Australian officials have confirmed that a 4-year-old child is going through a sex-change procedure despite the warning last month by the American College of Pediatrics that even treatments, much less surgical intervention, can cause sterility and are based on "unscientific gender ideology" that violate "the long-standing ethical principle of 'First do no harm.'"

The Australian case was profiled by Yahoo7 News, which said the child is the "youngest on Australian record to change their gender."

But the report said the New South Wales provincial government admitted hundreds of other children are being "referred to the state's hospitals for gender dysphoria."

Deputy Secretary of School Operations Gregory Prior said there were a number of students in his area with similar "circumstances."

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"Without breaching privacy," he told the news organization, "we have a 4-year-old who is transitioning to kindergarten next year who has identified as transgender."

He said the "Safe Schools" program is being used to "support that family, student and school."

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But no other details were revealed about the case, including the child's birth gender, the report said.

In the United Kingdom, the London Daily Mail reported last December, up to 80 children as young as 4 years old are now trying to change their gender.

The statistic came from the activist group called Mermaids, which "supports families with transgender children."

The organization claimed 1 percent of the population is transgender there.

In the United States, The New York Times said a report by the Williams Institute, which works on "law and policy issues" regarding sexual orientation and gender identity, claimed there are about 1.4 million adults who identify as transgender, about 0.6 percent of the adult population.

U.S. figures for children do not exist

The report noted that a comparable estimate for transgender youth in the United States "does not yet exist."

But many of those who treat gender dysphoria have expressed reluctance to treat people younger than 16 or 18, especially with those "nonreversible" surgical procedures.

Most treatments come in the form of chemicals that block gender development while a person sorts out their gender identity.

A new study last month by two of the top experts in the field at Johns Hopkins University concluded there is little scientific evidence for the "born that way" theory."

The authors, Lawrence S. Mayer and Paul McHugh, expressed alarm at the developing trend in the United States of parents declaring their child to be transgendered and subjecting the child to hormone treatments, behavioral adjustments and surgery.

Mayer is a scholar-in-residence in the Department of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University and a professor of statistics and biostatistics at Arizona State University.

McHugh is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and was for 25 years the psychiatrist in chief at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Children who express any identification of the opposite gender almost always leave those expressions behind as they grow, the scholars argue.

"Despite the scientific uncertainty, drastic interventions are prescribed and delivered to patients identifying, or identified, as transgender. This is especially troubling when the patients receiving these interventions are children," the authors wrote in the study, "Sexuality and Gender: Findings from the Biological, Psychological, and Social Sciences," published in The New Atlantis.

"We read popular reports about plans for medical and surgical interventions for many prepubescent children, some as young as six, and other therapeutic approaches undertaken for children as young as two.

'No one can determine gender identity of 2-year-old

"We suggest that no one can determine the gender identity of a 2-year-old. We have reservations about how well scientists understand what it even means for a child to have developed sense of his or her gender, but notwithstanding that issue, we are deeply alarmed that these therapies, treatments, and surgeries seem disproportionate to the severity of the distress being experienced by these young people, and are at any rate premature since the majority of children who identify as the gender opposite their biological sex will not continue to do so as adults," the study said.

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"Moreover, there is a lack of reliable studies on the long-term effects of these interventions. We strongly urge caution in this regard."

See a discussion of the study:

The 143-page report focused on the higher rates of mental health problems, including a stunning 40 percent suicide attempt rate for transgenders.

Both authors looked at hundreds of peer-reviewed studies across fields of epidemiology, genetics, endocrinology, psychiatry, neuroscience, embryology and pediatrics.

They found claims that people are "born that way" are unsupported by science, gender is not necessarily a "fixed human property," "only a minority of children who experience cross-gender identification will continue to do so into adolescence or adulthood" and "non-heterosexual and transgender subpopulations have higher rates of mental health problems (anxiety, depression, suicide), as well as behavioral and social problems (substance abuse, intimate partner violence), compared to the general population."

"This report is about science and medicine, nothing more and nothing less," Mayer wrote in a statement. "Cultural and political trends should not influence the reality of the importance of dealing with these difficult and personal issues. As citizens, scholars, and clinicians concerned with the problems facing LGBT people, we should not be dogmatically committed to any particular views about the nature of sexuality or gender identity; rather, we should be guided first and foremost by the needs of struggling patients, and we should seek with open minds for ways to help them lead meaningful, dignified lives."

The issue has been in American headlines of late, with the Obama administration's redefinition of "sex" in federal law to include "gender identity." He's been insisting that under the law, schools, universities, public building managers and more must allow a man or boy who "identifies" as a woman or girl to use the women's facilities, such as shower facilities.

Pastor Carl Gallups, author of "Be Thou Prepared: Equipping the Church for Persecution and Times of Trouble," immediately responded.

Parents protecting their children

He posted online a “Notice of Compliance Letter" to be used by parents to protect their children who are non-transgender. It has been downloaded thousands of times already.

According to the Obama administration's own "Dear Colleague Letter on Transgender Students," schools have "a responsibility to provide a safe and nondiscriminatory environment for all students, including transgender students."

