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The rise of the so-called gender-affirmation industry and its relationship with children is one of the most important stories of our time.

Under the guise of science, we are being told that toddlers can know that they have been ‘born in the wrong bodies’.

Under the guise of healthcare, we are being told that it is harmful and cruel to do anything other than affirm a child’s belief that they are a different gender.

Under the guise of medicine, we are being told that it is perfectly fine to treat children with drugs that stunt their natural development.

And if you dare criticise any of this, you run the career-ending risk of being labelled transphobic and turned into a social pariah.

In reality, this remains both an open social and medical debate which is being pursued across the West.

Government Censorship

Not in Victoria, however, where the Victorian Education Department’s LBGTQ Support Policy, available on its website, encourages teachers to assist minors to transition genders without parental approval, or even their knowledge.

There is to be no debate after the Victorian government made it a criminal offence — under threat of fines and/or jail time — to attempt to counsel a child out of transitioning genders.

Other Australian states are considering similar legislation.

This runs contrary to decades of accepted best-practice which treated gender dysphoria primarily with therapy, as most children grow out of these feelings.

The previous federal Liberal government allowed bureaucrats to embed transgender ideology into our health services by mangling language against the wishes of — particularly — women. Even medicare forms referred to ‘birthing parents’ until an outcry led the incoming Labor government to correct it.

Lamestream Media

It is very much a one-sided conversation in which the media, particularly Australia’s national broadcaster, runs a steady stream of pro-transgender stories, while typically ignoring any negative news, such as the tragic stories of de-transitioners seeking to sue for their lifelong injuries.

The ABC was silent when the UK’s main gender clinic, Tavistock, was closed down, with 1,000 families threatening to sue the NHS for harm done to their children.

Meanwhile, you are more likely to find trans puff pieces about a teenage girl who had a double mastectomy.

Hollywood is increasingly pushing LGBTQ+ representation and the idea of gender fluidity onto children and young adults — from Buzz Lightyear’s gay kiss to a transgendered character in The Umbrella Academy.

Disney featured its first transgender character in July.

Labelled and Dismissed

Schools and local councils, particularly in America, continue to integrate Drag Queens into the lives of children despite public backlash against what are traditionally adult performers in sexualised attire performing for toddlers.

A doctor friend of mine who dared to suggest, in a very well-written and calm email, that his local council should not be promoting a highly sexualised all-ages drag show, received a curt response from his local member suggesting he was an ‘overly zealous’ religious ‘bigot’ whose ‘wrongheaded’ ideas were ‘harmful to society’.

Whack!

Consider the dilemma Victorian parents now face. If you complain that your children ought not be exposed to gender ideology, you will be labelled a bigot.

So you keep quiet.

Confused Children

If your child — having been exposed to gender ideology at school or at a community event — ends up momentarily confused during a time when kids are confused about lots of things related to their changing bodies, you will be criminalised if you fail to agree with them.

So you keep quiet.

Children are effectively at the mercy of schoolteachers, health professionals, and the state — instead of their parents. Many agree that this is fundamentally wrong.

It is also logically bizarre. Your child, who is not able to take a Panadol at school without parental permission, is able to make life-changing decisions that often results in permanent medical intervention and sterilisation.

Media commentator Gray Connolly wrote this week that he does not believe this madness will stop until ‘until everyone involved is sued into oblivion and no insurer will cover this’.

At the weekend Libs of TikTok, a conservative social media account highlighting Woke progressive videos, released recordings of a conversation with staff at Children’s National Hospital in Washington DC.

The group’s founder contacted the hospital as a parent asking if they would perform a ‘gender-affirming hysterectomy’ on her 16-year-old.

Both the hospital operator who took the initial call and the hospital staff member to whom the caller was subsequently transferred confirmed that performing such an operation would not be a problem. Hospital staff said that such operations had been performed on children younger than 16.

You can listen for yourself here:

On the recording, you can hear the hospital operator ask:

‘How old is your patient?’

‘Sixteen,’ the caller says.

‘Okay,’ the operator replies. ‘Alright. So they’re in the clear.’

After confirming with a second person over the phone that a 16-year-old would be eligible for a gender-affirming hysterectomy, the caller asks whether it is a common procedure for that age.

‘Yes, we have all different type of age groups that comes in for that,’ the hospital worker responds.

‘For the hysterectomy?’ the caller asks.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ the employee says, adding later that she has ‘seen younger kids, younger than your child’s age’ undergo the surgery.

The recording went viral, and the outrage was palpable.

Media Spin

And the next day the story was picked up by the Washington Post.

Children’s hospital threatened after Libs of TikTok recording on trans hysterectomies.

It continued:

‘Children’s National Hospital has been inundated with threatening emails and phone calls after an influential right-wing Twitter account published a recording that falsely suggested the hospital is performing hysterectomies on transgender children, a hospital spokeswoman said. The torrent of harassment was accompanied by social media posts suggesting that Children’s be bombed and its doctors placed in a woodchipper.’

So the story was not that two hospital staff told a prospective patient that gender-affirming hysterectomies could be performed on a teenager. The story was that the hospital in which two staff said such procedures could be done was threatened.

The people behind the recording were demonised as ‘right-wing’. Later in the story, they are called ‘activists’.

Notice what the media do here, because it happens a lot. Rather than reporting on the outrageous “thing”, the media demonise the people who noticed the outrageous “thing” and, ignoring the story, make the people who noticed the story.

The Children’s National Hospital has since corrected the record and confirmed that, despite what its staff said, the surgery is not offered for anyone under 18.

This doesn’t change the scorn with which readers are treated if they raise their eyebrows at gender-affirming surgery on children — even if it is only in speculation.

In this case, the whistle-blowers were slurred as hateful, rather than the hospital criticised for managing to make such a strange error with a serious procedure.

It was the error of the hospital staff, not the reporter — and why did the staff make this error? Why did they hold the belief that surgery was available for young children?

And why was their (now corrected) website in error stating that gender-affirming hysterectomies were available to patients ‘between the ages of 0-21’?

The Washington Post doesn’t seem to have asked.

The National Children’s Hospital in DC is not the only American hospital to make this mistake, with a hospital in Boston also exposed by the Libs of TikTok who had to correct the record as well.

These are mistakes, we are told. But again, why are these patterns of mistakes being made in the field of gender-affirmation and young children?

Society is still having a conversation about whether ‘medical care’, as classed by these hospitals, includes giving healthy young girls (at 18) hysterectomies.

I always thought The Washington Post’s advertising slogan — ‘Democracy dies in darkness’ — was meant to imply that the Post existed to shine a light into dark places.

There is a new darkness, and that is the silencing of criticism when it comes to the future health of our children.

Australia doesn’t have a voice in this debate — that has been silenced by the legislation of our premiers — so we must wait to see if legal action in other countries is able to give those harmed by gender-affirmation a voice.

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Originally published at The James Macpherson Report.

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Photo by Alexander Grey.