Peak trans (n.): The epiphany experienced by many formerly supportive “allies” upon realizing that the transgender phenomenon is not what we once thought it was.

I have reached this peak so many times I now wear a mental oxygen mask so that I may continue to scale its dizzying heights. But this little news item in the UK Daily Mail had me gasping for breath nevertheless.

Children as young as three-years-old should be taught about transgender issues using story books about penguins, MPs have been told. A charity which works with transgender children say the number of youngsters wanting to change gender is ‘increasingly rapidly’. The organisation wants nursery and infant school children to read the Penguin Land stories, which introduce young children to gender identity issues.

Because, you see, the British school system has so far been doing it all wrong.

The Gender Identity Research and Education Society (GIRES) has accused the Department for Education of failing to take the lead on the issue.

[Update: Please see this informative comment by atranswidow for more in-depth information about GIRES.]

What would “the lead” be?

Sexing baby birds is hard. But sexing humans used to be so easy anyone could do it–even Mum or Dad! Not anymore.

Notice the emphasis on “love you just the same” in both of these pages from the storybook. Of course, 3-year-olds need to know they are loved by their parents. The implication is that parents who don’t fall in line with their preschooler’s claim to be the opposite sex don’t love their child. Notice also that there is no attempt to support parents who might celebrate their child being “gender nonconforming.” No, this is about assigning the child as a boy or a girl according to the offspring’s childish convictions.

The family’s only job is to “listen” to the child. Otherwise, they are “wrong.” The child needn’t “listen” to the doubts, guidance, or advice of the parents.

And there is only one way to have a happy ending to this story…

Of course, this is a children’s book so we can’t be emotionally blackmailing Mum and Dad by including a picture showing the grim alternate family event that will likely occur (hint: everyone will be wearing black and there will be no balloons) should they NOT change Polly’s name to Tom. But you can be sure GIRES and other “charities for transgender children” will deliver that message to parents one way or the other. Won’t be too difficult with the lapdog media ever ready to comply.

In evidence to the Common’s Women and Equalities Committee, it said: ‘The numbers of very young children transitioning in primary school are increasing rapidly, so information and reassurance needs to be given at the earliest stage… A report earlier this year stated that the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, the UK’s only centre specialising in gender issues in under 18s, has seen a four-fold increase in referrals in the last six years. In 2014-15, 47 children referred to the unit were aged five or younger and two of the children were three years old.

But the Mail won’t be looking into exactly WHY there has been this rapid increase in children “transitioning,” now will it? Especially since “news” stories exactly like this very one might be helping to fuel this four-fold increase in parents seeking “treatment” for their “transgender” kids?

Funny, isn’t it, how the pediatric medical literature from bygone days isn’t simply overflowing with accounts of young children desperate–desperate!!– to transition to the opposite sex, just waiting for modern science to catch up with all these melancholy preschoolers. Back in the 1970s, those poor “transgender children” had to assuage their dysphoric misery by playing with unisex Legos:

Isn’t it great that today we’ve got it sorted: proper pink and blue Legos so the little ones can make it clear to Mum and Dad exactly which gender they actually are!





Daily Mail, the heavy gendering of modern day toys couldn’t have anything at all to do with this trans kid trend, could it? Of course not. As a GIRES representative admonishes us,

‘Our statutory guidance is clear that young people, whatever their developing sexuality, need to feel that sex and relationships education is relevant to them and sensitive to their needs.

So 3-year-olds need to be concerned about their “developing sexuality” and “sex and relationships.” Got it. When my kid was 3, she would have been a lot more worried about the well-being of her imaginary and gender-fluid dog and cat friends, but I guess times have changed.

In its evidence, GIRES also urged the DfE to press for schools and exam boards to co-operate in registering children ‘in the name that accords with their gender identity’. It added: ‘Schools should be advised that requesting a GRC [gender recognition certificate], as some do, is entirely inappropriate.’

