Now we’re in a calamity with tens of thousands of children proclaiming an identity other than being male or female, demanding hormones, demanding their puberties be stopped, and asking for mastectomies and genital surgeries. Finally, people are taking notice, but it’s important for parents to understand how long this has been around and where the ideas came from. I spell all of that out in the book.
Essentially, people with gender dysphoria, and I’m going to oversimplify here, fall into two categories. The first category were mostly boys that were preschoolers or pre-puberty. The poster child for childhood onset gender dysphoria is Jazz Jennings. He went to his parents when he was two or three years old, already insisting that he was a girl, or that he had to become a girl, because he felt so uncomfortable with his body. That is classic childhood onset gender dysphoria.
We know from the studies done on these children, again mostly boys, over the decades that these cases have been rare. So rare in fact, that 20 years ago the entire world had only three clinics that helped children with gender dysphoria: Toronto, London, and Amsterdam. They didn’t see a lot of these cases, maybe 18 to 20 children a year.
We know that with the vast majority of these kids, we can adopt a watchful waiting approach. Watchful waiting means giving them support with their feelings, family support, and perhaps allowing certain behaviors or ways of dressing. But you don’t socially transition them the way we’re doing now. Between 60 and 90 percent of these kids will outgrow their gender dysphoria. A lot of them become gay and lesbian, but they’re comfortable with their bodies.
The other group with gender dysphoria are middle-aged heterosexual men who enjoy cross-dressing and wearing women’s clothing. Typically, after being married and having children, they decide they want to go through the remainder of their lives presenting as women. They sometimes go through medical transitioning to appear more like women. So two unique groups with different demographics.
We now have this third group we’ve never seen before, an explosion of gender dysphoria in teenage girls. It’s a majority of girls, and affects a lot of boys as well. But what’s new here is the demographic. They’re teenagers, and most of them never had any issue with being a girl in the past. In fact, some might have been very girly girls.
What we know about this group is that they have a lot of previous psychiatric conditions. A lot of them are on the autism spectrum. They have anxiety, depression, ADHD [Attention Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder], family issues, a history of trauma, and all sorts of things. We also know that before they come out as being transgender, they’ve spent an inordinate amount of time online exposed to these ideas through social media and influencers.
YouTube has hundreds if not thousands of kids who document their transitioning. They will say, “I’ve been on testosterone now for two weeks. My voice is starting to go.” Many kids are bingeing on these videos and getting drawn into them.
What these kids really need is psychotherapy. They need to look at their lives deeply with somebody who has experience, compassion, and understanding. They need someone who will help them explore where this new identity came from.
Yet we’re told certain things by the crusaders, the ideologues. I don’t use that word crusader flippantly. This movement seeks to impose a certain way of thinking on us and especially on our children. They propose giving girls testosterone at levels they would never experience, unless they had some sort of an endocrine tumor, and giving boys harmful levels of estrogen. There’s a whole laundry list of medical issues.
Some of these kids then go on to have healthy organs removed. They end up disfigured and even sterilized. This is all couched in the language of compassion and packaged within civil rights, “We have to be kind, we have to be inclusive.” Of course, we have to be kind and inclusive. No one is saying we shouldn’t be.
What people like me are arguing is that we should honor every person’s mosaic of male and female without harming their body. We should not be touching these kids’ bodies with experimental medical interventions.
In my book I call it an assembly line because once kids are put on this path, almost all of them on blockers go further down the path to cross-sex hormones. They’re not just buying time, and they’re not changing their minds. For the ones that change their minds, it happens later.
As most of your viewers know, sex is established at conception. There’s no assigning anything at birth. The egg unites with a sperm. In 99.98 percent of cases, you have either a boy or a girl at conception. That condition is permanent. This is biological reality. When you take that 10-year-old boy and you comply with his request to be considered a girl, and you are following the directions of all the medical organizations, let’s just call it what it is—you are enforcing a falsehood. He is not a girl and can never be a girl.
Is there some opposition to these transitions? Clearly. For example, the American Academy of Pediatrics has now announced they are going to review their policy they came out with in 2018.
And that term top surgery is particularly offensive as it leads young girls to believe that it’s not a big deal. They are led to believe that breasts are unnecessary sex objects. You’re not a girl, and you’re not a woman, so you don’t need these objects on your chest.
