Conservatives are rallying careful scientists and concerned parents to push back against the pharma-funded transgender ideology which insists that the government should help children who want to change their sex via drugs, sterilization, castration and lifelong medical treatment.

The children-choose-their-sex claim was strongly pushed throughout 2016 by former President Barack Obama, who later admitted that the unpopular claim had undermined Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

President Donald Trump has pushed the gender ideology back, but progressives are still pushing it into schools and workplaces, into civic society, media, and law. That biology-does-not-matter campaign is being supported by judges and by many activists and medical professionals who are directly or indirectly funded by pharmaceutical companies and by wealthy transgender activists.

The Heritage Foundation hosted an October 11 event with three medical professionals to talk about the transgender ideology and the reality that the two sexes are equal, different and complementary. The three doctors were assembled by Heritage’s Ryan Anderson, the senior fellow in American Principles and Public Policy, who invited them to answer a pro-transgender challenge from Zack Ford, the LGBT Editor for ThinkProgress.org.

The three respondents were Michelle Cretella, M.D., the president of the American College of Pediatricians, Paul Hruz, M.D., Ph.D., an associate professor of Pediatrics, Endocrinology, Cell Biology and Physiology at Washington University’s medical center, and Allan Josephson, M.D., a professor and division chief of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Louisville.

Cretella answered:

Chemical castration, which is what you’re doing when you put any biologically normal child on puberty blockers [drugs], is treating puberty like a disease, [is] arresting a normal process which is critical to normal development and bad for kids. Sterilization? Not good for kids. Prepping them for what will likely be a result in [the] case of girls, double mastectomy at 16? Not how you treat depression or anxiety and I have plenty of experience treating teenagers with depression and anxiety, even suicidal depression. Indoctrinating pre-school kids with the lie that you can be trapped in the wrong body? Again, that is just disrupting their normal reality testing and cognitive development. Those things are abusive.

The transgender ideology says that a person’s legal sex should be determined by their self-declared “gender identity,” not by their male or female body. The ideology also says the federal government should force Americans to accept the “gender identity” claims made by each person, regardless of scientific data about genetics, biology and the variety of normal behavior and appearances shown by normal equal-and-complementary women and men.

In February 2017, Heritage hosted a group of left-wing activists and conservatives to talk about the civic impact of the transgender ideology.

Polls show that strong majority of ordinary Americans oppose the progressive claim that unverifiable “gender” is more important than a person’s sex. Polls also show that Americans want sexual privacy in bathrooms and shower rooms and especially in K-12 schools. Also, the polls show that most Americans want to be polite and helpful to the very few transsexual people who wish to live as members of the other sex. According to one study of the 2010 census, the population of transgender people amounts to one in every 2,400 Americans, or 0.03 percent of the adult population.

The fight over the Pentagon’s policy is important because a Pentagon approval of the pro-transgender ideology would help transgender activists pressure judges and swing-voting legislators to impose the transgender rules on Americans’ civic groups, such as schools, universities, and workplaces.

The progressive push to bend Americans’ attitudes and their two-sexes, male and female, civic society around the idea of “gender” has already attacked and cracked popular social rules for how Americans handle the many social preferences of equal, different and complementary men and women, boys and girls. For example, the gender claims shifted rules or practices about different-sex bathrooms, shelters for battered women, sports leagues for girls, hiking groups for boys, K-12 curricula, university speech codes, religious freedoms, free speech, the social status of women, parents’ rights in childrearing, practices to help teenagers, women’s expectations of beauty, culture and civic society, scientific research, prison safety, civic ceremonies, school rules, men’s sense of masculinity, law enforcement, and children’s sexual privacy.

To read more about the scale and impact of the transgender ideology, click here.