Paul Cameron
Children’s genitals get attention. Religiously, a fair number of Muslim, some Jewish, and a few Christian (mainly Northern African-Middle East) parents want boys’ penises and/or girls’ vaginas to be ‘circumcised.’ Appealing to ‘natural is best and that a child’s genitals belong to the child,’ some argue mutilation should wait until adulthood. Thus, in California, an LGBT legislator (!) is trying to pass a law making it illegal to surgically change the genitalia of intersexed children (about 1 of every 10,000 births have ambiguous sex organs) to make it appear either male or female. He feels the decision should wait until adulthood. But his bill doesn’t touch trans, which has ‘mental health experts’ regularly drugging and surgically mutilating children as a ‘cure’ for their ‘gender dysphoria.’
Laws making genital mutilation of children (usually, girls) illegal are growing. Surgically removing or modifying the labia, clitoris, etc. is associated with a host of problems, including painful urination, sharply reduced sexual pleasure, and difficulties in giving birth. Curiously, where laws generally protect girls’ genitals against religiously motivated mutilation, laws permit mental health experts to mutilate kids’ bodies, and currently about 75% of the time the mutilation involves girls. While decried extensively, the proportion of circumcised girls who experience painful urination and other discomforts is unknown but very large. Likewise, the proportion of trans boys/men who experience discomforts analogous to those experienced by circumcised females is also unknown.
Religious parents often assert their ‘right’ to circumcise because the kids ‘belong’ to them, and mental health experts often assert their ‘duty’ to mutilate, because the kids have the ‘illness of gender dysphoria.’ Further, in many (most?) cases these experts claim the child ‘asked for the mutilation.’ But kids ask for lots of things we don’t give them. These experts reply, ‘this is different, as children ‘know’ when they were born in the wrong body!’ This notion, promoted by medico/mental health professionals, has children—in just this one area—being considered so perspicacious, their wishes MUST be granted.
The notion that children ‘know’ something significant about themselves a few years after birth – something so significant that it might result in their sterilization, mutilation, or death from surgical complications—is at odds with the traditional understanding of kids. Heretofore, our society agreed with Proverbs that “Foolishness is deeply ingrained in a child’s mind” (22:15). We believed kids were too ignorant to choose life-changing things, as getting married or having sex; smoking, using alcohol or drugs; refusing schooling; driving; etc.
Thanks to pressure from medico/mental health professionals and LGBT activists, in the state of Washington, what was once obvious has been cancelled. As of Jan 1, 2022, teens aged 13-17 have the right to change their sex without parental knowledge. Further, insurance companies must pay for prescribed ‘treatments’ to help kids match their gender identity. This includes puberty-blocking hormones, laser hair removal, or surgical procedures on their genitalia—without ever informing the parents (‘patient privacy’ don’t you know)!
We are not only in the grip of a fad sweeping through the media our children consume and the schools they attend, but parents can be kept out of the loop.
We have ‘accepted homosexuality’ for ~40 years and now find ourselves mutilating our kids’ genitals because experts say they need it or kids say they want it. And this comes along with excluding parents from determining their children’s medical care or even knowing about it.
But some parents are ‘pushing’ their kids to ‘change sex.’ Thus, a Los Angeles mother got international attention by announcing that after reading her twin boys a bedtime story, It Feels Good to Be Yourself: A Book About Gender Identity,” one of them pointed to the nonbinary description and said, “That's how I feel. I don't feel like a boy or a girl." The family then began supporting his new identity with different clothing, hairstyles, a new name and pronouns. The mother bubbled “For me, when we've honored his choices to cut his hair short or wear clothes that feel like him, the JOY & LIGHT on my son’s face is what lets me know that we are doing the right thing.”
Is this not Munchausen by proxy, that is where a mother harms her child to get attention? What kind of parent reads a book like this to her kids? If “foolishness is deeply ingrained in a child’s mind” you don’t want to give kids ideas. Bedtime reading of “Sex with adults can be fun” would also be madness: you never know when your child is ‘ready’ to try what he hears. Kids can enjoy sex, alcohol and any number of things we reserve for the knowledge that goes with adulthood. Parents don’t want teachers expounding on the ‘great trip’ they just had with drugs, or the joy of seeing enemies die. Kids get into enough trouble without giving them ideas—especially when apparently endorsed by parents or the school. This little boy certainly had no idea of the long-term consequences of his saying to a mother wanting attention “I don't feel like a boy or a girl.”
The Daily Wire (1/21/22) reported that an elementary school in Oregon offers a “Queer & Sexuality Alliance” club for fourth and fifth-grade students—that’s 9-11 year-old kids. Parents neither need to know nor consent for their kids to join it.
The West has ‘accepted homosexuality’ for ~40 years, and parents are being excluded from their children’s educational experiences involving it.
The New Yorker runs a regular LGBTQ rights feature. Headline on Dec. 15?
She Supported Her Child Being Trans. So the State Separated Them
A trans-supportive mother had a 3-year-old boy who “enjoyed playing dress-up.” “One day he ran out of his room crying. He said his brother told him he wasn’t allowed to be a girl. His mother told him he could be whatever he wanted to be.” Is this mother a good person or what? Although he can’t be a girl, no matter how he is sliced and diced, his mother “took him to a therapist who specializes in gender dysphoria …who recommended the parents call him by the names he asked them to use.” A kid who can’t tie his own shoelaces, was taken to a therapist who believed children ‘know—at age 3—their identity for life.’ His advice? ‘Dance to this 3-year-old’s tune’ (and make sure my bill is paid).
Soon a Child Protective Services caseworker got involved. She agreed with the father that the mother had “pushed her son against his will to identify as transgender.” The mother persisted. Three different professionals agreed that the boy wasn’t trans, and the father got the kids. But in a ‘justice for LGBTs twist, “a new attorney general, Dana Nessel, a Democrat and out lesbian, dropped the case and vacated the verdicts against the mother [a jury had convicted her of kidnapping the children from the father].” The New Yorker phoned the now 11-year-old boy:
“My mother ‘might have encouraged me,…But I did choose.’ He said his stomach hurts each time he thinks about his gender, so ‘I keep my mind busy so I don’t think of anything that scares me or makes me uncomfortable,…although I still get uncomfortable all the time — I can’t block all of it out.’”
Poor kid. If society hadn’t led the mother to believe sex change was possible…
The West abandoned traditional, largely Christian thought, and followed mental health experts’ claim that homosexuality, benign in any case, was normal. Some of the baggage that came with homosexuality—as transsexualism—has thrived. We now find ourselves with tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of children with messed up bodies and troubled minds. Our major institutions are going crazy trying to implement mental health experts’ wisdom. The boasts of LGBT leaders that they would destroy the nuclear family haven’t come true, but as the events catalogued above indicate, they have made significant progress. As traditionalists had warned, there is a lot more to homosexuality than ‘just another way to love.’
© Paul CameronThe views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.