This is happening in girls as young as age 12. In the book I talk about the surgeons who openly say, “I have no lower age requirement in my office.” These surgeons presumably are getting informed consent from the girls and from their guardian who also has to sign if they’re underage. One question I’m asking in the book is, “What kind of informed consent could this possibly be?” To get a valid informed consent, the person has to understand exactly what is going happen in this procedure, including the long-term consequences.
In order to be truly informed, girls need to be educated about what these organs actually do. Nursing, for instance, is an incredible experience, both for the mother and the infant. There is bonding going on. There are pheromones being shared. Oxytocin, the trust hormone and the bonding hormone, is being released in the mother and the child. It’s wonderfully complex and awesome. I call it an ecosystem.
And so many parents contact me who are desperate. Just a few days ago, I got an emergency email from a mom, and she was begging me, “Here’s the phone number of the surgeon. Please call him. I’ll pay you whatever you want. I know you can do this. Dr. Grossman, please convince him not to operate on my daughter.” Of course, there was nothing I could do. I can’t pick up a phone and call a surgeon and tell him not to operate.
What I can do is talk about what’s going on. I can warn parents about this. My book is written for everyday moms and dads to understand the landscape. Where did this come from? What can I do now to inoculate my kids against this ideology?
What I want parents to know is that there’s so much that they can do when their kids are still young. I’ll go through a few of these things, but there’s a lot more in the book. First of all, they can expose their child to biological truths. For example, you have a daughter, and you want your daughter to know that from the very moment she was formed on this Earth, she was a girl and that from that moment forward she will always be a girl.
There is no assigning of gender going on in the delivery room. If your daughter already knows that she was a girl from the first moment of her existence, and has heard this many times from you, when she’s first exposed to that phrase, assigned female at birth [AFAB], your child will say, “I wasn’t assigned. I was a girl and I’ll always be a girl.”
You want to explain that we all have DNA in each cell. It doesn’t have to be sophisticated. You can just say it’s like the control center, like a computer that has a certain program. Our DNA is that program. I want kids to understand that every part of their system, their heart, their lungs, and certainly their brain are all impacted by whether they have two X’s or an XY.
One of the other things that parents can do is plant seeds in the child’s head that there are different ways of being men and women, and that we never want to harm our bodies in any way in order to appear more male or female. We do not want to play around with medicines and surgeries that are invasive and aren’t good for us.
I do want to add that there are extremely rare individuals for whom living life as the opposite sex and going through these medical procedures may indeed be the right thing, who claim that it was lifesaving to have the surgeries and the cross-sex hormones. The thing is, we don’t have any evidence that these are the majority of people who go through medicalization, nor can we predict who is going to end up content and who is not.
Even if your child is only entering kindergarten, you want the school to know that you do not want that child exposed to gender ideology. You want to know beforehand about any instance in which this is going to be taught. You don’t want your child attending that class. You don’t want your child joining any club at school where these things are discussed. You do not give your permission for your child to meet with the guidance counselor without your knowledge, or with any other third party without your knowledge. And you certainly don’t give permission to the school to socially transition your child, meaning to use a new name and pronouns.
I want parents to understand how language and biology are being co-opted and twisted for this agenda. In the book I list current key articles on this topic so that if you have an appointment with your principal, guidance counselor, therapist, or pediatrician, you can say to them, “I’ve done a lot of research. Here are some articles by leaders in the field on the other side of the gender-affirming care debate. Please, take a look at these and then we can talk about it some more.”
While I was writing this book, I decided to make use of all my connections with parents. I did an international survey asking parents that have or have had a gender distressed child questions like: “What do you wish that you had known or done before your child came to you with the announcement? What information would you want to share with other families?”
About 500 parents in 17 different countries responded. There’s an appendix to the book where I gathered this valuable input. It’s parent-to-parent advice from those who have already gone through it.
On the other side, you say, “I’m not going to give you what you want right now. I’m not calling you by a different name or different pronouns, and I’m not making an appointment at a gender clinic to get puberty blockers. I am not doing that right now.”
You’re balancing those two things. The advice I give to parents is that basically your child needs you. It may not seem that way, but please remember that your child needs you and wants your approval. This is a difficult conversation for your child as well. You want this to be a time that your child walks away from the conversation feeling, “Well, they didn’t agree with me. They’re not giving me what I want right now, but they also didn’t reject me. They want to understand and learn more.” You’ve got to stay in control. You won’t always agree, but you want to hold onto them. In my book I provide a model conversation if this happens, something to strive toward, a basic guideline for those first few conversations.
