A recent study from the American College of Pediatricians has found that teaching gender ideology in elementary schools psychologically hurts children. To understand gender ideology it is important to recognize an inherent contradiction between its dual goals. On the one hand, it seeks to erase any suggestion of biological distinctions between male and female. On the other hand, it reinforces some cultural roles by suggesting children can and should alter their sex to confirm to what “gender” they feel themselves to be, even to point of hormone treatment and surgical alteration. This ideology dangerously conflates biological sex and its differences with the variables attitudes and roles of the sexes within a society. But all evidence shows that allowing children to “choose their sex” at an age when they cannot fully understand what they are doing will confuse and harm them as they get older.An individual’s feelings about his/her sex are independent of the biological realities present in his body. The study labeled gender as a sociological and psychological concept that develops as children age:
No one is born with an awareness of themselves as male or female; this awareness develops over time and, like all developmental processes, may be derailed by a child’s subjective perceptions, relationships, and adverse experiences from infancy forward. People who identify as “feeling like the opposite sex” or “somewhere in between” do not comprise a third sex. They remain biological men or biological women.
Indulging children in their misguided beliefs leads to a greater rate of suicide when they reach adulthood. In addition, most children who suffer from gender dysphoria in adolescence accept their biological sex as they mature. For these reasons, the study questions the efficacy of teaching gender ideology:
Rates of suicide are twenty times greater among adults who use cross-sex hormones and undergo sex reassignment surgery, even in Sweden which is among the most LGBTQ – affirming countries.11 What compassionate and reasonable person would condemn young children to this fate knowing that after puberty as many as 88% of girls and 98% of boys will eventually accept reality and achieve a state of mental and physical health?
Gender ideology has long-term consequences and encourages confused children to deform their healthy bodies. Allowing immature children to choose their sex is nothing short of child abuse:
Conditioning children into believing that a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful is child abuse. Endorsing gender discordance as normal via public education and legal policies will confuse children and parents, leading more children to present to “gender clinics” where they will be given puberty-blocking drugs. This, in turn, virtually ensures that they will “choose” a lifetime of carcinogenic and otherwise toxic cross-sex hormones, and likely consider unnecessary surgical mutilation of their healthy body parts as young adults.
The American College of Pediatricians based this study on facts, rather than allowing social agenda or bias to dictate its results. The study reveals the destructive reality of gender ideology, and the harm it causes children. We should be alert to and engaged with the many ways it is currently being advanced, including schools.
