STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS

Child Abuse: The Difference Between Gender Identity and Sex Change in Children

By Joe Jarvis - July 24, 2017

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Adults should be able to identify as any gender they want. Modern science means they can even change their physical characteristics and take hormones, which will mimic the opposite sex.

I may not understand it, but it doesn’t affect me, so I should have no say in how another adult lives his, her, or its life.

Bathroom policies should be decided by business owners. If a public school has a bathroom policy you don’t like, pull your kids out. Public school is a terrible thing for children anyway.

But there is a dangerous cultural meme that kids can choose to change their sex. Children should not be indoctrinated into believing they should get a sex change before they hit puberty.

If your little boy acts like a little girl, please continue to love and support him. Let him identify as whatever gender he wants, but do not plant the idea in his mind that he can become the opposite sex.

Once you are an adult who can understand consequences, go right ahead and play Mr. Potato Head with your body parts.

But children are being brainwashed into thinking it is normal to get a sex change. Children have rights and deserve some degree of autonomy. The parents’ job is to protect their children and do what is in the child’s best interest.

A four-year-old doesn’t know what transgender is. A four-year-old can cross-dress, act feminine or masculine, and even express the desire to be the opposite sex. But parents should not take this as a sign that their child is transgender.

I remember dressing up as a girl when I was about four years old, (probably with the help of my sisters who applied the eye shadow and nail polish). Did that mean I was transgender? No, it meant I was a little kid playing.

(I also identified as a cat for some time, and believe it or not my parents did not get me species reassignment surgery.)

But what if my parents had been brainwashed by the media? Would they have discussed in depth transgender issues with four-year-old me? Would they have told me it was okay to choose my sex?

As a four-year-old, maybe I would have flipped a coin and decided, “Hey, yeah, now that you mention it, I do like wearing dresses! Sign me up for hormone therapy, and make an appointment for a sex change.”

As crazy as this sounds, some parents are reacting in this way.

Because of the increase in media exposure, and indoctrination at schools, kids are becoming confused. In Great Britain, there has been a marked increase in kids seeking help with their gender identity.

A total of 165 children aged ten and under were referred to the clinic last year, compared with 36 in the year of 2012 to 2013.

And last year 2,016 young people aged between three and 18 attended gender identity clinics, while just 314 did from 2012 to 2013.

Statistics suggest “as many as 98% of gender confused boys and 88% of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty.”

So when kids are referred to clinics, if they were simply counseled through a tough time, that would be a good thing. But the clinics take it much further.

Those referred under a psycho-social assessment for six months by a clinician, which is followed by an action plan involving counselling and, sometimes, a physical intervention.

Children who have began puberty can be prescribed a course of hormone blockers to suppress the changes associated with adult development.

And those aged 16 and over can be given cross-sex hormones, giving them the physical characteristics of the opposite sex.

Is it Child Abuse?

Let’s quickly run through the difference between gender and sex.

Sex is a biological trait. There is male and female, and some rare medically identifiable physical disorders.

Gender is a social construction which generally corresponds to a particular sex.

There are some kids who really do identify as the opposite gender, and will act accordingly. They should be loved and accepted, but they should not be given hormones and surgery. Since gender is basically made up anyway, they can act like the opposite gender without having to pretend they are the opposite sex.

Before some reasonable age at which a human is capable of making permanently life changing decisions, it is child abuse to give them sex change drugs and surgery.

It is not child abuse, in my opinion, to allow a child to act like whatever gender they want. Allowing a boy to wear a dress if he chooses is not child abuse. Allowing a boy to get sex reassignment surgery is child abuse.

You cannot even legally get a tattoo in the U.S.A. before age 18. The government says you are not responsible enough to drink alcohol until you are 21. But the media tells us that 10-year-olds can make a permanent, life changing decision. A four-year-old in Australia was given sex reassignment surgery!

The American College of Pediatricians urges healthcare professionals, educators and legislators to reject all policies that condition children to accept as normal a life of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex. Facts – not ideology – determine reality.

1. Human sexuality is an objective biological binary trait: “XY” and “XX” are genetic markers of male and female, respectively – not genetic markers of a disorder.

Maybe someday science will actually be able to transform a man into a woman, but right now it cannot. You can use hormones so that the body mimics the opposite sex. You can get surgery so that your body looks like that of the opposite sex.

But if you are born a male, you cannot get pregnant no matter how much treatment you receive. If you were born with two X chromosomes, you are and will remain biologically a woman.

Parents who play into the media’s lies about gender and sex identity are setting their children up for a life of depression and anxiety.

Rates of suicide are nearly twenty times greater among adults who use cross-sex hormones and undergo sex reassignment surgery…

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 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 Tangled Web of Leftism

What happened to the mantra that you are perfect just the way you are?

We live in a society that tells unhealthy obese people that they shouldn’t be “body shamed” into losing weight.

But if you don’t feel comfortable with your natural biological sex, that is something worth changing?

Teach kids to act how they honestly want to act. If that means a boy wears a dress and a girl cuts her hair short, so be it! You can choose a “gender” without trying to change your sex.

No one is born with a gender. Everyone is born with a biological sex. Gender (an awareness and sense of oneself as male or female) is a sociological and psychological concept; not an objective biological one. 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.

What does it even mean for a boy to “feel like a girl” anyway? This is a huge contradiction of the left. Gender is a social construct, but somehow you can feel like the “opposite”? Since gender is a social construct, who is to say what qualities correspond to which sex?

The extreme leftists have gotten their message mixed up. They say correctly that you can choose a gender, but then advocate “choosing” a biological sex to correspond. This, of course, is impossible. You can only mimic the opposite sex, not actually become it.

Kids need love, support, and a guiding positive influence who is open-minded enough to discuss complex issues. They do not need drugs, hormones, and surgery based on their gender identity.