Explaining The Unexplainable To Young Children

Transgender Advice For Your Younger Children

One day, I took some of the younger boys to get haircuts (yes, another lesson at the salon), and the stylist who took the boys’ names was clearly attempting to “transition” between the two sexes. This person was friendly and gave a great haircut. We did not say a word of judgment or derision, nor did we exchange glances that might have made this stylist uncomfortable, but simply went about our business as usual.

When we got in the car, a discussion ensued. “Was that a boy or a girl?” “I couldn’t tell at all!” “The name could’ve been for a boy or a girl.” It can be unsettling not to recognize a person’s sex, because that identification is so primordial in our psyches. Writer Anthony Esolen once noted that a person’s sex is the first thing we notice and the last thing we remember. Think about it: You may not remember the name or hair color of the clerk that helped you at the mall, but you will remember if that person was a man or a woman.

We reinforced to the children that this was a child of God with inherent dignity, and how confused and troubled a person must be to want to “change” his or her very nature. As we do when we encounter anyone in grave confusion or sin (including ourselves!), we reminded the children to pray for that person, and we reiterated what we have taught from the start—and what you must teach: We cannot change objective truth, including the good and right way that God created and ordered his world.

I cannot stress enough that parents must form a child in objective truth from the youngest years. We don’t get to determine what is true based on our feelings (me, me, me); rather, truth exists outside of ourselves (God’s created order), and our job is to seek truth, to find it, and to conform our lives and our wills to it.

Teach your children that God made each of us a boy or a girl—and that’s something so beautiful, so purposeful, that it’s written into our very creation: “From before you were born, and even when you were just a microscopic embryo, science could already tell that you were a boy! God is such a masterful Creator!”

Escaping Oneself

We hear more and more cases of parents who help their children “transition,” even before the traditional age of reason, and even before the child can tie his own shoes. One famous case involves Thomas Lobel, an 11-year-old boy who identifies as a girl named Tammy. His adoptive lesbian parents claim that Thomas has identified as a girl ever since he was three years old, and they worried about suicide risks if they he didn’t use hormone blockers to stave off puberty.

There should be protective alarm bells instinctively going off in our brains when we hear any adult say such an historically novel and outrageous thing!

These adults ignore the real mental health risks involved in trying to change a child’s sex. According to Johns Hopkins University professor Paul McHugh, “When children who reported transgender feelings were tracked without medical or surgical treatment at both Vanderbilt University and London's Portman Clinic, 70 to 80 percent of them spontaneously lost those feelings.”

McHugh also points to a thirty-year, long-term study in transgender-friendly Sweden, which found that, ten years after having reassignment surgery, the mortality rate of transgender people was 20-fold higher than the non-transgender population. Walt Heyer is one example of sex-change regret, and he has made it his mission to reach out to others who regret their operations, and to educate the public about the harm of such surgeries.

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Dec 6th 2018 Catholic Answers

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