it’s happening.
Excluding Parents
Examples abound of schools purposefully keeping parents out of the loop when it comes to controversial issues. In Emmaus, Pennsylvania, the student body at Emmaus High School was shown a series of pro-LGBT videos.35 Not only were parents not notified in advance, they weren’t allowed to see the videos after the fact! In California, parents are up against the “Healthy Youth Act,” passed in 2015, with two stated goals. As John Stonestreet writes at Breakpoint.org, the first is to “provide pupils with the knowledge and skills necessary to protect their sexual and reproductive health” from sexually transmitted diseases and unintended pregnancy. The second is “to give students ‘knowledge and skills’ to help them develop ‘healthy attitudes’ concerning ‘body image, gender, sexual orientation, relationships, marriage and family.’”36
The law states that parents may “excuse their child from all or part of comprehensive sexual health education, HIV prevention education.”37 Here’s the kicker: the law also states that parents are not allowed to excuse children from “instruction, materials, presentations, or programming that discuss gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, discrimination … relationships or family.”38 Many parents have missed that caveat, not realizing that they were not allowed to opt out of instruction related to gender ideology and sexual orientation. They made the mistaken assumption that they could opt out of all that’s normally thought of as sex ed. As Stonestreet writes, “[P]arents in California can opt their kids out of the anatomy but not the ideology.”39
No More Dick and Jane
Even for the youngest students, school libraries aren’t what they used to be. By the time our children left elementary school, King and King was one of a couple books about homosexuality on the bookshelves. Aimed at children ages five to eight, according to Amazon, King and King tells the fictional story of a prince who marries a prince. My children could have stumbled across it on their own while visiting the library, or it could have been the librarian’s choice to read aloud one day.
There are now plenty of children’s books aimed at normalizing same-sex households. There’s Daddy, Papa and Me and Mommy, Mama and Me, both for kids three years old and up. King and King now has a sequel — King and King and Family — in which the married kings adopt a little girl while on their honeymoon. You get the idea. It’s quite likely such books are in your children’s elementary school library. There’s also nothing to stop a teacher from choosing such books for story time.
Let’s take a moment to make one thing clear: Christianity is about loving God and loving one’s neighbor. There is no place for bullying, mocking, or ridiculing others for any reason. That said, we are also obligated to live by God’s rules. In the Catholic Church, and in traditional Protestant denominations, the rules about sex and marriage are straightforward: sex is intended exclusively for marriage, and marriage is the union of one man and one woman. There is a counter-moral message in those seemingly sweet books meant, in theory at least, simply to promote tolerance and respect. This morality is not in accord with basic Christian teaching. For traditional Christians, exposing young children to such books undermines both religious and parental authority.
The same can be said for the new crop of children’s books on the topic of transgenderism. “Dyson loves pink, sparkly things. Sometimes he wears dresses,” is part of the Amazon description of My Princess Boy, written for children ages four through eight. There’s also I Am Jazz, the true story of Jazz Jennings who “from the time she was two years old … knew that she had a girl’s brain in a boy’s body.”40 It’s also intended for children starting at four years old. Introducing Teddy, for children ages three through six, is about a teddy bear named Thomas who reveals to his friend that he’s really Tilly.
Much as LGBTQ activists and progressive educators would have us believe such books are aimed at helping children who are struggling with gender identity issues, for many parents — including Christians — it’s more complicated than that. First there’s the question of introducing the very idea to children. Dr. Michelle Cretella is a pediatrician, a Catholic mother of four, and president of the American College of Pediatricians. In an interview with me for National Catholic Register, she discussed the consequences of introducing the concept of transgenderism to young kids:
Most parents with little children are going to be confronted by this at some point, whether it’s in their public libraries, preschool or K-12 schools, just by virtue of the books that could be read to them. What is dangerous is that these young children are just developing the awareness of the fact that they are a boy or a girl. It’s not until age seven that most realize that is who they are and that sex doesn’t change. … Children will come to believe that their sex is whatever they think they want it to be. This is dangerous from a psychological point of view. It’s disrupting the natural process of gender identity formation.41
Dr. Cretella told me that it’s important that both parents and children understand that it’s our genes, our DNA, that determine our sex. Biological sex can’t be changed; it’s hardwired. Gender identity is what we feel and how we think about our biological sex. That, she says, is not hardwired. And around the age of seven, the idea of the permanence of biological sex is formed in a child’s cognitive development.
Thus, reading children books that say people can be whatever sex and gender they choose is encouraging a lie. And if this is reinforced by parents and medical professionals who “affirm” a child’s gender confusion, says Cretella, “the child will eventually be put on hormones that make him or her sterile, that harm bones, harm brain development, and increase the risk for stroke, diabetes and cancer over his lifetime.”
There are critics who think the traditional Christian point of view is intolerant and unsympathetic. The truth is, we can have sympathy for people — children and adults — who suffer from gender dysphoria without tolerating educators teaching our children falsehoods.
Transgender Truths
Dr. Paul McHugh is the University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical School and former psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Writing for The Public Discourse, McHugh cites a thirty-year follow-up study of sex-reassigned individuals in Sweden where, he points out, the culture is “strongly supportive of the transgendered.”42 The study found evidence of “lifelong mental unrest,” and suicide rates up to twenty times higher than for comparable peers. In other words, sex reassignment wasn’t an answer. “The treatment should strive to correct the false, problematic nature of the assumption and to resolve the psychosocial conflicts provoking it. With youngsters, this is best done in family therapy,” according to McHugh.
Walt Heyer has written extensively about transgenderism from a unique point of view: he used to be transgender. He agrees with McHugh that children who want to switch genders need intervention, not encouragement. Writing for The Daily Signal, Heyer says that by the age of four he wanted to be a girl.43 He sought help from a gender specialist who told him the only way he’d find relief was by having gender reassignment surgery. And that’s what he did at the age of forty-two, living as Laura Jensen for eight years. “While studying psychology in a university program, I discovered that trans kids most often are suffering from a variety of disorders, starting with depression — the result of personal loss, broken families, sexual abuse, and unstable homes,” Heyer writes. “Deep depression leads kids to want to be someone other than who they are.” This resonated with Heyer. “Finally, I had discovered the madness of the transgender life. It is a fabrication born of mental disorders. I only wish that when I went to the gender counselor for help he would have told me I couldn’t really change genders, that it is biologically impossible.”
Gender Ideology in Schools
Parents at the Nova Classical Academy, a charter school in Minnesota, were confronted with the issue of transgenderism when