By Andrea Widburg
When my son was a toddler, he thought he was Spider-Man, a soldier, and a fireman. My children believed in Santa, that thunder killed, and that temper tantrums worked. As to all but one of those things, they were wrong. It turns out that, if you’re a so-called “transgender” activist and tantrum loudly enough, Britain’s National Health Service (“NHS”) will agree to treat (i.e., “affirm”) allegedly “trans toddlers.”
For toddlers, every day is a miracle. Most things are new to them, and absolutely nothing is explainable. That’s why they can believe with passionate sincerity in the most outrageous fictions. Indeed, a popular Quora forum had parents list the funny things their toddlers believed to be true. The list included these gems:
- Dinosaurs can live in our ears.
- That bras are inflatable stand-ins for women’s actual breasts.
- That Siri is a real person.
- That is, if no one is watching, it didn’t happen.
- That they are more physically powerful than adults (a belief common among little boys).
The list of fantastical things that toddlers believe is legion. They also misinterpret things, a trait that can last a long time.
When I was a very little girl, my parents told me that my father’s brother, who had been a true genius (allegedly the best student in the history of Berlin’s storied Moses Mendelssohn School, as of 1925 or so), ended his life as a “custodian” due to communism’s destructive effect on his ambition. I knew what that meant: My uncle was a janitor, something I often told people. I didn’t discover until I was in high school that, in reality, he was a low-level civil servant in Denmark working as a “custodian of records.”
Children, because of their naivete, their limited fund of knowledge, and the world of assumptions in which they live, get the wrong end of the stick all the time. For them, reality is elusive and confusing, and the younger they are, the more serious this reality gap is. And of course, it is most serious of all when the adults in their world, through malice or their own mental illness, tell them malevolent lies about reality.
That’s why it’s utterly appalling to learn that the NHS will continue to see so-called “trans” children, without any lower age limit, at its gender clinics. And as a reminder, these gender clinics never tell people that they’re suffering from treatable gender dysphoria, which is often tied to sexual trauma, childhood abuse, mental illness, or autism. Instead, these clinics exist to “affirm” gender dysphoria through brutal, permanently disfiguring chemical and surgical interventions that leave people infertile, incapable of sexual function, and at risk of cancer, heart disease, and other illnesses.
The NHS is treating nursery-age children who believe they are transgender after watering down its own guidance, The Telegraph can reveal.
The health service was previously set to introduce a minimum age of seven for children to be seen by its specialist gender clinics, claiming anything less was “just too young”.
The limit was removed after the proposals were put out to consultation, with new guidance due to be published showing that children of any age are eligible.
Currently, according to the same article, there are known to be as many as ten children in the program who are “nursery age,” as well as a total of 157 children under ten. This is utterly bizarre given the Cass Review, an independent study that the NHS commissioned, about children and gender dysphoria.
The report showed that the available research promoting child transgenderism is faulty and that the evidence shows that no one has looked seriously into factors other than so “transgenderism” (e.g., factors such as mental illness, abuse, etc.) to account for the number of children claiming to be the opposite sex. Boiled down, the report, while phrased in formal language, says stop accepting as true the claim that children are in the ‘wrong body’ and start addressing the real issues.
So why did the NHS ignore the report and announce that it was going to accept as real children’s contentions about their sex? It appears that it’s because the so-called “transgender” activists screamed. Again, from the Telegraph:
However, a source close to the consultation process said NHS England had “caved to the pressure” of trans activists to remove the [minimum age] limits.
As Western nations mutilate and sterilize children in the name of “gender inclusivity and affirmation,” Western civilization hangs in the balance.