Boy? Girl? Two-spirit, gender-fluid wood nymph? You can forget gender reveal parties, parents, because you’re now required to accept your child’s “preferred gender” regardless of their anatomy.
At least, that’s according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, which published new guidelinesMonday encouraging parents to accept their kids’ preferred gender.
In a policy statement entitled “Ensuring Comprehensive Care and Support for Transgender and Gender-Diverse Children and Adolescents,” the group recommended “gender-affirming” health care for minors who do not identify with their birth sex. In some cases, this includes “surgical intervention,” as well as using gonadotrophin-releasing hormones to delay puberty up to age 16 and prevent the development of some sex characteristics, such as breasts and a deeper voice.
The group also prescribes therapy for family members of youth who identify as gender-diverse. It said it hopes to eradicate discrimination and stigma associated with “youth who do not conform to social expectations and norms regarding gender.”
This “gender-affirmative care model,” the AAP says in its guidelines, is about “appreciating the youth’s gender experience.”
“A strong, nonjudgmental partnership with youth and their families can facilitate exploration of complicated emotions and gender-diverse expressions while allowing questions and concerns to be raised in a supportive environment,” AAP adds.
This “supportive environment” includes affirming to the struggling child that “transgender identities and diverse gender expressions do not constitute a mental disorder” and that “variations in gender identity and expression are normal aspects of human diversity.”
Even more than that, the AAP instructs parents that “any therapeutic intervention with the goal of changing a youth’s gender expression or identity is inappropriate.”
This opinion, seemingly developed on little scientific evidence and based almost solely on an adolescent child's feelings, contradicts the opinions of multiple psychologists and scientific scholars who've seemed gender dysphoria a mental illness that requires non-affirming treatment.
For example, Dr. Paul R. McHugh, former psychiatrist-in-chief for Johns Hopkins Hospital, has gone on record as saying that transgenderism is a “mental disorder," adding that sex change is “biologically impossible." The American College of Pediatrics caught flak in 2016 for calling biological sex “an objective biological binary trait” and saying that any attempt to affirm transgenderism in children constitutes "child abuse."