphone and 45% reported being online “almost constantly.” Carefully curated and “face-tuned,” their photographs set a beauty standard no real girl can meet. And they sit constantly in a girl’s pocket, feeding fears of inadequacy, fueling obsession over her flaws – all the while exaggerating them. Even under the best of circumstances, teenage girls have been cruelly unforgiving critics of their own bodies – and each other’s. But today, social media supplies the microscope and performs the math.
Many of the adolescent girls who fall for the transgender craze lead upper-middle-class lives. They are often stellar students. Until the transgender craze strikes, these adolescents are notable for their agreeableness, companionability, and utter lack of rebellion. They’ve never smoked a cigarette; they don’t even drink. They’ve also never been sexually active. Many have never had a kiss – with a boy or girl. Many have never masturbated. Their bodies are a mystery to them, their deepest desires under-explored and largely unknown. But they are in pain – lots of it. The internet never gives them a day – or even an hour – of reprieve. They want to feel the highs and lows of teenage romance, but most of their life occurs on the iPhone. As a transgender therapist put it to me, “A common response that I get from female clients is something along these lines: “I don’t know exactly that I want to be a guy. I just know I don’t want to be a girl.”
This is the story of the American family – decent, loving, hardworking and kind. It wants to do the right thing. But if finds itself set in a society that increasingly regards parents as obstacles, bigots, and dupes. We cheer as teenage girls with no history of dysphoria steep themselves in a radical gender ideology taught in school or found on the internet. Peers and therapists and teachers and internet heroes egg these girls on. But here the cost of so much youthful indiscretion is not a piercing or tattoo. It’s closer to a pound of flesh. Some small proportion of will always be transgender. But perhaps the current craze will not always lure troubled young girls with no history of agender dysphoria, enlisting them in a lifetime of hormone dependency and disfiguring surgeries. If this is a social contagion society – perhaps – can arrest it. No adolescent should pay this high a price for having been, briefly, a follower.
THE SHRINKS: Dr. Blanchard does not believe the adolescent girls who suddenly identify as trans in adolescence necessarily have gender dysphoria at all. He believes they are likely a mixed bag of a least three groups: (1) some kids who are going to be transgender no matter what therapy they’re given; (2) kids who would naturally have outgrown their dysphoria on their own and proceeded to live as gay adults; (3) “some contingent of teenage girls who just have borderline personality disorders and who have a kind of faux gender dysphoria, which they have identified as the locus of their unhappiness.” “People develop gender dysphoria in isolation of models. They didn’t need prompting from a friend, a school assembly, of a YouTube influencer to realize their dysphoria, it simply was.”
PUBERTY BLOCKERS: Sex hormones like testosterone don’t only target the sex organs. They also shower the brain. There is good reason to believe they participate in an adolescent’s neurological development. Why on earth would doctors liberally prescribe drugs that block it? Far from being “neutral” the psychosocial effects seem closer to radical. Suppression of normal bone density development and greater risk of osteoporosis, loss of sexual function, interference with brain development and possibly suppressing peak IQ are all risks puberty blockers carry. These risks increase dramatically if an adolescent goes straight from puberty blockers to cross-sex hormones. In that case infertility is almost guaranteed – and sexual development and potential for orgasm may be foreclosed for good. Shortly after cross-sex hormones are introduced permanent changes result. If a biological girl regrets her decision and stops taking testosterone, her extra body and facial hair will likely remain, as will her clitoral engorgement, deepened voice, and possibly even masculinization of her facial features.
“BOTTOM SURGERY” – PHALLOPLASTY: Whereas 36% of biological females identifying as “trans men” have had top surgery and another 61% desire it, according to the U.S. Transgender Survey of 2015, only 3% have had phalloplasty and only 13% even want it.
CONCLUSION: I have nothing but respect for the transgender adults I’ve interviewed. They were among the most sober, thoughtful, and decent people I had come to know in the course of writing this book. But I was concerned about another population, too, one I considered more vulnerable. A population we seem to have abandoned in pursuit of identity politics and progressive bona fides. A group that should, by right, be making us awfully proud, but instead seems to be teetering on the edge of disaster, the brink of despair – teenage girls. They hold the very possibility for our future. If only they weren’t tearing themselves apart.
Expressing concern about teens suddenly identifying as trans has become politically unwise and socially verboten – hateful by definition – an alleged assault on all transgender people, genuine and ersatz. But of course, the social contagion captivating teens has nothing to do with those who suffer gender dysphoria since childhood and, in adulthood, fashioned for themselves a transgender life. The fanatics – both transgender and, just as often, not – exploit an honest struggle that besets this tiny few to bully and harass any who might point out the sudden craze captivating our despairing young. Many trans adults I talked to apologized for the trans activists that claim to speak in their name. It’s important to remember that activists are the most extreme members of any group. All the institutions we’ve built to keep young people from making irreparable mistakes have failed them. The universities, the schools, the doctors, the therapists, and even the churches have been won over by a dogged ideology that claims to speak for a more important class of victim.
