It’s about “fundamentally transforming” America -- replacing the cultural influence of church and parents with governmental decrees. Remember when you were a kid and you had a same-sex best friend? The two of you spent hours laughing together on the phone, shared secrets, and spun dreams. And you then decided since these feelings were undeniably love for another girl, you were probably a boy trapped in a girl’s body and you should transition to being male because then you could love her like you should? No, I don’t remember that either.
Most of us do experience that strong emotional bond with our best friends during puberty, while our bodies are churning up the hormones that will soon fling us into the heterosexual soup. For some of us, those feelings may last longer. But now Obama and his government co-conspirators want to freeze that very fluid period into a lifelong change in identity and bodily equipment, a drastic alteration that is nearly guaranteed to wreak a lifetime of gender-confusion havoc.
A dictatorial government has become the siege engine laying waste to the religious and cultural certainties that undergird our nation. By blasting away bit by bit at America’s guiding moral framework, the Almighty government usurps the Almighty himself, erasing the “laws of nature and nature’s God” as Thomas Jefferson expressed it in The Declaration. But eradicating those laws harms our citizens.
God very clearly gives each of us our “sex assignment” at birth with a sprinkling of genes and the laying on of genitalia. But Man (or at least .03 percent of them) now rebels against God’s narrow-minded decree and chooses instead “sex reassignment” complete with makeup, trendy high heels, hormone “therapy” and the surgeon’s blade.
Government wants you to think a judgy God limits your “rights.” Today you alone in your infinite wisdom determine your identity and indeed you may change who you are day by day depending on how you “feel.”
And it goes beyond sexual identity. Those in academia and elsewhere decide they are Native American by reason of “family stories” or “feelings”, and then reap the benefits of tenure and special protected class status that such a claim brings. In Spokane, a NAACP president “passes” as a black person for years and actually believes she is African-American, over the vocal protests of her white bread parents.
How far will it go? Apparently there’s something called “otherkin”; people who think they’re imprisoned not only in the wrong body, but in the wrong species. They may “identify” as dogs, cats, or wolves, or as aliens and not just at Star Trek conventions. Some alter their appearance with tattoos or surgery to look like their “other.” I’ve always identified as a dolphin; if I apply for a job as a performer at Sea World and I’m turned down can I claim anti-homo sapien job discrimination? A new civil rights battle in the making.
But let’s get back to the bathroom. Dr. Paul McHugh, former psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, in a Wall Street Journal article boldly calls transgenderism a “mental disorder” requiring psychological, not surgical, treatment. In breaking with the media and governmental trend, the brave doctor risks being labeled a transgender denier, just as real scientists who disagree with the global warming hoax are maligned as “climate-change deniers.”
Dr. McHugh compares this disorder to an anorexic who is “dangerously thin” but looks in the mirror and sees a fat person. Certainly, a very small number of individuals are born with both male and female genitalia; they are called hermaphrodites. But we aren’t talking about them.
We’re talking about another very small number of “transgender” individuals – about .03 percent – and 90 percent of them “feel” they are women dealing with the inconvenience of male genitalia.
Dr. McHugh says the push by government and media to legitimize transgender feelings in youngsters comes very close to child abuse. He warns against encouraging this tendency in today’s young people who are “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…having transgender surgery.”
Dr. McHugh laments that some “misguided doctors”, working with very young children who seem to imitate the opposite sex, 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.”
The American College of Pediatricians recently released a statement declaring that “Conditioning children into believing a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful is child abuse.”
Physical and personality mayhem ensue since studies from Vanderbilt University and London’s Portman Clinic of children who had expressed transgender feelings show that over time, 70-80 percent “spontaneously lose those feelings, abandon their confusion and grow naturally into adult life if untreated ….” according to McHugh. Actually the percentage returning to normal is probably much greater than 80 percent, because transgender adults only comprise about .03 percent of the population.
Johns Hopkins, after pioneering sex-change surgery, halted the treatment in the 1970s after demonstrating “that the practice brought no important benefits,” reports Dr. McHugh. “Our efforts, though, had little influence on the emergence of this new idea about sex, or upon the expansion of the number of ‘transgendered’ among young and old.” He adds that “sex change is biologically impossible…claiming that this is a civil-rights matter and encouraging surgical intervention is in reality to…promote a mental disorder.” Yet the Obama administration announced in May that Medicare will now cover transgender surgery.
While encouraging surgery, government often forbids parents to seek the treatment that Dr. McHugh says their gender-scrambled kids need. Some states, including 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.”
With the recent Obama edict requiring all schools to provide transgender bathrooms and allowing male students to shower with young girls on days they “feel” female-ish, the government has literally endorsed every teen boy’s wet dream. But following the government’s order undeniably endangers women and girls .
Although the transsexual lobby claims victimhood, the real victims are women and children. In Florida, a 250-pound male beat a 9-year-old girl almost to death in the women’s room of a Best Buy. In Chicago, a man choked an 8-year-old girl until she passed out in the women’s bathroom of Jason’s Deli. And there are enough additional court cases to prove that men, transgender or not, can be dangerous if allowed in women’s restrooms.
And it may get worse. England’s Daily Telegraph recently reported that a city council wrote to thousands of parents urging them to help their four-year-old children choose the gender “they most identify with” before starting school. Says the letter, “We recognize that not all children and young people identify with the gender they were assigned at birth…Please support your child to choose the gender they most identify with. Or if they have another gender identity leave this blank and discuss with your child’s school.” Authorities helpfully provided a gender survey with 25 options including “genderqueer,” “tri-gender” and “gender fluid.” These are preschoolers!
The bathroom battle is really about the government eroding and replacing the family and faith of the dominant culture including the 70 to 75 percent of Americans who “identify” as Christians. Authoritarianism’s first goal is to supplant the traditional social cohesion of a society.
In America, parents are forbidden or discouraged by government, schools and even doctors from helping their kids with the psychological therapy they need. God has proven himself a bigot and a hater by insisting on his outdated, musty-fusty man-woman concept. God should be fired, like Curt Schilling.
Government is now challenging God. That government reigns supreme over parental guidance and religious belief, is doctrinaire in Communist countries where religion is banned and children are taught from an early age to inform on parents’ “counter-revolutionary activities.” Youth are then spared that difficult teen-rebel period as their parents disappear into labor camps or mass graves.
What then shall we do? Dozens of states are suing the feds. Parents are protesting. Me, I’m stuffing sheets of unused toilet paper in a bunch of envelopes and sending them to the White House: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, D.C., 20500.
Joy Overbeck is a Colorado journalist and author who writes for Townhall.com, The Washington Times, The Daily Caller, American Thinker, BarbWire and elsewhere. More columns: https://www.facebook.com/JoyOverbeckColumnist Follow her on Twitter @JoyOverbeck1