Australia: Year 4 pupil ‘gender transitions’ at Melbourne school -and a response
Australia: A Year 4 pupil at a primary school west of Melbourne is undergoing a gender transition, with the Safe Schools Coalition helping with the process at the school.
Roz Ward, co-founder and head of the program in Victoria, is expected to visit the school today to hold a workshop for the pupil’s class, after which the pupil plans to socially change to their chosen new gender.
Parents of the Year 4 class were advised of the workshop only days ago when the school sent home a letter. “Safe Schools are visiting … to assist us with the gender choice of a student who is currently transitioning,” the letter stated.
“The session will include learning that considers how students can be a good friend and ally to people (of) all genders.”
Several parents have expressed concerns about the way the school has handled the matter, including the lack of notice and detailed information about what pupils will be taught in the workshop. Transgender operations have ceased in some hospitals claiming it is a mental health issue and that children and youth will grow out of it in time. The Government is NOT listening to those who regret the operations - as they are only listening to the left immoral advocates.
The Victorian arm of the Safe Schools Coalition, which has courted controversy for promoting contested theories around gender and sexuality, severed ties with the nationally convened body after an independent review in March. In effect parents are being kept in the dark and being lied to. The program being forced on schools is essentially warped and a form of child abuse.
Among the changes ordered by federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham was a requirement that distribution of Safe Schools materials be restricted to secondary schools only.
The Victorian government has refused to abide by the changes, however, and has taken over sole funding for the program in the state. It has also declared the program mandatory for secondary schools.
“I guess we just have lots of questions and we’re not really getting answers,” one parent of a Year 4 student said.
“I’d like to know what my child will actually be taught in this workshop. This is a big deal and affects the whole school community.”
The acting principal has confirmed the school has been working with the Safe Schools Coalition in accordance with the state government’s gender identity policy.
She declined to answer questions about whether the child had parental support and whether the transition was being supported by medical professionals.
Social transition typically refers to a person “coming out” and making others aware of their gender identity. It is understood the child wants to be known by a new name fitting their new identity and will be permitted to use the toilets and change rooms appropriate for their new identity.
The issue of young people coming out as transgender has received publicity in recent months, coinciding with a big rise in the numbers of young people seeking to access treatment for gender dysphoria.
The Daily Telegraph reported last week that a four-year old preschooler in NSW had begun “transitioning” before attending their first day of kindergarten.
In Victoria, the Education Department’s policy states that “schools must support and respect a student’s choice to identify as their desired gender when this does not align with their designated sex at birth”. This assume a kids knows what they are doing - highly unlikely.
SCIENTIFIC RESPONSE TO THE TRANSGENDER ADVOCATES
Dr. Paul R. McHugh, the former psychiatrist-in-chief for Johns Hopkins Hospital and its current Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry, said that transgenderism is a “mental disorder” that merits treatment, that sex change is “biologically impossible,” and that people who promote sexual reassignment surgery are collaborating with and promoting a mental disorder.
He also reported on a new study showing that the suicide rate among transgendered people who had reassignment surgery is 20 times higher than the suicide rate among non-transgender people. Dr. McHugh further noted studies from Vanderbilt University and London’s Portman Clinic of children who had expressed transgender feelings but for whom, over time, 70%-80% “spontaneously lost those feelings.”
While Hollywood, and major media such as Time magazine promote transgenderism as normal, said Dr. McHugh, these “policy makers and the media are doing no favors either to the public or the transgendered by treating their confusions as a right in need of defending rather than as a mental disorder that deserves understanding, treatment and prevention.”
“This intensely felt sense of being transgendered constitutes a mental disorder in two respects. The first is that the idea of sex misalignment is simply mistaken – it does not correspond with physical reality. The second is that it can lead to grim psychological outcomes.”
The transgendered person’s disorder, said Dr. McHugh, is in the person’s “assumption” that they are different than the physical reality of their body, their maleness or femaleness, as assigned by nature. It is a disorder similar to a “dangerously thin” person suffering anorexia who looks in the mirror and thinks they are “overweight,” said McHugh.
This assumption, that one’s gender is only in the mind regardless of anatomical reality, has led some transgendered people to push for social acceptance and affirmation of their own subjective “personal truth,” said Dr. McHugh. As a result, some states – California, New Jersey, and Massachusetts – have passed laws barring psychiatrists, “even with parental permission, from striving to restore natural gender feelings to a transgender minor,” he said.
The pro-transgender advocates do not want to know, said McHugh, that studies show between 70% and 80% of children who express transgender feelings “spontaneously lose those feelings” over time. Also, for those who had sexual reassignment surgery, most said they were “satisfied” with the operation “but their subsequent psycho-social adjustments were no better than those who didn’t have the surgery.”
“And so at Hopkins we stopped doing sex-reassignment surgery, since producing a ‘satisfied’ but still troubled patient seemed an inadequate reason for surgically amputating normal organs,” said Dr. McHugh.
The former Johns Hopkins chief of psychiatry also warned against enabling or encouraging certain subgroups of the transgendered, such as young people “susceptible to suggestion from ‘everything is normal’ sex education,” and the schools’ “diversity counselors” who, like “cult leaders,” may “encourage these young people to distance themselves from their families and offer advice on rebutting arguments against having transgender surgery.”
Dr. McHugh also reported that there are “misguided doctors” who, working with very young children who seem to imitate the opposite sex, will administer “puberty-delaying hormones to render later sex-change surgeries less onerous – even though the drugs stunt the children’s growth and risk causing sterility.”
Such action comes “close to child abuse,” said Dr. McHugh, given that close to 80% of those kids will “abandon their confusion and grow naturally into adult life if untreated ….”
“’Sex change’ is biologically impossible,” said McHugh. “People who undergo sex-reassignment surgery do not change from men to women or vice versa. Rather, they become feminized men or masculinized women. Claiming that this is civil-rights matter and encouraging surgical intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote a mental disorder.”
