How To Make a ‘Trans Kid’
Since adults typically make difficult converts, gender activists are increasingly turning their focus to children.
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Most people understand the terms “man” and “boy” refer to adult and adolescent human males, respectively, and that “woman” and “girl” refer to adult and adolescent human females, respectively. These are not “identities,” but terms that describe objective facts about one’s age and biological sex.
Gender ideology, conversely, is a belief system asserting that what makes someone a woman or a girl, or a man or a boy, has nothing whatsoever to do with their sex, but is based entirely on the social roles and stereotypes with which they “identify.” Therefore, a person who identifies with feminine roles and stereotypes is a girl or woman, and a person who identifies with masculine roles and stereotypes is a boy or man—regardless of their biological sex. According to gender ideology, people who do not identify with the social roles and stereotypes typically associated with their sex are considered “transgender.”
That’s Gender Ideology 101. If it comes across as completely insane, that’s because it is.
Gender ideology has therefore proven to be a hard sell for many adults who rightfully view such ideas as regressive and sexist. After all, this worldview entails that a woman who does not fully embrace femininity is not actually a woman, and a man who does not embrace masculinity is not actually a man. If this sounds similar to the regressive and oppressive system that women’s and other human rights groups fought for decades to overcome, that’s because it is. But it’s actually much worse, since it also promotes the idea that a “mismatch” between one’s sex and “gender identity” can be medically “corrected” with hormones and surgeries.
Since adults typically make difficult converts, as any religious proselytizer will tell you, gender activists are increasingly turning their focus to children, and one of the most common ways they go about indoctrinating youngsters into gender ideology is through normalizing the “inclusive” practice of sharing pronouns. Being asked “what are your pronouns?” is often the first encounter a child will have with gender ideology, and it is therefore a common first step in creating so-called “trans kids.”
This is effective because asking a child about their pronouns mentally separates the terms “he/him” (as referring to men and boys) and “she/her” (as referring to girls and women) from one’s biological sex and instead roots it in “gender identity.” This question causes a child think hard about their own “gender identity,” a novel concept to them which will inevitably be based on masculine and feminine stereotypes they associate with males and females, respectively.
The Genderbread Person is a common educational tool for teaching children about gender identity, which it defines confusingly as “how you, in your head, experience and define your gender, based on how much you align (or don’t align) with what you understand the options for gender to be.” And in case the reliance on sex-based stereotypes wasn’t explicit enough, it depicts “Gender Identity” below the illustration as degrees of “woman-ness” and “man-ness,” and lists “personality traits, jobs, hobbies, likes, dislikes, roles, expectations” as its components.
Another common avenue for child indoctrination into gender ideology is through popular children’s books like I Am Jazz, which tells the story of Jazz Jennings, a young boy who is described in the book as being “different from other kids” because “she had a girl’s brain in a boy’s body.” Other more recent books such as Call Me Max and Jack (Not Jackie) touch on similar themes, but are about young girls who believe they’re boys because they exhibit behavior and preferences more typical of boys. Many parents have reported that their young children expressed confusion about their “gender identity” after being introduced to these books.
When introduced to these concepts, whether through books or probing questions about their pronouns, gender nonconforming children, who are more likely to grow up to be gay and lesbian adults, as well as kids who don’t view themselves as paragons of masculinity or femininity, will then come to believe they're “trans” or “nonbinary,” or they’ll be extremely confused. This confusion can cause considerable distress because it overturns their prior (sane) notion that their sex made them a boy or girl. But now they’re being told their body and mind may not be “aligned” but can be made to align with hormones and surgeries.
Their teachers, with or without their parents’ knowledge or consent, may begin to socially transition them by using gender neutral “they/them” or opposite-sex pronouns. Many schools now explicitly require this. While social transitions are often presented a risk-free way to let children explore their “gender” without permanent interventions like hormones and surgeries, it is in reality a serious psychosocial intervention known to cause children to persist in rejecting their bodies. But parents are not told this.
A child’s parents will likely be very concerned at this point, having heard the widely perpetuated myth that gender-confused children are at extreme risk for suicide. And since puberty is rapidly approaching for their child, there is no time to waste in getting their child the care they need. Being the loving parents that they are, they rush their child to see a professional “gender-affirming” therapist. Because the child is showing confusion regarding their “gender identity,” the therapist is likely to recommend puberty blockers, which they will portray as a “safe” and “fully reversible” option to “pause” puberty and give the child more time to resolve their gender confusion.
What’s the harm?
The harm is that, far from being a hormonal “stop sign” that allows time for deep gender introspection, studies show that nearly 100 percent of children who are put on puberty blockers persist in rejecting their bodies and continue on to cross-sex hormones, which will cause permanent physical changes and render them sterile. Some of those children will then pursue risky and irreversible “gender-affirming” surgeries. These children’s bodies are now permanently disfigured, and their endocrine systems fully dependent on the medical establishment for the rest of their lives.
Looking back, the child’s dysphoria that initiated this morbid cascade of events was not inevitable—it was conjured into existence by a radical ideology that wedged itself into the child’s mind by the simple act of giving them a book or asking about their pronouns, and the social transition and puberty blockers cemented it.
This is how you turn normal children into “trans kids.” Simply put, this is conversion therapy for gender nonconforming kids, except that it’s now bodies instead of minds that are being converted to bring children into “proper” alignment with themselves.
This trajectory for children is becoming increasingly common as gender ideology becomes further entrenched in our educational institutions. At this point it’s not about whether your children will encounter these ideas, it’s when. As a parent, it is therefore important to inoculate your children against these pernicious ideas before activist educators get to them. When you see these materials in your child’s school, you need to raise hell. Your children will thank you for it later.
Great article, thanks! The hyperlink to the Sapir article about the myth of suicide is excellent. As that threat drives so much fear, it's important for parents to dive deeper. Here's another article detailing the issues with the studies of suicidality with gender distressed kids to date: https://can-sg.org/frequently-asked-questions/are-children-and-young-people-with-gender-dysphoria-at-higher-risk-of-suicide/
More on the many dangers of social transition from Stats for Gender, a sister site to Genspect: https://www.statsforgender.org/social-transition/
Young kids are so easily led astray. A few days before I started kindergarten back in the 1950s, my parents told me the name on my birth certificate was actually Renee and asked whether I wanted to be known by that name at school. I'd never heard the name Renee before. And because it was so new, I said "yes" without ever thinking of what it would be like to be called "Renee" by everyone at school.
Long story short, it was the worst decision of my young life. I grew to hate, and I mean hate, being called Renee. Just before I entered first grade, I had my parents change my school name back to Nancy, the name I had always been called at home. But some kids continued to call me Renee all through elementary school, sometimes just to annoy me.
But that was just my name, not my sex. So I can only begin to imagine how embarrassing and humiliating it would be for a child to come to his or her senses and have to publicly detransition back to their real sex.