More than 60 leaders concerned about the mental health of American children have signed onto an open letter that asserts the Obama administration’s transgender bathroom decree for schools is “putting the nation’s children at risk.”
The leaders address the Obama administration’s recent “Dear Colleague” letter that denigrates the traditional common sense safety and privacy policy that boys must use boys’ bathrooms and girls must use girls’ bathrooms in school settings. The new policy – steeped in the ideology of gender fluidity – allows boys and girls to use the rest rooms and shower and locker rooms of the sex with which they identify at any given moment.
The letter’s signers write:
This controversial and reckless government overreach increases the risk for our children’s safety and privacy in deference to an un-tethered notion of rights. This policy rejects the scientific reality of every person’s biological sex. To force all Americans to comply with such an extreme and faulty premise – that every person’s sex is “assigned” to them, rather than simply identified at birth – is beyond the pale.
The leaders continue that Congress has made no law requiring the Obama administration’s decree.
“A ‘Dear Colleague’ letter is a format increasingly employed by the Obama administration when it seeks to impose a rule without going to the trouble of seeking legal authority or even public hearings,” the leaders say, adding:
Typically, recipients of guidance letters from the Civil Rights Division or Office of Civil Rights presume that such letters accurately reflect the law and are almost always cowed into compliance with the terms of the letter. Very few recipients have the courage or resources to challenge such a letter.
The signers of the letter include Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-TX), North Carolina Lt. Gov. Dan Forest, Sandy Rios, director of governmental affairs at the American Family Association, Richard Viguerie, chairman, Conservative HQ.com, Dr. Michelle Cretella, president of the American College of Pediatricians, and Lisa Bell, founder of Youth Trans Critical Professionals.
“Someday it will be written in the rise and fall of the United States that the greatest, most powerful country in the history of the world showed symptoms of insanity when it reached the pinnacle of its greatness and success, and this will be one of the symptoms that was written about,” Gohmert said Thursday on the House floor.
The American Family Association (AFA) has led the pledge to boycott Target – which has heartily endorsed the Obama administration’s gender ideology policies in terms of its own stores’ bathrooms. The pledge has reached 1.3 million signers and the retailer’s stock continues to decline in contrast to its competitors.
“If the Obama Administration wants to descend into madness, the signers of this letter and the millions of people they represent are not going there with them,” Rios, vice president of governmental affairs for AFA, tells Breitbart News.
The American College of Pediatricians has asserted that gender ideology is harmful to children and that by promoting gender fluidity, the Obama administration is complicit in masking serious mental health issues in children.
The College states:
No one is born with a gender. Everyone is born with a biological sex. Gender (an awareness and sense of oneself as male or female) is a sociological and psychological concept; not an objective biological one…
A person’s belief that he or she is something they are not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking. When an otherwise healthy biological boy believes he is a girl, or an otherwise healthy biological girl believes she is a boy, an objective psychological problem exists that lies in the mind not the body, and it should be treated as such. These children suffer from gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria (GD), formerly listed as Gender Identity Disorder (GID), is a recognized mental disorder in the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-V)…
“According to the DSM-V, as many as 98% of gender confused boys and 88% of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty,” the College asserts. “Conditioning children into believing that a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful is child abuse.”
Similarly, Youth Trans Critical Professionals – a group of self-described “left-leaning, open-minded, and pro-gay rights” professionals say it is risky to affirm young people who claim to be transgender and provide them with hormonal and surgical treatments to change their bodies.
“Our concern is with medical transition for children and youth,” say Youth Trans Critical Professionals on their website. “We feel that unnecessary surgeries and/or hormonal treatments which have not been proven safe in the long-term represent significant risks for young people.”
“Policies that encourage — either directly or indirectly — such medical treatment for young people who may not be able to evaluate the risks and benefits are highly suspect, in our opinion,” says the organization, which is composed of psychologists, social workers, doctors, and other professionals.
The professionals express “alarm” that, because of the current trendiness of being transgendered, many young people have decided they are a member of the opposite sex simply as a result of “binges” on social media sites. They describe a process of transgender activists recruiting these young people for their “cult.”
“There is evidence that vulnerable young people are being actively recruited and coached on such sites to believe that they are trans,” the professionals say.
Despite such potential mental health problems associated with gender confusion, children who claim to be the opposite sex are no longer legally permitted to see a therapist to engage in “conversion therapy” in some states. Youth Trans Critical Professionals sees such state prohibitions as dangerous since they may block the process of critical thinking and evaluation of the young person regarding the reasons why he or she desires to become a transgender member of the opposite sex.
“While the sentiment behind this legislation is laudable, in some cases, it is being interpreted to mean that therapists cannot explore gender identity with a youth who is professing to be trans,” argue the professionals. “This would mean we can’t ask why; we can’t explore underlying mental health issues; we can’t consider the symbolic nature of the gender dysphoria; and we can’t look at possible confounding issues such as social media use or social contagion.”
The signers of the open letter write that radical progressives promoting the gender fluid policy for young people are “distorting the law” against a flood of opposition from “the overwhelming majority of Americans.”
They add:
In addition, considering all the possible actions the federal government should be taking to keep us safe — like addressing porous borders, rising terrorism, the weakening economy, the escalating collapse of the Middle East, rising crime rates, etc. — we firmly believe that, in setting bathroom, shower and locker room policies in local schools, the federal government has exceeded its authorities while putting our children’s mental health at risk to politically-driven psychology and their very lives in peril at the hands of potential sexual predators.
The leaders urge others “to join us in opposing this grave threat to children and this abject rejection of law-making by self-government, that manner by which America’s founders intended our constitutional system to function.”