As a Christian organization, New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms works to oppose policies that reflect misguided and worldly notions about sexuality and gender identity, and to expose the falsehoods behind those policies. The task is a challenging one. American politics, business, education, and media have embraced false beliefs about sexuality and gender with dizzying speed.
One false belief that undergirds the “transgender” movement is the belief that a person’s gender identity is not based on his God-given biological sex, but is instead based on his feelings. In other words, if a boy states that he feels like a girl, “transgender” activists would assert that he is a girl—even if he possesses male anatomy and male chromosomes. Furthermore, the “transgender” ideology holds that the appropriate response to feelings of gender dysphoria is not to help people to resolve their gender dysphoria and grow comfortable with the bodies God has given them, but to provide them with hormones and surgeries to make their bodies look more like the bodies of persons of the opposite sex. This approach can have consequences that are both catastrophic and permanent—especially when it is used with impressionable young people.
What can be done to reverse this harmful and dangerous narrative? The simple response is this: We must tell the truth, even when it is difficult to do so. Earlier this month, a left-wing Missouri caseworker named Jamie Reed spoke out about her former employer, the Washington University Pediatric Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. The bombshell allegations made by Reed have led Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey to open a much-needed investigation into the Transgender Center.
According to the Daily Signal, Reed asserted that Transgender Center personnel lied to parents about the care they provided, that medications provided by the Transgender Center harmed children, that the Transgender Center continued to push patients toward gender “transitions” even if a parent revoked his or her consent to such treatment, and that the Transgender Center “‘regularly refers minors for gender transition surgery.’” Reed also noted that some patients’ parents put pressure on their children to adopt “transgender” identities. Shockingly, Reed added that “one doctor at the center gives patients a drug called Bicalutamide, a pancreatic cancer drug that may poison the liver but has a side effect of causing breasts to grow.”
New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms thanks Jamie Reed for bravely speaking out about the Transgender Center. We hope that Reed’s disclosures will help turn the tide of public opinion against the “transgender” movement and lead government officials, medical personnel, and parents to choose a different path in response to childhood gender dysphoria.