Imprimis: Gender Ideology run amok

These mendacious dogmas have corrupted our K-12 schools, our universities, and our legacy media, as well as our scientific journals and our medical accrediting organizations—the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, etc. To give you a sense of how far things have gone, I was informed late last year by a member of the National Association of Science Writers—an association of journalists with scientific backgrounds—that a member of the association’s online forum had been expelled for mentioning my book on the transgender social contagion among teenage girls. He hadn’t even read my book. He just mentioned that it sounded interesting, and for that he was banned as transphobic.

Similarly, endocrinologists, psychiatrists, pediatricians, and researchers who are concerned about the risks of gender interventions report that they struggle today to get their research published. And public and private funding of research is almost entirely restricted to researchers who promote gender transition and downplay the risks.

There are phalanxes of young doctors now, many of them in pediatrics or child psychiatry, who are open about their belief that their primary job is “social justice.”

They unreservedly celebrate the increase in transitioning treatment of young people and are inexcusably complacent about the risks of those treatments. The Washington Post recently quoted some of these doctors to the effect that puberty blockers are fully reversible—which is not something that any honest doctor can claim to know. We simply don’t have the data to know whether puberty blockers are fully physically reversible when applied to halt healthy puberty—and they are certainly not psychologically reversible. We’re seeing a startling politicization of medicine and science, which is symptomatic of a larger woke corruption of American society.

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Now, there’s something I make a point of saying whenever I speak, and I say it for the simple reason that it is true: transgender adults are some of the soberest and kindest people I have met in my work as a journalist. Many of them seem to have been helped by transition, and they are leading admirable and productive lives. They have no desire to harm women or to push transition on children. The gender ideology activists do not represent them.

My understanding of freedom includes a belief that society should allow adults to make consequential decisions about their lives, which includes choosing to undergo sex reassignment surgery. And whenever I am asked by a transgender adult, I use his or her chosen name and pronouns. This seems to me the courteous and the right thing to do. But—and this is a big but—I never lie. This means I never say, and I will never say, that trans women are women. I think reciting this lie leads, as we are seeing, to unjust and dangerous consequences for women and girls. It is not courteous or right to parrot these lies. It is the cowardly surrender of women’s welfare to the woke gods. And it is wrong.

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I’m also often asked why it is that the gender ideology activists are doing what they are doing.

What possible justification could there be, for instance, for telling small boys that they might be girls and small girls that they might be boys?

My best guess at an answer occurred to me while talking to detransitioners. I heard repeatedly from these young women that while they were transitioning, they were angry and politically radical. They often cut off relations with their families, having been coached to do so online by gender activists. Related to this, if you look, you’ll notice a disproportionate number of gender-confused people among the ranks of Antifa in cities like Portland.

So what do we do about it? How do we push back?

First and foremost, we must oppose the indoctrination of children in gender ideology. There is no good reason for it, and it does real harm. We can absolutely insist that all children treat each other kindly without indoctrinating an entire generation in gender confusion.

Second, we must overcome our squeamishness and speak the truth in public. Wherever we find ourselves, we must refuse to recite lies. And we must always clearly distinguish between transgender Americans, generally wonderful people, and the ideological transgender movement, which seeks to warp children and weaken families.\


This is a movement that would turn our children against themselves because its advocates know there is no greater harm—no quicker way to bring America to its knees—than by driving our children to do themselves irreversible damage.

The people pushing this ideology have gotten a head start on us by perhaps a decade.

But now I think they have awakened a sleeping giant. The success of my book is one indication. The many state legislatures that are now debating these issues is another.

These are our kids and grandkids. Our future depends on our winning this fight.

Young people have enough problems growing up anyway.