By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
J.M., a reader from Arizona, writes to call our attention to a position paper from the American College of Pediatricians (ACP) on the issue of “gender-conflicted” youth. It has much to offer educators who are facing the question of how to be compassionate with students faced with this issue, while at the same respecting the privacy rights of students who do not want students with the body parts of a member of the opposite sex in the same bathrooms or locker rooms with them. They are not alone. The medical professionals at ACP are on their side.
The American College of Pediatricians was founded in 2002 by a group of pediatricians to provide an alternative to the more liberal American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). ACP describes itself as “a national organization of pediatricians and other health-care professionals dedicated to the health and well-being of children . . . committed to fulfilling its mission by producing sound policy, based upon the best available research, to assist parents and to influence society in the endeavor of childrearing.”
The group’s founder, Joseph Zanga, spoke of the group’s commitment to “Judeo-Christian, traditional values,” but stressed that it was “open to pediatric medical professionals of all religions” provided that they “hold true to the group’s core beliefs: that life begins at conception; and that the traditional family unit, headed by a different-sex couple, poses far fewer risk factors in the adoption and raising of children.” The AAP disagrees, arguing an equivalence between same-sex and traditional family adoptions.
What is the ACP’s position on transgenders and sex-change procedures? The group “urges educators and legislators to reject all policies that condition children to accept as normal a life of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex.” The AAP disagrees here, as well, contending, “There are many normal variations in gender presentation, gender identification, and sexual orientation.” And, as you might suspect, the ACP’s disagreement with the AAP on these matters has earned the ACP the label “hate group” from liberal groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Readers of First Teachers can examine the ACP’s website to get a full picture of the group’s activities. Until then, consider the key elements of the position paper recommended to us by J.M. One of its authors is Paul McHugh, MD, University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical School and the former psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
It offers a dose of common sense on the matter of transgendered youths. Our correspondent, J.M., observes, “Johns Hopkins was the first U.S. hospital to do sex-change surgeries years ago, but they stopped doing them in the 1970s after realizing that surgery didn’t help the underlying psychiatric condition and because of the high suicide rate among those patients. It would appear that trying to recreate man and woman in our own image is a dangerous thing for humankind, especially youth at a vulnerable time of their life.”
The ACP paper begins by observing, “No one is born with a gender. Everyone is born with a biological sex. Gender (an awareness and sense of oneself as male or female) is a sociological and psychological concept, not an objective biological one. No one is born with an awareness of themselves as male or female; this awareness develops over time and, like all developmental processes, may be derailed by a child’s subjective perceptions, relationships, and adverse experiences from infancy forward. People who identify as ‘feeling like the opposite sex’ or ‘somewhere in between’ do not comprise a third sex. They remain biological men or biological women.”
What of the young men and women who disagree and feel they “are trapped” in the body of the opposite sex?
The ACP writes, “A person’s belief that he or she is something they are not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking. When an otherwise healthy biological boy believes he is a girl, or an otherwise healthy biological girl believes she is a boy, an objective psychological problem exists that lies in the mind not the body, and it should be treated as such. These children suffer from gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria (GD), formerly listed as Gender Identity Disorder (GID), is a recognized mental disorder in the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. The psychodynamic and social learning theories of GD/GID have never been disproved.”
This leads the ACP to reject sex-change operations and hormone treatments to alter the sexual identity of a young person: “Puberty is not a disease and puberty-blocking hormones can be dangerous. Reversible or not, puberty-blocking hormones induce a state of disease — the absence of puberty — and inhibit growth and fertility in a previously biologically healthy child. According to the DSM, as many as 98 percent of gender confused boys and 88 percent of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty.”
First Teachers has no way of verifying this last statement from the ACP about the large percentage of “gender-confused” boys and girls who eventually come to “accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty.” One can only hope that it is a correct estimate. It gives comfort to parents and young people going through this troubling time in their lives. Beyond that, it highlights the danger of the Obama administration’s policies on the transgendered, which have the effect of making permanent and “normal” the stage that transgendered youth are going through.
One would think that enlightened policy would be constructed to help these confused young people find normalcy in their lives, as ACP recommends, rather than making it easier to accept the disordered state they find themselves in, as AAP and the Obama administration advocate. President Obama promised to “fundamentally transform” the United States. We can see what he meant.
On another topic: S.M. writes to recommend to our readers the Culture of Life Studies Program put together by Judie Brown and American Life League. Mrs. Brown describes the program as one developed to counteract Planned Parenthood’s “methodical efforts to get its programs into every public school in America for the last fifty years.” Brown calls attention to provisions of Obamacare under which “Planned Parenthood is the only organization on the planet that ‘qualifies’ for hundreds of millions of your tax dollars to teach kids its perverse secular humanism.”
She notes that the Culture of Life Studies Program “has been endorsed by Raymond Cardinal Burke, Abby Johnson, and Bobby Schindler, to name a few.” Information about the program is available at the American Life League’s website: all.org.
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford, CT 06492.
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