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Blue states are passing laws to allow children to become “transgender” without parental consent, to punish those who use “wrong” pronouns, and to shield “gender” doctors from lawsuits for harms caused to kids. Red states are passing laws to outlaw transgender medical “treatments” on minors, to protect children from sexually explicit schoolbooks, and banning males from female sports.

Disagreements over the definition of biology, sex, sexuality, and truth – and the safeguarding of children. I never expected to be thinking about such things when I got involved in gay rights, in 1993. No one was talking about any of the things “LGBTQ+” activists are talking about today.

It’s 2024 in Georgia and a once rare psychiatric disorder affecting primarily men has become today what we call “transgender.” What were formerly known as transsexuals and transvestites have morphed into a host of different things, real and imaginary. Today’s queers, nonbinarys, pansexuals, asexuals, demiboys, and gender-fluids - with xemself, perself, and verself pronouns. What remains a diagnosis in the Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-5) is now used to tell kids they can be “born in the wrong body.” A condition trans activists insist be included under The Americans with Disabilities Act is proselytized to kids as healthy social and biological development.

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President Biden appointed trans activist Dr. Rachel Levine as Assistant Secretary of Health. Dr. Levine uses the bully pulpit of the federal government to loudly proclaim “gender affirming healthcare for kids” to be “evidence based,” “medically necessary,” and “lifesaving.” Dr. Levine further claims the medical and scientific basis for trans healthcare is not in dispute. None of this is true.

Dr. Levine and left-wing trans activists, like Georgia Equality and the Human Rights Campaign, point to WPATH – The World Professional Association for Transgender Healthcare to justify their claims. WPATH identifies as a medical association of “trans medicine” practitioners. WPATH publishes a “standard of care” cited by The American Academy of Pediatrics and The Endocrinology Society in their support for “trans healthcare.”

The WPATH Files. The nonprofit group Environmental Progress recently published The WPATH Files, a large batch of leaked internal WPATH communications. The WPATH Files Report shows WPATH members acknowledging the high risk of life-long complications, like sterility and loss of sexual function. And WPATH members expressing awareness their young patients lack the developmental capacity to consent to the medical interventions. The report compares the WPATH promotion of “the pseudoscientific surgical destruction of healthy genitals in vulnerable people” to the mid-20th-century use of lobotomies, “the pseudoscientific surgical destruction of healthy brains.”

Examples of WPATH members’ saying internally what they do not say to the rest of us include: “We try to talk about it, but most of the kids are nowhere near the brain space to really, really, really talk about it in any serious way. That always bothers me, but we want the kids to be happy, happier in the moment, right? [] We’re often explaining these kinds of things to people who haven’t had biology in high school yet.”

The Cass Report. The efficacy and ethics of transgender healthcare for kids is hotly contested around the world, with several European countries recently putting the brakes on the “gender affirming” approach. Most recently, the release of The Cass Report in the UK contains a damning indictment of the underlying claims of trans healthcare for kids, after conducting a 4-year systemic review of the medical evidence.

The Cass Report concluded the quality of research supporting trans healthcare is poor. The effect on cognitive and psychosexual development remains unknown, and “Clinicians are unable to determine with any certainty which children and young people will go on to have an enduring trans identity.”

“Gender clinics” have grown from 1 in the mid-2000’s to hundreds today, including about 50 pediatric. According to a Journal of the American Medical Association report, thousands of kids as young as 12 have had “gender affirming” surgeries. Lots of money is being made, not unlike the opioid epidemic’s explosion of for-profit “pain management clinics.” There are 42 Georgia healthcare professionals and activists who are WPATH members. Georgia has 24 surgeons advertising “FTM Top Surgery in Georgia” on topsurgery.net. Emory University Hospital has a gender clinic. Meanwhile, a Reddit subgroup for detransitioners, those reverting to their natal sex and who are overwhelmingly gays and lesbians, has grown to over 53,000.

Georgians - including parents, teachers, and health care providers - need to know the whole truth. Transgender has become an ideology and ideology is not healthcare. Children should not be pawns in anyone’s political agenda.

Jeff Cleghorn is a past president of Georgia’s Stonewall Bar Association and a former Georgia Equality and Lambda Legal board member.