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Even as an adult, it can be an intimidating and daunting task to untangle and challenge the lies of transgender ideology which are permeating our culture. Words are losing their meaning, science is losing its relevance, and debate is losing its dignity. How can we think ideas through without clear language? How can we weigh their merit without using objective methods? And how can we measure ideas against each other when disagreement is fast becoming a hate crime?

If it is difficult for us, just imagine the confusion and anxiety children must be suffering through. Day care centres, kindergartens, schools, universities, peer groups, sporting and social clubs, workplaces, books, internet chat rooms, music and TV shows relentlessly undermine the concept of biological sex, of science, of objective reality itself.

If you’re an ‘un-feminine’ female, or an ‘un-masculine’ male, you might actually be transgender! If you don’t like your body, you might have been born in the wrong one! Men who say they are women, are women, and vice versa. To say otherwise proves that you’re a ‘transphobe’. These are perfectly serious tenets of transgenderism, backed by popular culture and (increasingly) legislation and case law.

A Growing Trend

Transgender ideology is a cultural juggernaut not to be underestimated. How confident are you that your children and grandchildren will avoid falling prey to the lies of transgenderism? In the last decade, the number of referrals for gender-dysphoric children in Australia, America, the UK and Europe reached epidemic proportions (figures show increases ranging from 1000-4000%).

The correlation between the commencement of transgender lessons in schools, trans-worship in popular culture, and the steady increase in childhood gender dysphoria has sparked intense debate. A recent paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, entitled ‘Association of Media Coverage of Transgender and Gender Diverse Issues With Rates of Referral of Transgender Children and Adolescents to Specialist Gender Clinics in the UK and Australia’, concluded that gender dysphoric “patients commonly identify the media as a precipitant for them to seek clinical assistance”.

Neither Ethical Nor Scientific

A primer for those who don’t know: childhood gender dysphoria is a well-established, historically rare, psychological condition with objective diagnostic criteria. It has a long history of successful treatment using a ‘watch and wait approach’ coupled with psychological support. This approach affirms the child in their biological sex, avoids gender stereotyping and allows natural puberty to take place, resulting in approximately 85% of children outgrowing their dysphoria.

However, in Australia as elsewhere, this unprecedented wave of gender dysphoric children has been systematically denied this highly successful, low-risk method, which, upon being rebranded as ‘conversion therapy’, has been banned in jurisdiction after jurisdiction. Instead, gender dysphoric children are now labelled as ‘transgender’ and funneled into a radical and untested treatment pathway known as the ‘affirmative model’.

But ‘transgenderism’, like the ‘Emperor’s new clothes’, exists only in the minds of believers. It is a theory developed in university sociology departments, premised on the highly subjective and philosophical claim that a person’s sex can be ‘wrong’. It has never been proven to exist in the body through objective medical testing such as DNA analysis, brain scans or blood tests.

Deterred neither by logic nor science, Melbourne’s own Royal Children’s Hospital has pioneered and championed the ‘affirmation model’. In Australia and the UK, minors can legally be considered competent to consent to their own medical treatment, and this means that the following treatments can commence in patients much younger than 18 and against their parent’s wishes (and testimonies of this happening are mounting).

It involves diagnosing gender dysphoric children as ‘transgender’, affirming them in the belief that they were born in the ‘wrong body’ and telling them that changing their body so that it looks more like their desired sex can alleviate their dysphoria.

The ‘affirmation’ pathway begins with ‘social transitioning’, encouraging the child to dress and act as the opposite sex and demanding that others treat the child as his/her opposite sex. For boys, this includes ‘tucking’ genitals between the legs to hide them, often in specially designed underwear. For girls it often involves the use of a breast binder and prosthetic ‘packer’ for underwear to give the ‘bulge’ of male genitals. Where are the scientific studies which prove social transitioning to be harmless to the gender dysphoric child, or to the other children around them?

If the patient is pre-pubescent, they can be prescribed off-label use of high-risk puberty blockers to stop the development of secondary sex characteristics such as breasts, genital development, facial hair, facial widening and vocal changes.

When the child reaches the age of puberty (or is post-puberty), he/she is prescribed experimental, lifelong high risk, high dose cross-sex hormones. These suppress natural sex functions and artificially induce and sustain secondary opposite sex characteristics. This includes facial widening and male pattern hair growth in girls and breast tissue growth in boys.

Of course, no scientific studies exist which prove that giving children puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones are safe or reversible. On the contrary, there are a multitude of studies which show precisely the opposite.

Lastly, in the mid to late teens, the child can undergo experimental, drastic and irreversible ‘gender confirmation’ surgeries, such as removal of breasts or breast implants, facial ‘feminisation’ surgeries, surgical destruction of genitals and genital plastic surgery.

Just imagine what it must have taken to persuade such vast swathes of children that only these treatments will bring them happiness, and to persuade them so utterly that many of them will defy and abandon their own parents to access them.

And those are only the list of desired outcomes for the affirmation model of treatment! Data charting the long list of unsatisfactory surgeries, unwanted side effects and increased rates of serious health problems in these patients, is horrifying. Briefly, they include but are not limited to: atrophy of sexual organs, sexual dysfunction, heart, bone and brain changes resulting in serious and debilitating health problems, large painful scars, incontinence, fistulas, social isolation and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Most heartbreaking of all, though rarely heard in the mainstream media, are the testimonies of devastated, regretful young ‘de-transitioners’. They permanently and literally embody the unjustifiable, catastrophic and irreparable harms inflicted on vulnerable children by the ‘affirmative model’.

But the house of cards is falling.

Turning the Tide

Detransitioners, medical specialists and psychologists, as well as concerned parents, teachers and whistle-blowers from across the world and across the political spectrum, are demanding a halt to the ‘affirmative model’ of treatment.

Queensland just passed Australia’s first law against ‘conversion therapy’, which would have outlawed the evidence-based ‘watch and wait approach’ for gender dysphoric children; but thanks to, as Bernard Lane reported, a “medical revolt”, where “psychiatrists, doctors… lawyers, Christians, women’s and lesbian groups” protested so fiercely that amendments had to be made allowing clinicians some discretion (unfortunately this, and the newly-tabled ACT legislation may still leave doctors, teachers, parents, counsellors and ministers etc. liable to prosecution over ‘conversion therapies’ for encouraging children to embrace their biological sex).

The UK’s preeminent Gender Identity Development Service has experienced over 35 resignations, including one Governor, due to clinician concerns about the unethical and harmful ‘affirmation model’ of care.

This year, the American Journal of Psychiatry was forced to admit that one of its most lauded research papers had falsely claimed to show improvements in mental health after ‘trans-affirmative’ surgeries and hormone treatments. That paper, along with the discredited ‘Dutch Protocol’ study, are still being used in Australia to justify these scandalous ‘affirmation treatments for gender dysphoric children.

It’s not up to children to reel in the excesses of transgender ideology in schools, hospitals, legislation and culture. That’s a job for adults. It’s a job for mums, dads, doctors, workers, sports coaches and anyone else who cares about child safety, to put pressure on our politicians to stop these mad scientists from experimenting on Australian children.

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Originally published at The Spectator.
Photo from Pexels.