So if little Jimmy comes to kindergarten insisting he’s Janie, and Polly is now Tommy, the authorities must change these children’s school registration papers to the gender these kids proclaim they are.

Can you say “indoctrination”?

We now have “charities” working with “transgender children” instructing legislators in a major Western democracy to toe the transgender line. What could possibly go wrong?

Now I have truly seen it all. And the little preschoolers who say they’re the opposite sex will be applauded for their “bravery,” while any doubting parents will be considered transphobic or, at best, woefully out of step.

Sometimes I think the only explanation for what has happened in the last decade is a poisoned water supply. How else to explain the utter extinction of critical thought amongst parents, medical professionals, journalists, and now, apparently, legislatures and school systems worldwide?

Not long ago, I took a relatively benign view of what is known as “social transition,” which is exactly what GIRES is pushing. My main bailiwick was medical transition: hormones and surgeries. What’s the harm in using a child’s “preferred pronouns?” What’s wrong with agreeing with a preteen insisting they are actually the opposite sex? Little children insisting they are the opposite sex should be validated–even on official school documents. Why not? In fact, if we take this far enough (as trans activists now have), we can all agree that medical transition isn’t even necessary. A penis can be female. A man can get pregnant. Voila! No surgeon or endocrinologist needed.

But I no longer take comfort in the notion that everything short of medical transition is an acceptable compromise. Such thinking has led (to take but one of many examples) to a teenage boy, only recently deciding he is a girl, to insist he be allowed to use the girls’ locker room, even while flouncing around in a dress and no underwear so that his penis is clearly visible. “Lila” Perry has become a media cause celebre, while over 200 of his female classmates, who have, after all, known him for years, are denounced as bigots. This same warped thinking has led to a feminist event at the University of Auckland, NZ being shut down because it was to include a lighthearted cupcake exhibition which dared to celebrate female genitalia.

How can anyone with a working brain not see this for what it is? The dots are so easy to connect. The increasingly gendered stereotyping of kids’ toys and activities; the societal collusion in childhood magical thinking; the redefinition of biological reality, in which a girl can have a penis or a boy a vagina; the denial of sexual dimorphism, possibly leading eventually to major repeated surgeries, lifelong treatment with opposite sex hormones that were never meant for that body; and frequently, sterility. It’s a conveyor belt started up in toddlerhood, leading inexorably to enrichment of medical providers, families wrenched apart, and the McCarthyite silencing and shaming of anyone who disagrees.

There is nothing revolutionary, cutting edge, or “progressive” about any of this. The truly brave and open-minded position a parent could take in 2015 is a loving but firm stand: No, you are not the opposite sex. No, your penis is not female. But you can dress however you like, you can grow up to pursue any job you like, and there is no such thing as boy or girl clothing or pursuits. If you feel like or long to be the opposite sex, it just means that you are a wonderful and unusual example of the sex you actually are. I celebrate you in all your uniqueness, and together we will show the world just how expansive the definition of a boy or girl truly can be.

That is true gender fluidity. That is true gender expansion. And in today’s upside down world, that is good parenting.

Sadly, such reasonable parenting is not only not supported anymore. It is on the point of being outlawed, particularly in leftist circles. Make no mistake, what we have is a gathering storm, with no end in sight. The incredibly successful co-optation of the LGB movement to unquestioningly accept the inclusion of T has resulted in liberals and progressives disowning their own common sense and ability to think and act critically.

The transgender phenomenon is a peculiar mix of anti- and pro-science aspects. On the one hand, it heavily embraces advances in plastic surgery and pharmaceutical interventions, piggybacking on the extreme body modifications that are increasingly the norm in Western societies. Trans activists and “gender specialists,” lacking rigorous research to support their claims, cherry pick brain studies to prove there is such a thing as male or female brain, and that it is therefore the “wrong” body that must be modified to match a brain that has convinced itself it has a specific “gender.”

