Parents across the nation are facing a new threat to their children: the transgender-industrial complex. For different but sometimes overlapping reasons, the medical establishment, Big Pharma, the culture industry and government agencies are leading our kids on the road toward “transitioning” — whether parents like it or not.
For the private-economy actors, especially, the spread of gender ideology is a big boon to their bottom line.
To be sure, people experiencing gender dysphoria deserve compassionate care. But that’s very different from enabling minors in a vulnerable state of mind in these sexually confusing times to irreversibly alter their bodies with the latest in medical and pharmaceutical science.
Actually, that bit about the latest science isn’t quite right. Medroxyprogesterone acetate, a common drug in “gender-affirming therapy,” has long been used to chemically castrate sex offenders.
Another widely used medication is Lupron, a controversial hormone blocker. Lupron was initially developed to lower testosterone levels in men with prostate cancer, effectively chemically castrating them. It’s now used as a puberty blocker in the booming business of “transitioning” children.
Lupron manufacturer AbbVie made $726 million on the drug alone in 2018. AbbVie has joined other major pharmaceutical companies in lobbying to keep drug prices high while virtue-signaling about diversity and inclusion.
Transgender people require lifelong medical support, making them ideal customers for the health-care industry, and the well-documented phenomenon of “peer contagion”—kids pressuring each other into thinking they’re all trans — ensures an endless supply of consumers.
Lisa Littman, a physician-scientist at Brown University, has illuminated this social phenomenon. Littman’s research identified a pattern: Children tend to experience a “rapid onset of gender dysphoria” after being exposed to transgender ideology through peers or media.
Her study elicited fierce backlash, which was ironic, because peer contagion is another way of describing the culture’s success in normalizing these ideas to children. Critics essentially shouted, That’s not happening, and it’s good that it is.
It’s happening. A New York PBS affiliate recently featured a drag queen who wanted children “to get to experience the magic of drag and to get a little practice shaking their hips or shimmying their shoulders to know how we can feel fabulous inside of our own bodies.”
It was targeted toward kids aged 3 to 8. “Keep kink in Pride [parades] for our kids’ sake,” wrote Lauren Rowello in a Washington Post op-ed in June. Rowello cheerfully recounted showing scenes of men in leather thongs spanking each other “playfully” with floggers. “These folks [are] members of our community celebrating who they are and what they like to do,” Rowello told her kids, by her own account.
This messaging not only normalizes hyper-sexualized concepts to children but exalts them as a positive good; thinking or acting to the contrary is therefore cruel, cowardly, conformist. The medical establishment agrees.
The American Medical Association has announced that sex should be removed as a legal designation on the public part of birth certificates. At medical schools nationwide, would-be physicians are berating their professors for still insisting on the bodily nature of sex.
In one case, a Pakistani immigrant and devout Muslim named Ahmed checked his teenaged autistic son into a Seattle hospital after he had struggled with severe depression. Due to a COVID-19 policy, Ahmed couldn’t stay with his son. In his absence, hospital staff and social workers manipulated the boy into thinking his problems stemmed from being a girl trapped in a boy’s body.
In Washington, minors can consent to “gender-affirming therapy” at 13. Knowing social workers would conflate protest with abuse, Ahmed promised to play along with transitioning, collected his son and fled the state with his family; Ahmed’s son is now living happily in his natural sex, as a boy.
In Pakistan, people flee from terrorists; in the United States, they flee from social workers.
In our brave new world, a culture of depravity preys on children. That culture insists that the state and medical professionals revoke guardianship from the adults to whom kids were accidentally born. The implications for this are terrifying, yet neither political party seems to have the courage to speak for the sanity and safety of American families. Meanwhile, Big Pharma cashes in handsomely.
Pedro L. Gonzalez is the associate editor at Chronicles.
Twitter: @Emeriticus