Do No Harm: Navigating Gender Identity in School

In her thoroughly researched and scrupulously fair-minded book Time to Think, Hannah Barnes relates the history and calamitous downfall of the Tavistock—England’s only child gender clinic. It’s a sobering story of the harm done to hundreds of children. It’s about distressed adolescents, desperate parents, over-stressed professionals, and out-of-control activist organizations. Barnes shows us just who these children are and what conditions they presented in addition to gender dysphoria.  Some of the patients report being happy with their treatment and Barnes tells their stories too. But for many of the children, treatment led to severe depression, sexual dysfunction, stunted growth, and osteoporosis. Almost all of them presented with other—and sometimes multiple—social and emotional problems that were simply ignored.

Time to Think is essential reading for any educator who wants to understand the issues. Many of the children who presented for care were autistic and struggling with a sense of being different and socially awkward. Many were children—some with homophobic parents—who, if left alone, would grow up to be gay or lesbian.

This is important for educators because schools are making decisions about whether to teach the gender identity theory that underpins medical interventions for gender-questioning minors. My advice is to “Get informed” and reach out beyond your usual media information sources. Some of the most accurate and best-researched reporting on this subject is coming from outlets around the world that you probably would not usually read. As the condescending phrase goes: “Educate yourself”. Don’t outsource your capacity for independent and critical thinking to your go-to pundits and politicians.

My Path through the Maze

For the last decade or so—ever since “pronouns” and “cis’” started popping onto my radar (c.2008) and since the time high school kids started declaring they were “pansexual” or “non-binary”—I’ve been watching what’s been going on with children and schools. 

When Tumblr caught on I saw these labels and this language proliferate with kids. When same-sex marriage passed, I noticed that LGB and other civil rights organizations started switching their focus. Over time, something about it did not sit well with me. It activated my progressive and Gaydar alert systems. The more I learned, the more alarmed I became that this was cuckoos laying eggs in the LGB nest. I got a whiff of all kinds of regressive intellectual trappings. 

• Why was everything wrapped in baby blue and pink?

• What was causing the sudden rapid growth of gender-questioning youth?

• Why were so many organizations and politicians I had supported and trusted showing such a lack of knowledge and curiosity?

• Why were they showing such a lack of understanding about child development, and endorsing views totally at odds with child psychology, progressive thinking, and legal and cultural traditions?

• Why were they so quick to turn their backs on women’s rights?

• Why were they, or so it seemed to me, set on undermining children’s understanding of reality and disrupting parental confidence?

First, do no harm

“The science is settled,” Admiral Levine, Assistant Secretary for Health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) confidently said, referring to gender medical intervention for gender-questioning minors.  Sallie Baxendale consultant clinical neuropsychologist and a professor of clinical neuropsychology at University College London is one of the experts who have carefully scrutinized the available data. She begs to differ:

Since no high-quality evidence for the benefits of puberty blockers has been found in systematic reviews, it is unsurprising that even the doctors who work in this field have described themselves as building the plane while flying it. With mounting concerns for the possible harms associated with a medical pathway of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones (including reduced bone density, disruptions to neurodevelopment, impaired sexual function, and infertility) — not to mention the growing numbers of detransitioners for whom this was never an appropriate treatment pathway, one might extend their aviation metaphor as an attempt to build a plane while flying it while someone else throws out all the parachutes and sets an engine on fire.

https://unherd.com/2023/07/has-gids-learned-from-its-failure/

All educators know that science is never settled, and the best evidence we have to date is that gender-related medical interventions are detrimental to young people’s physical and mental well-being. 

Dr. Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist with 30 years of experience working with gender-questioning clients and a former board member of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) also disagrees. Seeing the huge spike in the numbers of gender-questioning youth, Anderson has concluded that many of them think being trans is the explanation for their ongoing distress when that is not the case. 

Acknowledging that social contagion may be a factor, Dr. Anderson sums up the dilemma for healthcare professionals: 

“The biggest question today is not whether gender-affirming care is appropriate for transgender youth. The question is: Who is transgender and at what point should medicines be used?”

