When children are being sold a lie, that is everyone's business

Every adult is responsible for teaching children the truth about sex.

Complacency, ignorance, and misplaced trust have created a perfect storm in which a whole generation of children are being harmed, intellectually, emotionally and physically.

Too many adults have abandoned their responsibility to teach children the truth about sex – that it is binary, innate, and immutable – and instead are sacrificing the future of children for the sake of trendy social niceties.

A recent facebook post about the number of children “transitioning” at a NZ high school prompted dozens of ill-informed comments, exposing the depth of the problem we have, whereby people would rather repeat transgender propaganda or turn a blind eye than confront what is undoubtedly a major educational and medical scandal.

Many comments on the post denied that transition is happening at all or asserted that it only affects a tiny number of people.

Others seem to think being trans is the same as being gay or that some children are just born that way and hormones turn them into the person they were really meant to be.

Those who expressed concern about the transitioning children were told to mind their own business and leave it to the experts.

But it is everyone’s business when children are being taught the lie that they can change their sex.

And that is exactly what is happening. Hundreds of picture books aimed at 3-8 year olds teach children that sex is a matter of choice, like this one that tells them males can give birth:

Complacency

The facebook comments display a staggering level of complacency. It seems many people would rather live in a happy rainbow bubble than face up to the reality of what is happening to hundreds of vulnerable children in NZ. They consider themselves to be kind, inclusive, and progressive but, in reality, they have been conquered and co-opted by a wishful-thinking ideology.

Denying that transition is happening or insisting that it is rare and harmless may be comforting for the blinkered, but our whole society will pay the price of this betrayal of children.

Not least because we are certain to have an enormous medical bill in the future from adults whose bodies are suffering from the effects of wrong sex hormones that were administered to them when they were unsuspecting adolescents. A salutary example is provided by the long term serious health damage of young East German athletes who were doped with sex hormones by sports officials in the 1980s.

Puberty blocker judicial review on now

The message that blocking puberty is not a wise action has not got through to the general public. This is not surprising when even Crown Law was poorly prepared to defend the Minister of Health’s decision to ban puberty blockers when PATHA applied for a judicial review last year.

The judge heard the same old discredited claims of puberty blockers being reversible, giving children time to think, improving their mental health, and being agreed best practice for ‘gender affirming care’ amongst experts.

On the other hand, counsel for the Ministry of Health restricted their submission mainly to the process that was followed to reach the decision and the normal management of medicines used off-label. Almost none of the material in support of the government’s regulation was placed before the judge and she was not informed that the ‘expert’ evidence supplied by PATHA is nothing of the sort.

The judge who knew too little

The judicial review will be heard over three days this week in the Wellington High Court. Will Crown Law be ready this time to raise the salient issues of the untested long term physical and intellectual effects of these drugs? The first day of the hearing is Monday 13 July. Will the media report on this important case or continue to leave the public in a state of complacent ignorance about the safety and efficacy of puberty blockers?

Ignorance

The lack of basic scientific knowledge about sex, evident in the submissions to the Definitions of a Woman and Man Bill, is quite astounding. Many submitters seem to truly believe that taking opposite sex hormones will literally change a person’s sex - that a man might grow a uterus and a woman might start producing sperm. They don’t understand the difference between primary sex characteristics (ovaries or testes etc) that categorise a person’s sex, and secondary sex characteristics (breasts, beards etc) that correlate with (but do not determine) a person’s sex.

What determines sex is the chromosomes inherited at conception, with binary sex development triggerd by the presence or absence of a functioning SRY gene.

Each individual human body is structured to produce only one type of gamete, providing a clear and objective classification for female or male. This classification does not depend on fertility, identity, or social role. It is a foundational biological fact.

Whether an individual has a body structured for the production of sperm or ova is how sex is classified, not by whether a person has breasts, a beard, a deep voice or any other secondary sex characteristic. While secondary sex characteristics and gender presentation can be changed, the person’s innate sex (ovaries or testes) is immutable, no matter how many hormones are taken or how much cosmetic surgery is undertaken.

Adults should be telling children this irrefutable truth instead of blindly leading them down the transgender path. Believing that large numbers of children are born with a hormone imbalance and opposite sex synthetic hormones will make them “who they truly are” is ideological propaganda. The vast majority of children claiming a trans identity are physically healthy but are struggling with their mental health.

