Home Opinion Child’s confusion should not lead to secret, dubious decision

Child’s confusion should not lead to secret, dubious decision

1135

Diocese of Wilmington

If an underweight fifteen-year-old girl walks into the school nurse’s office and announces that she is fat, the nurse, the administration, parents and the medical profession will go at once to work to address what presents as anorexia or bulimia.

If the same girl announces that she is really a boy, much current thinking imagines that her confusion about her body should be accommodated, and that she should be treated with strong hormones and even mutilating surgery. If she lives in Oregon, the state will pay for it without her parents’ knowledge. The previous national administration claimed that she should be admitted to the boys’ locker room. The more extreme social justice warriors think that if her parents are too sane to cooperate, they should be cut out of the process.

Father Leonard R. Klein

We do not allow the same young woman to vote or buy beer or to go get a tattoo without permission. She is also below the age of consent for sexual intercourse. Yet it is proposed that society should encourage and assist in her life-altering rejection of simple biological reality. She will never be a man, never be able to father a child, as is appropriate to the actual male sex.

Yet this insistence comes from those voices who claim most loudly to be reality and science based. And how is it that two generations into second wave feminism anybody thinks that someone can be born with the wrong body?

It gets worse. She need not be fifteen. She can be a mere child too young to go to the playground without adult supervision, and the same establishment will rush to help a child that barely knows her right from her left pretend to be a boy. All of this is in spite of considerable evidence that most children who have such fantasies will soon enough leave them behind.

Some months ago the News Journal carried a story about a six-year-old boy who was “transitioning.” There was no father in the house; his mother identified herself as a strong feminist and had wanted a girl. There was no evidence in the story that the reporters had asked the obvious questions.

Life-altering decisions that are risky and dubious for adults – transgender suicide rates are extremely high even in hyper-tolerant Sweden – are being ratified for the very young.

In all humanity we must recognize that gender dysphoria is a very distressing matter for a certain number of people, though it is very possible that less drastic forms of therapy would be the wiser course. The hormones and surgery are life-altering, and the surgery is irreversible. Consequently, serious questions of medical ethics arise in these kinds of treatments. Nevertheless, those who endeavor to live as a member of the opposite sex are owed the same kindness as all people, though certainly not every accommodation they demand.

But for children? Do they need more confusion? When so many of our children grow up without both parents, without good models of mature manhood and womanhood, robbed of innocence and modesty by a decadent culture, and bombarded by the fraud that our bodies are just raw material that we can design to fit our wills, the jump to judge boys or girls as transgendered is imprudent at best, if not outright child abuse. The legislature should perhaps give that some thought.

Likewise, some thought should be given to limiting the power of the school system in this matter. At last check, the public schools were struggling to do their basic job successfully. Family breakdown has already stressed the system to the limit and we are seeing generations of failure at the bottom of the socio-economic scale. While the schools have to deal with what is presented to them, in this case the effort to be pro-active is foolish and unnecessary. Minor, local adaptations may be necessary. Ideologically driven top-down polices are a bad idea.

It is little surprise that the proposed regulations and legislation have drawn the opposition they have. Most people still have some common sense. We can tell the sex of fruit-flies from their DNA but are told we must be less sure about humans. Those who would lead us would do well to heed the good sense of those they wish to lead. And everybody needs to sober up and give this latest progressive cause a more critical look.