By Phil D’Agostino
While the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) isn’t an authority per se, it does mirror, represent, and influence the thinking of others who are. This group has issued a new “guidance” on how to treat our children, as seen in this news article.
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s (WPATH) new guidance lowers the recommended age for cross-sex hormones from 16 to 14 years, according to a guidance draft obtained by The Post Millennial this week. The age for double mastectomies, the removal of breasts, has been lowered to 15. Sixteen-year-old boys may seek breast augmentations, facial surgeries and tracheal shaves to reduce the appearance of an Adam’s apple.
Fourteen! Fourteen (by far, mostly girls), and they’re already fed up with a part of who they are! What are we doing to our children? A fourteen-year-old shouldn’t be obsessing over his gender. These youths, as burgeoning adolescents, historically (that is, since the beginning of recorded history) have been and are usually busy learning to do something or become something so they can go on to be successful at standing on their own, finding a way to build a life, and be happy. Now, our culture (and others) has them so focused on their being offended, getting attention, how different they are, and what their bodies look like that they are missing out on some very important developmental milestones.
Developmental psychologists like Alfred Adler, Erik Erikson, Albert Bandura, and many others have shown through extensive studying over many decades that we go through stages of mental and physical development. Subsequent mental illness or problems can stem from missing or not successfully going through these stages. Whether you agree or not with a specific, we can say with a high degree of confidence that the general principle of developmental stages does exist and that our children are at greatest risk for developing mental or psychological challenges later in life due to what happens to them as they are going through those stages.
We are warping their normal development with cultural overlays and imperatives. We eschew the concept that there actually is a “normal,” as though to say someone isn’t is a sin against the universe and earns one the title of bigot, arrogant, or judgmental. Children need to be able to just be who they are until their minds are mature, educated, and free enough to decide for themselves.
We do not allow fourteen-year-olds to marry, yet we completely submerge them into the realm of sex and gender. We would never allow a fourteen-year-old to drive a car or give him a mortgage, because fourteen-year-olds can’t make good judgments yet, and their commitments are fleeting. They mean what they say when they say it, but children are inherently fickle. They sign up for a sport or instrument lesson as if they would die if they didn’t, and then, three months later, they stop going, leaving you with a three-year contract on a trombone that’s gathering dust in a closet.
People who think this is okay are sick. We are the adults, after all! Our children depend on us to know more and be able to help them with difficult-to-make decisions until they’re ready. Even eighteen has been shown to be too early for many. Think about “student loan debt.” This is the result of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds making decisions with consequences, and we, as a nation, are talking seriously about allowing them to abandon their commitment. You can’t abandon surgical changes to your body, regardless of what proponents want to tell you. Thomas Wolfe wrote the famous phrase and book title, “You Can’t Go Home Again,” and when it comes to interrupting or surgically changing a person’s sexual development and anatomy, he is absolutely correct. Once you get past a certain point, you might turn around, but you’ll never, ever be able to get back to where you started or undo what you’ve already done.
In Hamlet, Shakespeare puts in the mouth of Hamlet, “I must be cruel only to be kind. Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.” Here, he must be cruel to his mother, he explains, in order to be kind to her — to save her from lapsing any further into sensuality and betrayal of her dead husband. Can we be so weak and cowardly as to do less for our own children!? “Thus bad begins and worse remains behind” is the rub here. We must have the courage to be the adult, the protector, the parent, and to be willing to deal with the “bad” to come to avoid the “worse” if we do not. The reckoning may not be for a decade or two, but that day may well come when a child looks his parent in the eye and says, “How could you have let me do this? How could you have been so weak, so absent, so cowardly when I was depending on you to protect me from me?”
