Between 2016 and 2017, the number of “gender transition” surgeries performed on adolescent girls quadrupled. This shocking increase in teenage girls suddenly claiming they were “born in the wrong body” and seeking life-altering, experimental surgeries is made even more alarming by the fact that this appears to be a “craze”—an intense and often short-lived cultural enthusiasm that spreads like a virus. Unlike other crazes that have affected teenagers in recent years, this one comes with lifelong effects and frequently encourages teens to completely alienate themselves from their parents and families.
In her recent book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, Abigail Shrier documents this disturbing trend. One of the contributing factors that she highlights is the role that many public schools play in fueling the transgender movement and undermining parents. Shrier reports that in June of 2019, the California Teachers Association’s policy-making branch voted on a proposal that would allow students to leave campus during school hours to receive puberty-blockers and cross-sex hormones without the “barrier” of parental consent. In January of this year, the CTA’s Civil Rights in Education Subcommittee recommended creating “school-based healthcare clinics” that would offer “cisgender, transgender and non-binary youth equal and confidential access to a broad range of physical, mental and behavioral services.”
Washington state is currently considering a similar proposal, and in December, Planned Parenthood Los Angeles announced their intention to open 50 school-based healthcare centers in the Los Angeles area within the next three years. In Madison, Wisconsin, parents have fought back after the school district adopted a policy that enabled students to adopt a new name and pronouns at school behind their parents’ backs and even instructed teachers to conceal information from parents.
From the earliest stages of a child’s life, the relationship between child and parent is crucial and formative. Parents help their children learn how to navigate life. A child’s parents are the ones who comfort them at night, know their ups and downs, and are responsible for watching out for their best interest. But when it comes to a life-changing decision that leaves the body permanently altered and can cause life-long health challenges and infertility, parents are silenced and forced out of the picture if they refuse to go along with it, or even if they express hesitation or question of this is best for their child.
There has been a shift away from recognizing that an adult who tells a child or young person “don’t tell your parents about this” is probably up to something sinister to assuming that an adult who encourages a minor to conceal information from their parents must know the child better than his or her parents do. Under the guise of “anti-discrimination” and “anti-bullying” adolescents are being rushed into life-altering decisions behind their parents’ backs.
The transgender movement wreaks havoc on the bodies and minds of the young people caught up in this craze and launches an attack on the family by driving a wedge between children and their parents, all for the sake of advancing a radical sexual agenda. Shrier tells the stories of families that have been torn apart by this movement, as teenagers have believed the voices of their peers, teachers, counselors, and internet influencers telling them that their parents are against them and that if they “really” loved them they would support them. The truth is that no responsible parent would “support” their teenager’s insistence on inflicting harm upon themselves.
The growing push for comprehensive sex ed (CSE) is enabling schools to begin introducing this agenda as early as kindergarten. Shrier writes, “In schools across America, kindergarteners are taught that biological sex and gender very often come apart; one has no essential connection to the other.” In one of the books that the California Board of Education makes available to kindergarten teachers, children are introduced to the notion of “gender identity” with terms such as “transgender,” “gender fluid” and “genderqueer.” This continues throughout a child’s educational journey, with curriculum for middle schoolers encouraging teachers to ask their students to imagine what it would be like to be a different gender, and high schoolers being given extremely graphic descriptions of various sex acts. “All this purported education encourages adolescents to focus relentlessly on their own gender identities and sexual orientations,” explains Shrier.
It encourages students to look constantly for landmark feelings or impulses, anything that might point toward “genderfluid,” “genderqueer,” “asexual,” or “non-binary.” And it encourages the subtle formation of two camps: us and them. The imaginary divide between those who fit perfectly into cartoonish gender stereotypes and those who don’t. The dauntless young, who welcome different gender identities and sexual orientations, versus their phobic elders, who don’t.
The transgender movement leaves a trail of devastation in its wake and vilifies parents, professionals, and people who have left the transgender movement who would warn teens away from these destructive choices. Despite the havoc wreaked on young lives, and the stories of regret that are already being told by young people who were encouraged to believe the lie that their “true” selves have nothing to do with physical reality, our culture celebrates this movement.