Instead of letting their minds run amok, adults ought to be teaching children to accept and respect the sexed bodies they are born with.

Not to do so is an abrogation of adult responsibility.

There is no sex spectrum

Another area of ignorance is the idea that sex is on a spectrum. This is thoroughly debunked in a recent paper authored by 16 international biologists who said:

When it comes to human sexes, it is true that a variety of quantitative traits, like height, have overlapping normal distributions. However, other traits do not overlap, and notably these are the key traits involved in sexual reproduction. There is no meaningful sense in which men and women have overlapping normal distributions in uterus size, sperm production, anatomy adapted for the function of becoming pregnant or impregnating, or other primary sexual characteristics. These characteristics are binary, and it is not a coincidence that they correspond to the male/female distinction recognized by all cultures.

DSDs are rare, affecting only about 1,000 people in NZ

Sex is a binary reproductive category into which 99.98% of humans are easily classified before or at birth. Of the remaining 0.018% (1 in 5,500 or 1,000 in 5.5 million), further investigations determine whether they have a DSD (disorder of sex development) of the male sex or of the female sex. A tiny number of people have both ovarian and testicular tissue but no one can produce both ova and sperm that is viable, therefore there is no third sex. The existence of these developmental variations does not change the biological reality that humans are a sexually dimorphic species organised around two sexes.

Misplaced trust

“Leave it to the experts. It’s none of your business” is a common refrain from transgender believers. Politicians also like to say it should be parents and doctors alone who decide whether to start a child on the transition pathway.

But what if the professionals have had their hands tied?

• As described by a mental health practitioner:

Counsellors and psychotherapists know they are able, under the Conversion Practices Prohibition Act, to engage in exploratory therapy, but they also know any client can complain against them for conversion practices. Having a complaint against you is sky high anxiety and people will do anything to avoid it. There is always the threat of being found to have failed to meet the rules, loss of reputation, loss of contracts, loss of income, and loss of standing among peers… and then there is the pain of being investigated. When regulatory boards and professional associations are prescribing gender identity affirmation as required practice you find yourself with no support… Despite the law, regulatory and professional association policy in effect outweighs the CPP Act.

What if psychiatrists have been muzzled?

• As described in Gender Clinic News:

A group of 13 psychiatrists claims that “punitive action” by the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP) against critics of the puberty blocker-driven, gender-affirming treatment model is “unprecedented”.

What if dangerous medical practices have been normalised?

• As described at a recent London conference:

Transgender surgery is like the abandoned practice of frontal lobotomy, according to prominent US plastic surgeon Dr Scot Glasberg.

He suggested the argument for stopping under-19 trans surgery was the same for lobotomies—“there was no evidence to show that [these interventions] were of any benefit, and we were harming people in the process”.

What if parents are being bulldozed?

• As described by a mother who was shut out of her teenage son’s health care:

Just after the first lockdown and with absolutely no warning, my 16 year old son, who is on the spectrum, gifted but socially inept, announced that he was trans. It was a huge shock to me. I had never seen any sign that he might be questioning his gender, although looking back as I learned more I realised that during covid he had spent a huge amount of time online and had probably been influenced.

I consulted his doctor. Instead of supporting me, he advised us to go to a gender clinic. I felt very excluded as a mother because he was now 16 and I was no longer entitled to know anything about his health. But I went along with what I was told - ‘better a live daughter than a dead son etc’. After two short appointments at the clinic, where he was immediately affirmed, we were sent to the fertility clinic to store his sperm and he began puberty blockers. He became quite antagonistic towards me, and two years later, when he went to college, he cut me out of his life completely. I believe he is probably on cross sex hormones but I don’t know where he is or what he is doing. He doesn’t answer emails, phone calls, letters. My heart is broken. I live in hope that one day this harmful gender ideology will go the way of eugenics and lobotomies.

Intimidation silences the critics and silence smothers the questions.

Instead of having open debate about everything to do with the effect transgender ideology has on children, accusations of hatred, bigotry, and ‘transphobia’ are routinely employed to make people reluctant to ask questions in public and even to be circumspect about what they say in private.

Those who claim that transitioning children is a private matter, best left to the experts, are grossly out of touch.

When children are being sold the lie that they can choose their sex, that is everyone’s business.

By Fern Hickson