Encouraging Gender Fluidity Is Child Abuse

Several new words have entered our English language, which have powerfully changed American and Western family structures, legal systems, military, politics and social norms. Here they are: cisgender, gender-fluid, non-binary (gendered), pansexual, trans and transgender. Let me explain them in the simplest terms. A cisgendered person is an individual who identifies with his or her birth sex; these people believe they are a man or a woman because of the genitals they were born with. A nonbinary or pansexual refers to a person who has not quite made up his mind yet--he does not identify with being either male or female. A trans, or transgender person, is one who has changed or is in the process of changing his birth sex, often with the help of medical intervention, from a man into a woman or vice versa.

I am sure most Americans know about Olympic gold medalist Bruce Jenner's highly publicized change to Caitlyn Marie Jenner. Many Americans recall the legal and political furor in North Carolina over the question of whether transgender schoolchildren could use bathrooms matching their new identities. These were big news items, widely broadcast by proponents of gender fluidity and transgenderism.

While the issues surrounding gender identity may not be hot news right now, the transgender movement is continuing to march into new territory. What's the new turf? The physical and mental health of very young children.

I read in an August 14 cnsNews.com article by Gage Cohen that a University of California–San Francisco director of mental health claims that 2-year-olds can know that they are transgender. In case you don't fully understand that sentence, here is some mind-blowing, stomach-wrenching clarity. In other words, according to Dr. Diane Ehrensaft, a 2-year-old boy can know that he should have been born a girl, and a little girl can know, at 2, that she should have been born a boy.

Child Psychology Gone Mad

When the Associated Press asked Ehrensaft when children should be allowed to begin transitioning into the other gender, she responded: "We expect a 2-year-old to know 'I am boy. I am girl.' So why can't that also apply to transgender children?"

Ms. Ehrensaft has a history of advocating for children to be allowed to determine whether they are transgender. She supports the Rainbow Day Camp in northern California--a camp where transgender youths as young as 4 may attend. According to Ehrensaft, the camp has experienced a "sea change, maybe we can even call it a tsunami, in the number of little kids showing up with their families." There may be a sea change, or a tsunami, of kids claiming to be transgender, but that doesn't mean it is normal. Yet this is what Ehrensaft would like us to believe.

"When asked what it means if a young boy wants to wear dresses, Ehrensaft said it meant parents should buy him dresses: 'What we know is, you have a son who likes princess dresses. I would say, get him the dresses. Have your child free to choose. Maybe, they'll stop wearing dresses. Maybe, they grow up to be gay,'" wrote Cohen.

Here are several things Ehrensaft suggests parents watch out for to determine if their 2-year-old thinks he or she is transgender. For starters, you need to listen carefully to your child's "use of verbs [pronouns] regarding gender," then look for frustration concerning his or her own genitals, and finally take it very seriously when a boy wants to wear a dress or a girl wants to play with trucks. By the way, this last suggestion is called, in professional terms, "gender expansion play."

Cohen mentioned advice for parents from another gender expert, Johanna Olson-Kennedy, the medical director of the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children's Hospital in Los Angeles. Olson-Kennedy recommends "that parents go away for a weekend with your child in order to learn more about his or her gender preference." Sound good? Would you take them to the beach, the zoo or an amusement park? No. "Do a weekend as a different gender, and see what you learn ... letting them use a different pronoun or wear a dress or other clothing of their choice." I ask: What has happened to human minds that could think or advocate such things?

I am a father of four daughters and grandfather of nine grandchildren. Not one of my daughters ever questioned her birth sex. Of the nine grandchildren (five girls, four boys), not one has made the proclamation, "I should have been a boy" or, "I should have been a girl."

What 2-year-old, just learning to talk, doesn't at times mix up her pronouns concerning gender? What 2-year-old girl playing beside a brother, does not attempt to play with her brother's cars or trucks? And what 2-year-old boy playing with a sister would not pick up a pink purse or doll and play with it? It takes an adult mind to see this innocence as some form of transgenderism. Let's be truly honest, adults. Playing at cross-dressing with a child is the best way to introduce confusion into a child's mind concerning sexual identity.

So what's going on here?

The New Normal

Michelle Cretella, M.D., pediatrician and president of the American College of Pediatricians, has a different view of the transgender ideology so heavily promulgated today. She views it as an infection disrupting American politics and our legal systems. "[T]ransgender ideology is not just infecting our laws. It is intruding into the lives of the most innocent among us--children--and with the apparent growing support of the professional medical community," she wrote for the Daily Signal. "I have witnessed an upending of the medical consensus on the nature of gender identity. What doctors once treated as a mental illness, the medical community now largely affirms and even promotes as normal" (emphasis added throughout). The diagnosis for children distressed by their biological sex at one time used to be called "gender identity disorder." In 2013, this name was changed to "gender dysphoria." The word disorder means "a state of confusion." The word dysphoria means "a state of unease." This change in diagnosis name was accomplished by the often-unseen hand of the transgender movement.

