Pushing gender ideology on kids is child abuse: pediatricians group

“Facts – not ideology – determine reality,” the American College of Pediatricians (ACP) said in a warning to legislators and educators about the dangers of surgical and medical sex change operations to children.

“Conditioning children into believing that a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful is child abuse,” the physicians said, “Rates of suicide are twenty times greater among adults who use cross-sex hormones and undergo sex reassignment surgery, even in Sweden which is among the most LGBTQ – affirming countries.”

The group, which aims at getting parents involved in their children’s health and education about health, said, 

“Gender (an awareness and sense of oneself as male or female) is a sociological and psychological concept; not an objective biological one,” and that, “A person’s belief that he or she is something they are not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking.”

To the contrary, the group maintained that human sexuality is a “binary trait” and said the XY and XX chromosomes that determine female or male sex are “genetic markers of health” not “genetic markers of a disorder.”

“No one is born with a gender. Everyone is born with a biological sex,” the statement said.

The American Academy of Pediatricians, the larger professional society from which the ACP broke away in 2002, has surgical and medical interventions in youth to suppress the hormones that naturally cause girls to grow into women and boys to men.

The ACP says this change in position has put American teens at higher risk for physical and mental illness. “Puberty is not a disease and puberty-blocking hormones can be dangerous…as many as 98% of gender confused boys and 88% of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty,” the ACP pointed out, and noted that children who use puberty blockers to “impersonate the opposite sex” will require cross-sex hormones in late adolescence that in turn can cause dangerous health risks such as high blood pressure, blood clots, stroke and cancer.

One of the statement’s authors is psychologist Paul McHugh. Drawing upon his clinical work with LGBTQ persons as chief psychologist at Johns Hopkins hospital and research as distinguished professor at the university’s medical school, McHugh has criticized what he sees as the American Psychological Association’s embracing of gender ideology at the expense of sound medical practice. 

McHugh authored an amicus brief filed in the U.S. Supreme Court case that overturned man-woman marriage laws in the U.S. last year.

Pro-LGBT groups criticized the ACP statement saying it would incite discrimination; one group called it an “attack on transgender children”. A public interest law firm labeled the ACP a “hate group” when it filed an amicus brief with the Alabama Supreme Court which favored exceptions to the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling knocking down U.S. laws protecting marriage as between a man and a woman.

Activists similarly criticized Pope Francis’ recent remarks to Polish bishops where he identified gender “ideology” as a form of “ideological colonization” and linked it to government corruption. He said, “Today children – children! – are taught in school that everyone can choose his or her sex. Why are they teaching this? Because the books are provided by the persons and institutions that give you money. These forms of ideological colonization are also supported by influential countries. And this is terrible!”

Reprinted with permission from C-Fam.