America has tolerated the sexualization of children for far too long, and we have reached a breaking point—between 2019 and 2023, almost 6,000 minors underwent surgical mutilation for a “sex-change” to the cheers of the American medical community, and almost 9,000 children received experimental puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.
Teachers hang LGBTQ flags in elementary classrooms, and public school libraries lend pornographic books detailing gay sex acts to children. The average age of first pornography exposure is 11 years old, and 41 percent of programs rated for children on Netflix contain LGBTQ content, characters, and themes.
I have seen this crisis up close. Last year, I attended a school board meeting in the suburbs of Chicago where a girl had been forced to change with a trans-identifying boy in a locker room. The board meeting was full to the brim with LGBTQ advocates waving pink, white, and blue flags, and the first speaker walked to the mic from the seat behind me—he had on a knee-length dress, dark red lipstick, a little too much blush on his cheeks, and a long, grown-out comb over.
His two-minute testimony about “inclusivity” for “trans kids” was met with enthusiastic applause, but my gut reaction to this old man in a dress was worlds different: I want this man as far away from children as possible. Later that night, I found the man’s Facebook page, and I was unsurprised to see it was filled with fanciful pictures of little girls.
A question lingered with me in the days following: Why did an old, trans-identifying man attend a school board meeting to demand that a boy have full access to the girls’ locker room? Soon enough, I found that a look at history proves that LGBTQ ideologues have been sexualizing children for decades.
The western roots of gender ideology can be traced back to “sexologists” John Money and Alfred Kinsey. In the 1960s and 70s, Dr. Money conducted his “research” on a pair of male twins from their infancy to age seven at Johns Hopkins University. One twin was raised as a boy (the control twin), and the other was forcibly raised as a “girl” after an unintentional castration of his genitals. Dr. Money forced the twins to perform sex acts with each other as part of his experimentation.
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Dr. Money published his findings to his fame, coining the terms “gender identity” and “sexual orientation,” while the twins went on to die tragic deaths in adulthood: one committed suicide, and the other overdosed on antidepressants.
Dr. Money’s contemporary, Dr. Alfred Kinsey, was the director of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. His seminal works on human sexual behavior contain data gathered on “pre-adolescent orgasms,” and the youngest child Dr. Kinsey induced and measured an orgasm on was two months old.
Money and Kinsey laid the groundwork for today’s gender ideology; so did their “research.” The fathers of the LGBTQ agenda built its foundation on perverse child abuse.
As evidenced by the thousands of sex-rejecting procedures American doctors have performed on children, the ideology built by Money and Kinsey’s child-abusive pseudoscience has persisted unchecked. What is more, “Drag Queen Story Hours” are held at elementary schools and kids’ libraries far too often, and we have seen an increase in drag performances in front of children—even some where children are the ones dressing and performing in drag for adults.
From public schools to music, Netflix series, social media platforms, and toys, almost no arena of American life with influence over children has gone untouched by gender ideology. In theory and in practice, the sexualization of children is a hallmark of the LGBTQ agenda.
At the Chicago school board meeting last year, I went to the mic after a transgender parent spoke with his young “transgender” child on his shoulders. My remarks made the cramped room considerably angrier:
"Transgender ideology is an adult fantasy that should not touch school-aged girls and boys. Adult sexual perversions have no place in the classroom, and adult gender delusions should never be pushed onto vulnerable boys and girls. There is no amount of emotional manipulation or noise that will change the fact that transgenderism confuses, grooms, sexualizes, and mutilates children. There is no such thing as a transgender child, only misguided parents, pedophiles, online predators, and their underage victims."
My testimony was not popular in that room, and the Chicago Tribune called me an “anti-trans firebrand” in the days to come—but I know that for the good of our nation, not one more child should be sexualized, abused, or mutilated under the guise of an ideology manufactured by the likes of John Money and Alfred Kinsey.
So-called “gender-affirming care” is starting to crumble—for that, we should celebrate. Last month, New York City’s NYU Langone Hospital closed its pediatric gender clinic, one of the largest peddlers of harmful puberty blockers (administered to children as young as 12) and sex-rejecting procedures in the country. The hospital cited fiscal pressure from the Trump Administration in its decision, joining almost 40 hospitals and clinics that have done the same. But celebration means we keep working. America’s child sexualization cultural rot runs deep, and it will take more than temporary hospital closures to reverse course.
Only with scalpels down permanently, pronouns away, gay characters out of kids’ shows, classroom pride flags thrown out, and drag queens out of libraries do we stand a chance at restoring our nation for children. Gender ideology needs nothing less than wholesale rejection from the American public.
Hannah Lape is Legislative Strategist for Concerned Women for America, the nation’s largest public policy women’s organization. On X: @CWforA
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