Furthermore, "harassment that targets a student based on gender identity, transgender status, or gender transition is harassment based on sex, and the departments enforce Title IX accordingly," the Obama administration said.

See the letter that Gallups has proposed.

Gallups simply notes Title IX also applies to non-transgendered children. Therefore, parents can use the letter he has prepared to obtain safe, "harassment free" accommodations for their children. This means they can have individual-use accommodations, without having to be exposed in sensitive situations to people who "identify" as a member of the opposite sex.

It was the American College of Pediatricians that just in August posted online a position paper on "Gender Dysphoria in Children."

"When this occurs in the pre-pubertal child, GD resolves in the vast majority of patients by late adolescence. Currently there is a vigorous, albeit suppressed, debate among physicians, therapists, and academics regarding what is fast becoming the new treatment standard for GD in children. This new paradigm is rooted in the assumption that GD is innate, and involves pubertal suppression with gonadotropin releasing hormone (GnRH) agonists followed by the use of cross-sex hormones – a combination that results in the sterility of minors. A review of the current literature suggests that this protocol is founded upon an unscientific gender ideology, lacks an evidence base, and violates the long-standing ethical principle of 'First do no harm,'" the group said.

The paper pointed out that there are "psychological and cultural characteristics" involved, and also ethical.

'Moral judgment'

"Every therapeutic action or inaction is the result of a moral judgment of some kind that arises from the physician's philosophical worldview. Medicine also does not occur in a political vacuum and being on the wrong side of sexual politics can have severe consequences for individuals who hold the politically incorrect view," the college said.

The paper pointed out that even Dr. Kenneth Zucker, "long acknowledged as a foremost authority on gender identity issues in children, has also been a lifelong advocate for gay and transgender rights."

"However, much to the consternation of adult transgender activists, Zucker believes that gender-dysphoric pre-pubertal children are best served by helping them align their gender identity with their anatomic sex," the pediatricians said.

They noted the development of the movement: "Prior to the 1950s, gender applied only to grammar not to persons. Latin based languages categorize nouns and their modifiers as masculine or feminine and for this reason are still referred to as having a gender. This changed during the 1950s and 1960s as sexologists realized that their sex reassignment agenda could not be sufficiently defended using the words sex and transsexual. From a purely scientific standpoint, human beings possess a biologically determined sex and innate sex differences. No sexologist could actually change a person's genes through hormones and surgery. Sex change is objectively impossible.

"Their solution was to hijack the word gender and infuse it with a new meaning that applied to persons. John Money PhD was among the most prominent of these sexologists who redefined gender to mean 'the social performance indicative of an internal sexed identity.' In essence, these sexologists invented the ideological foundation necessary to justify their treatment of transsexualism with sex reassignment surgery and called it gender. It is this man-made ideology of an 'internal sexed identity' that now dominates mainstream medicine, psychiatry and academia. This linguistic history makes it clear that gender is not and never has been a biological or scientific entity. Rather, gender is a socially and politically constructed concept."

They warn against the influence from "social media sites," because "there are entire peer groups 'coming out' as trans at the same time."

And, they note the American Psychiatric Association's handling, which focuses not on the discrepancy between an individual's thoughts and physical reality but on the "emotional distress" the issue creates, is wrong.

"A girl with anorexia nervosa has the persistent mistaken belief that she is obese; a person with body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) harbors the erroneous conviction that she is ugly; a person with body integrity identity disorder (BIID) identifies as a disabled person and feels trapped in a fully functional body. Individuals with BIID are often so distressed by their fully capable bodies that they seek surgical amputation of healthy limbs or the surgical severing of their spinal cord. … The aforementioned false beliefs, like GD, are not merely emotionally distressing for the individuals but also life-threatening."

PBS reported that even the chemicals doctors sometimes use to block puberty developments can be dangerous, mainly because there's so little research.

Said one doctor, "The bottom line is we don't really know how sex hormones impact any adolescent's brain development. We know there's a lot of brain development between childhood and adulthood, but it's not clear what's behind that."

This just isn't natural. The hormones are bad for the baby. https://t.co/WAlbKNOfWa — Kassy Dillon (@KassyDillon) September 2, 2016

'My brother's pregnancy'

The agenda has created the circumstances that allow for Time headlines such as "My Brother's Pregnancy and the Making of a New American Family."

The report this week starts out, "My brother Evan was born female. He came out as transgender 16 years ago but never stopped wanting to have a baby. This spring he gave birth to his first child."

An accompanying image has a cutline, "Evan, who stopped his hormone treatments before trying to get pregnant, chest-feeds his newborn son in their Massachusetts home."

And at the Guardian was the headline "Breastfeeding as a trans dad: 'A baby doesn't know what your pronouns are.'"

"[Trevor] MacDonald, soft-spoken and sporting a wispy goatee, was breastfeeding his first child at the time. He and his partner had splashed on a lavish dinner, baby in tow. When his son began fussing, MacDonald eyed the waitstaff and patrons wandering about in formal attire and thought it best to head to the restroom.

"It was there, holding his fussing son, that he was struck by the incongruity of nursing a child in a men's bathroom," the report said.