In 2014, there were only 24 pediatric "gender clinics" along the East Coast and in California to help children distressed by their biological sex. By 2015, there were 40 across the nation. "With 215 pediatric residency programs now training future pediatricians in a transition-affirming protocol and treating gender-dysphoric children accordingly, gender clinics are bound to proliferate," said Cretella.

Here is the problem with the expansion in the number of clinics.

Children who "consistently and persistently insist" that they are not the gender of their birth sex are considered to be innately transgender. ("The fact that in normal life and in psychiatry, anyone who 'consistently and persistently insists' on anything else contrary to physical reality is considered either confused or delusional is conveniently ignored," wrote Cretella.) Then trained medical professionals recommend parents adhere to a transition-affirming protocol. Essentially, this means that the parents are to act as if the child is the gender he or she desires. When the child is 11 or 12 years old, the parents should then place him or her on puberty blockers. If by age 16, the child believes that he or she is still trapped in the wrong body, the child should be placed on cross-sex hormones and biological girls may receive a double mastectomy. "[G]enital reassignment surgeries are not recommended before age 18, though some surgeons have recently argued against this restriction," continued Cretella. None of this sounds normal to me.

Large-scale Child Abuse

Michelle Cretella confirmed Ehrensaft's view that the number of children claiming to be transgender is dramatically increasing. In the United Kingdom alone, there has been a 2,000 percent increase in referrals since 2009. "The transgender movement has gained legs in the medical community and in our culture by offering a deeply flawed narrative," wrote Cretella. She believes that the transgender movement has opened the door to large-scale child abuse. You can read the actual details debunking the transgender movement's flawed claims in Dr. Cretella's full article here.

"These professionals are using the myth that people are born transgender to justify engaging in massive, uncontrolled and unconsented experimentation on children who have a psychological condition that would otherwise resolve after puberty in the vast majority of cases," warned Cretella. "Today's institutions that promote transition affirmation are pushing children to impersonate the opposite sex, sending many of them down the path of puberty blockers, sterilization, the removal of healthy body parts, and untold psychological damage."

There is nothing more precious than the life of a little child. It is natural for parents to want to protect the life of their child. One of the biggest scare tactics transgender supporters throw at parents is that they must allow gender transformation to prevent suicide. This is a huge lie. In Sweden, one of the most lgbt-affirming countries in the world, the suicide rate for adults who undergo sex reassignment is 20 times greater than that of the general population.

"These harms constitute nothing less than institutionalized child abuse. Sound ethics demand an immediate end to the use of pubertal suppression, cross-sex hormones, and sex reassignment surgeries in children and adolescents, as well as an end to promoting gender ideology via school curricula and legislative policies," Cretella proclaimed. That is a laudable desire. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that Dr. Cretella and her peers will appear on our nightly news or in our national newspapers. They have great difficulty finding amplification for their message.

Destruction of Biblical Family

This is part of a highly organized plan to destroy biblical family, commonly known as the traditional family. It has been happening for decades. Diane Ehrensaft admits her part in the movement in the introduction to a book she coauthored, My Son Wears Heels. "A long time ago, I grew up to be a feminist of the 1960s. Looking back on that time, we all thought we were kicking up some dust, and we were happy for it," she writes. "We had no idea we had started a landslide, earthshaking tremors that would set in motion, with our allies in the lgbtqi movement, a new era in which homosexuality would be deleted as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual (1973), gay marriage would be legalized in the United States (2015), and reparative therapy to try to fix the gender identity for minors would be banned in several states in the United States and a province in Canada." Reparative therapy is the practice of trying to change someone's homosexual orientation or "gender identity disorder." The practice has been banned for minors in nine U.S. states: California, Connecticut, Illinois, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island and Vermont.

"Many of us are mesmerized by the seemingly sudden breakdown of the gender binary--one box for boys and one box for girls, and never the twain shall meet. When even Target stores dispense with gender categories in their toy departments (which they announced in the summer of 2015), we are definitely in a whole new world," continues Ms. Ehrensaft.

Long forgotten is the fact that a supreme, all-powerful Creator God made a man and a woman out of the dust of the Earth. The history of this incredible event is recorded simply and beautifully in the first several pages of the Bible. In proper translations, this fact is recorded as poetry. "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them." (Genesis 1:27; English Standard Version). You can read further details of the creation of Adam in Genesis 2:7 and the creation of Eve in verses 21-23. Then, on the very day of their creation, God instituted marriage, making these two human beings--a man and a woman--a family! Now that is truly mesmerizing. Unfortunately, not long after that day, that man and woman rejected the God who made them and the way of living He had mapped out for them. They thought they could come up with something better. Yet man has been cut off from God and has lived miserable lives ever since (Genesis 3:22-24).