On the anti-science hand, trans activists and specialists eschew the most basic and long-settled scientific realities, as well as more contemporary discoveries. Feelings and “personal identity” trump any evidence to the contrary. Insights from decades of biology and genetics are ignored, as are the more recent findings in neuroscience and adolescent brain development. Amongst biologists, sexual dimorphism is not a controversial concept in regards to any other member of the animal kingdom. But according to transition promoters, humans should be granted an exception, based purely on professed feelings and ideas.

Similarly, the now well understood late-maturation of human executive function is ignored by the transgender movement. In recognition of the fact that young people are ill equipped to make major decisions or handle dangerous situations, driver education and licensing requirements for teenage drivers have been tightened. The drinking age was increased to 21 in the United States some 30 years ago. For all other feelings or convictions fervently held by young people, mental health professionals serving teens understand that adolescents change their minds, often more than once. They are impulsive. They are unaware of future consequences. And psychologists who take care of younger, primary school children? In any other arena apart from “gender identity,” psychologists recognize that fantasy and reality are blurred in the mental life of young kids. This aspect of child development is as well understood as gravity, or the fact that the Earth is round and revolves around the sun.

Lifelong neuroplasticity–the ability of the human brain to dramatically change in response to experience and circumstances–is one of the most groundbreaking discoveries of the 20th century. But this insight is shunted aside in the rush to legitimize childhood transgenderism. Multiple, replicated fMRI and behavioral studies have shown that the brain rewires in response to experience and repeated activity. And the inherent plasticity of a young brain has actually been understood for many decades. It’s why young brains recover from trauma more quickly and more completely.

How can anyone think that a little child, toying with identity, insisting that they are the opposite sex, subsequently obliged and coddled in this delusion, then “socially transitioned” for 10 years, will not be changed and in fact molded by that experience? How can anyone think such a child would then blithely drop the puberty blockers and revert back to their natal sex? “Social transition” is not some sort of benign trying-it-out period. The entire society–the family, the school, the doctor–in fact, all the adults in the life of a child (who in earlier times would’ve been looking for guidance from those adults, not the other way around) have conditioned that child.

How insane is it that it has become politically incorrect and even illegal in some places to simply encourage a child to accept and embrace the actual biological sex that they are? Why has it become forbidden to guide a child to realize they might be an exceptional and unusual example of their biological sex? To celebrate that; to encourage it. And further, to bravely help a society that has locked itself into gender stereotypes to also accept and celebrate such variations from the norm?

The claim that transgenderism is about breaking gender stereotypes is the most Orwellian, the most insidious, co-optation that has been accomplished by transgender proponents. Not only have they successfully shut down critical thought by convincing the public that the transgender trend is equivalent to the gay and lesbian liberation movement. (Never mind that being sexually attracted to the same sex does not entail divorcing oneself from biological reality.) Using such terms as “gender fluid” and “genderqueer,” they have falsely assumed the mantle of the open-minded, of those who are expanding gender roles. True gender fluidity is a child or a teen or an adult living and looking the way they feel comfortable, denying the labels, denying the stereotypes, refusing to accept restrictions on what a woman or man can be.

The way things are going, a parent who encourages such actual gender fluidity, without facilitating social or medical transition, may soon risk having their child taken away by authorities in the not-too-distant future.

The only way–the only way a change will take place is for parents and other adults to speak out before it’s too late. This juggernaut is moving quickly.

As a society–and more specifically, as people who purport to believe in human liberation and progress–we have lost our way. It is incumbent upon those of us who have come to this realization to speak out in whatever way we can. It will not be the first time in human history that a medical or cultural trend has been fully embraced, later to be discarded.

Those in the transgender community who insist that critics like me are on the wrong side of history have it exactly backwards. A social trend that results in the sterilization of children, in the tightening of gender-restrictive stereotypes, in the alienation of children from their families, is not the stuff of progress. It is a deeply regressive phenomenon that is going to require all hands on deck to reverse.

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