Source: Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing our Daughters by Abigail Shrier (2020).
THE VIEW OF A SEXOLOGIST AND NEUROSCIENTIST: Transgender activists have gained much political ground through the use of the narrative that being trans is similar to being gay – a person is born this way, it cannot be changed, and to question this is harmful to a trans person’s well-being. The ironic thing is that many of these children are indeed gay, and by being persuaded to transition, they are actually undergoing a new form of conversion therapy. Parents across the board are consequently being encouraged to monitor for signs of gender – atypical behavior in their children. Those parenting gender dysphoric kids are also irresponsibly being told that 41% of transgender children have attempted suicide (even though children under 18 were not part of the study) and that their child has a high likelihood of becoming part of this statistic. The misuse of this statistic is dishonest and cruel. But it is effective, which is why it continues to spread. Parents who wouldn’t otherwise allow their kids to make basic decision about what they’re having for dinner or what time they’re going to bed will support a child’s wish to undergo potentially irreversible medical interventions. Critics of the “trans kids” movement will frequently accuse these parents of being irresponsible and unfit to parent, but that’s not necessarily what it’s about. Logical, otherwise wary parents are having their deepest, most natural fear exploited by being told this is what their child needs to survive. Across all eleven long-term studies ever done on gender dysphoric children, between 50% to 90% desist by puberty. Desistence refers to the phenomenon of gender dysphoria remitting. A child who has desisted will no long feel dysphoric about their birth sex. These kids, who would fall into the early onset are more likely to grow up to be gay in adulthood, not transgender.
Source: The End of Gender by Dr. Debra Soh (2020).
THE PROFESSION: Dr. Johanny Olson-Kennedy is at present the medical director of the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. This is the largest transgender youth clinic in the U.S. and is one of our recipients of a taxpayer-funded National Institute of Health grant for a five-year study on the impact of puberty blockers and hormones on children. A study for which, as it happens, there is no control group. In her career Dr. Olson-Kennedy has, by her own admission regularly issued hormones to children as young as 12. And in an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association she says that a number of girls as young as 13 had been put on cross-sex hormones for fewer than six months before they were given surgery. This means that girls as young as 12 have been given these life-changing drugs. Furthermore, progress reports show that as of 2017 children as young as eight have become eligible for such treatments. Olson-Kennedy is skeptical about the idea that some 12-or-13-year-olds might not be in a position to make an informed and irreversible decision.
Source: The Madness Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity by Douglas Murray (2019).
THE GAY, LESBIAN AND STRAIGHT EDUCATION NETWORK (GLSEN): The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network describes itself as “the leading national organization fighting to end anti-gay bias in K-12 schools. GLSEN states it is working to make sure all primary and secondary school students accept all of their classmates – regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity expression. Gender identity expression in kindergarten? I for one, and no doubt you as well, believe we should let children be children without having to “learn” about homophobia, especially when it’s used as a pretext to gain access to a child.
GLSEN isn’t alone when it comes to using children and the school system to promote the radical gay agenda. A documentary film called It’s Elementary: Talking About Gay Issues in School offers to look at that agenda in action. The film, which actually uses children to move its message, is supposed to show teachers and other educators how to advocate homosexuality, bashes religion, and mocks people who believe homosexuality is wrong. This film, by the way, isn’t languishing in some basement without a hope of being distributed. It has already been aired on 100 stations of the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), and the film’s producers delight in informing us that it has been acquired by nearly 2,000 educational institutions.
Source: The Death of Right and Wrong by Tammy Bruce (2003).
TRANS ISSUES: Every human being should be free to modify their body however they see fit, but only when they’re an adult. Its consistent with how we treat all minors who are considered intellectually incapable of reasoned logic. It’s why we don’t allow kids to get tattoos, buy a firearm, and drink alcohol or smoke until they’re grown up. The idea behind this isn’t random. It’s because a young person’s frontal lobe – the brain’s control panel, which manages problem solving, judgment, and emotion – takes years to fully develop. The general consensus is that the brain’s development is largely finished by 18 years old and fully complete seven years later. Until the former, they must defer to us, the adults who know better. This is a universally held truth, yet we’re now allowing record numbers of young children (some as young as four years old) to change their gender through invasive surgery and potent puberty blockers.
So, let’s respect trans people as individuals the same way we would respect anyone else. But let’s also protect young people from overzealous activists caught up in the wokeness of the day. The trans issue is particularly interesting because it directly affects such an infinitesimally small fraction of the population. While that group of people is worthy of equality and protection, ask yourself why this topic is being relentlessly pushed so hard. Is it genuine concern, or is it another excuse to virtue signal while telling us how to think and feel?
Source: Don’t Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason by Dave Rubin (2020).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| 15_nihilism_long_transgender_children_--_segment_15.pdf |