People today also refuse to acknowledge that the same God who created a man and a woman stated clearly that homosexuality, lesbianism, transgenderism and even cross-dressing is an abomination (Leviticus 20:13; Deuteronomy 22:5; Romans 1:26-27). Many Americans and Britons are embracing a Sodom and Gomorrah-type lifestyle. The Apostle Peter warned that people who commit such sins, unless they repent, will face severe punishment (2 Peter 2:6). God will not be mocked.

Can Diane Ehrensaft offer this world something better than God offered our first parents? Read carefully what she writes: "As the 21st century rolls on, we are bearing witness to an explosion in the acknowledgement, understanding and celebration of people of all genders and sexualities. Gender used to be bedrock, and now we've converted it into moving boulders. Marriage used to be the sole providence of a man and a woman, and I should add as a man and a woman who started out that way. Now we recognize marriage as the loving union between two people of any gender and any sexual identity." This psychologist celebrates the destruction of gender as a bedrock of human society; she celebrates that (according to men's law) marriage is no longer the sole possession of a man and a woman--according to birth sex. She celebrates homosexuality and cross dressing. Do we see that she also celebrates confusing little children?

What Psychologists Don't Know

"As a clinical psychologist, I am bound by the oath that dictates the actions of all medical and mental health professionals: Do No Harm. Yet all around me, physicians, psychiatrists and child therapists are doing just that--in clinics and private practice consultation rooms where parents are advised to take away their little boy's dolls and pink tights or make their little girls grow out their buzz cuts; mothers and fathers are directed to ignore or punish their children's 'inappropriate' gender expressions and pay attention to or reward only the 'gender-appropriate' ones; and families are sent home to make sure the gender-nonconforming children are redirected to same-sex friendships and to their same-sex parent as the main or only parent to identify with," Ehrensaft writes in her book Gender Born, Gender Made: Raising Healthy Gender-Nonconforming Children. Let's be reasonable. Who is actually doing harm to children? It should be very easy for us to answer that question.

Herbert W. Armstrong, the most important theologian of the 20th century, wrote a groundbreaking article titled "What Psychologists Don't Know About Child Rearing." He wrote: "The psychologists who reject the revealed Word of God cannot rightly teach you how to rear children. They do not know what the human mind is." All parents must learn that eliminating gender confusion is a matter of proper child rearing.

All proper child rearing begins with the understanding of how God created the human mind. "Adam, the first created human, was created with a spirit in him," wrote Mr. Armstrong. "The spirit was not a 'soul.' The breathing physical man was the soul (Genesis 2:7). The spirit in him did not impart life to him. His breathing imparted the breath of life to his circulatory system. So says God." This is astounding biblical revelation that few people understand today. Study Job 32:8 and 1 Corinthians 2:11.

"Adam was created with a human spirit by which, of himself, he could acquire knowledge. Man has acquired by himself knowledge to build houses, make and operate automobiles, airplanes, computers. He has developed a sense of good and evil, right and wrong. Yet in 6,000 years, man has never learned how to get along with fellowman," Mr. Armstrong continued. Man has excelled at gaining knowledge of how to deal with material things. Mr. Armstrong explained in that article, however, that man needed two other important kinds of knowledge to have a truly happy and successful life: Man needed to know how to have contact and a relationship with God and also how to have a relationship with other people--especially those of his own immediate family.

Adam needed God's Holy Spirit to gain knowledge of the other two important kinds of knowledge. "The Holy Spirit would have imparted to him knowledge for contact and relationship with God--how to get along with his fellowman--how to treat his mate and rear his children. But Adam rejected the Spirit of God (tree of life) and took to himself the knowledge of good and evil," explained Mr. Armstrong. We are currently living in the world that Adam and Eve created. It is a world in rebellion against its Creator.

So where does this leave us on the subject of transgenderism? Essentially, children are born with the same human spirit as an adult. A child can think, reason and decide what to do. But at birth, a child's mind is a blank slate. The child must be taught by his or her parents to think and reason properly. This means children must be taught about gender and the God-ordained purpose behind the sex they were born with. In other words, boys must be taught how to be men; girls must be taught how to be women. Parents should teach their sons and daughters about the proper use of clothing and living a sexually moral life. In other words, parents should be teaching their children to live by and obey all of God's Ten Commandments. This flies in the face of all modern thinking--but it is the only way to solve this world's growing social problems.

Mr. Armstrong expounded on this teaching on the human spirit and God's purpose and plans for mankind in his book The Incredible Human Potential. We are happy to send you this book free of charge and without follow up. ▪