Schools across the country and around the world have started embracing the idea that boys who identify as girls and girls who identify as boys should be confirmed in those mistaken identities and even put on hormonal or surgical “treatments” to “affirm” them. Medical organizations and governments are endorsing this crackpot approach, and working hard to silence dissent. Dr. Michelle Cretella, executive director of the American College of Pediatricians, explained why.
“It’s like they’re accusing us of heresy, it’s an inquisition,” Dr. Cretella told PJ Media in an interview at the Values Voter Summit. “You can’t have debate, scientific debate. No dissent allowed. You either agree with us or you’re a hater, you’re a bigot.” Her own organization has been marked as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and derided by the American Academy of Pediatricians, which promotes transgender identity as healthy.
The pediatrician suggested that transgender ideology is tantamount to a religion that should not be endorsed by the government, much less pushed as unquestionable truth, quashing dissent as “heresy.” This “cult” spreads in various ways, and many of them foster child abuse.
Dr. Cretella discussed a scientific study published in the academic journal PLOS ONE that delves into “rapid onset gender dysphoria.” The researcher, Lisa Littman, studied teenagers who had no gender confusion or gender non-conforming behavior as children, but then suddenly announced to their parents and the world that they were transgender, requesting hormones and surgery.
Littman suggested that this “rapid onset” gender dysphoria (the condition of identifying as a gender opposite your birth sex) could result from a “social or peer contagion.” She explained peer contagion using the example of anorexia. Girls in friend groups will convince one another that they are fat and together they will strategize on starving themselves.
These social networks will praise girls who lose a lot of weight and stigmatize girls who reject anorexia. The situation can get even worse over the Internet, where pro-eating disorder sites will provide motivation for extreme weight loss, called “thinspiration.” Such sites even push the eating disorder as an identity, and strategize on how to deceive parents and doctors to keep losing weight when it isn’t healthy.
Littman’s study found evidence to support the idea that gender dysphoria is indeed a social contagion, and that many friend groups — particularly among teenage girls — will “come out” as transgender together.
“There are pages run by transgender adults and they chat with these troubled teens and talk them into believing that they are transgender,” Cretella explained. “They tell the kids, ‘This is what you tell your parents and the doctor. If your parents question you, they are abusive.'”
The pediatrician compared the spread of transgenderism among teens to other social contagions like suicide and anorexia. “If a child in high school kills himself, everyone understands there has to be emotional support and closure. Without that counseling to help the peers grieve, they may take their own lives as well.”
“I agree with Dr. Littman that what we are seeing is social contagion not dissimilar from the social contagion of suicide,” Dr. Cretella told PJ Media.
She also mentioned anorexia. “There are online chat groups and Facebook groups in which these girls teach each other the tricks to maintain their anorexia so they can hide it from families and friends,” she said. “It’s almost like a cult.”
“I think the whole movement is a religious conversion — it’s a conversion away from Christianity back to pagan Gnostic dualism,” Dr. Cretella told PJ Media.
In the early centuries after Jesus Christ, Christianity struggled with a heresy known as Gnosticism. This cult suggested that each person consisted of a bad body and a good spirit. The purpose of religion was to restrain the body and purify the spirit.
In transgender ideology, the gender identity is the true part of a person, overriding his or her biological sex. If a biological male identifies as a woman, he should “transition.” Because the gender identity is more important than the body, he should take hormones to prevent puberty, take hormones to look female, and even cut off his healthy genitals.
None of this is supported by scientific evidence. According to DNA and reproduction, human beings are male or female — or a tragic disorder that renders them infertile. Even so, schools and medical associations have adopted the transgender ideology.
Dr. Cretella told PJ Media that teachers have complained about the curricula schools order them to teach. “We’re being told that we can’t teach that girls have ovaries and boys have testes. We can’t teach that girls make eggs and boys make sperm. We’re supposed to say, ‘Persons with ovaries make eggs and persons with testes make sperm,'” she recalled.
“They are trying to recreate humanity in terms of cis and trans, instead of male and female,” Dr. Cretella explained. This new idea makes “our bodies meaningless. But our bodies mean everything. They tell us who and what we are, scientifically, concretely.”
“In nature, reproduction is the rule. You can tell the abnormality because the function, reproduction, is not served,” the pediatrician explained. For this reason, a “transgender male” cannot be considered a male, because she does not produce sperm. She can get hormones and surgery to look like a male, but she will not be able to carry out reproduction.
Concerned parents and citizens who bring up these points are rejected as hateful. “Parents must support you one hundred percent of the way. You’re not allowed to consider other points of view,” Dr. Cretella said. “Because it’s anti-reality, you need censorship, you need propaganda, and you need severe consequences for those who practice critical thinking.” Hence the need to silence dissent as “heresy.”
“It’s a religion of radical autonomy,” the pediatrician continued. “The transgender movement demands that we place a person’s perceived reality — a person’s belief — ahead of true reality. ‘I am what I think, therefore reality is up for grabs.’ You can’t have a society that way.”
Pointedly, Dr. Cretella asked, “If you were born with anorexia and starved yourself to death, would that be healthy?”
“If my child consistently and persistently insisted that he was a lion tamer, would I be obligated as a good parent to throw him into the lion pen at the zoo?”
In no arena is it considered healthy to indulge a child’s false beliefs — except in the realm of sex. Therein lies the answer to the conundrum of why mainstream schools and medical associations have fallen for this Neo-Gnosticism. “They’ve bought the sexual revolution, hook line and sinker,” Dr. Cretella explained. “They worship sexual autonomy.”
Follow the author of this article on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
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