Dr. Erica Anderson

In a July interview, Admiral Levine said, “Adolescence is hard and puberty is hard. What if you’re going through the wrong puberty? What if you inside feel that you are female, but now you’re going through male puberty?”

We need to think about this carefully, as educators. Does this comport at all with what we know, both intellectually and experientially, about child development? What would Piaget, Vygotsky, or Erickson have to say? 

The U.S. is becoming an outlier in pediatric gender-related medical interventions. While countries like Sweden, Finland, and the UK have pulled back on their treatment of children and teens who experience alienation from their sexed bodies, the United States seems to be determined to ignore the mounting evidence and forge ahead with these extreme pharmacological and surgical solutions for emotional distress. Cui bono?

The cure for most children with the diagnosis of gender dysphoria is going through puberty. For many, it’s a developmental stage on the route to identity formation. The large majority of children desist without intervention. With “gender-affirming care” puberty itself is in the medical crosshairs.  

Gender Identity Ideology v the Rights of People Who Identify as Trans

It’s helpful to distinguish between gender identity ideology and the rights of people who identify as trans. Trans rights are about the social accommodations that enable trans people to go about their lives with the same protections as everyone else. To achieve this means working on solutions in areas where trans rights conflict with the rights of other groups. These don’t have to be intractable problems.

However, the extreme claims of the ideology make negotiated solutions and alternatives impossible:

• Sex is on a continuum, and therefore concepts of male and female are subjective matters of self-chosen identity.
• A person’s inner sense of gender identity should not be doubted or challenged. You are who you feel yourself to be.
• Children as young as eighteen months can know their gender identity
• Transwomen are women and transmen are men. No debate.
• Denying or challenging the truth of any of those sentences is akin to violence.

That’s the dogma. What it means is that a heterosexual man can call himself a lesbian, and a man self-identifying as a woman has the right to enter women’s only spaces, competitions, and sports, and demand to be housed in a women’s prison even if he’s a convicted sex offender. This absolutism threatens women’s sex-based rights, erases categories of women, gays, and lesbians, and leads to conflicts in areas like sports, safe spaces, and child safeguarding. It also requires a complete overhaul of societal norms and language. Gender identity theory is uncompromising and sets up implacable opposing forces that make conflict inevitable. 

The Invention of the Transchild 

Most disturbing of all, these ideas have lodged themselves in education and magically created the idea of the “transchild”. On the basis of flimsy notions of gender identity and outdated stereotypes, certain children are exempted from well-established principles of child development on the basis of being “trans”. Accepting the idea of the transchild contradicts everything we know about childhood development.

There is no reputable evidence that children possess such a thing as a “gender” and plenty of empirical research shows it is an adult label pushed onto children.

That most sinister of euphemisms—”pediatric gender-affirming care”—imposes an adult belief system, centered around the existence of “gender identity,” on vulnerable children. The evidence supporting its effectiveness is questionable at best and politically motivated at worst. Claiming that it reduces suicide risk or improves mental health is a reckless distortion of available data. 

• Gender Clinic News, Blocked & retorted: Clinicians debunk the Endocrine Society’s suicide prevention claim with its own words
• CITY JOURNAL, Reckless and Irresponsible: The ACLU pushes the potent but misleading “affirm or suicide” narrative.
• Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, Transgender Identity and Suicide Attempts and Mortality in Denmark: Elevated rates of suicide despite wide accessibility of gender transition interventions

The push for fast-tracked medical intervention should alarm everyone. It bypasses essential developmental stages and therapeutic psychological support. It leads children down an irrevocable path of irreversible harm. 

Anyone with any understanding of children (or has ever been or met a child) knows children and adolescents cannot grasp the significance of puberty and the long-term effects of treatment. Such cognitive capacity is not in place until full maturity, which is reached in the mid-twenties. What all of this means is that no minor can give informed consent. 

Educators would be well advised to remain skeptical about whether the medical intervention industry prioritizes profit over the welfare of children. Behind the façade of progressiveness, are evidence-based practices taking a backseat to financial gain? Are long-term consequences and side effects being overlooked?  Does this business model create a lifelong dependence on medical and pharmaceutical services that commodify vulnerable children?

In a remarkably short period, questionable concepts relating to “gender identity” have taken hold in major educational and medical institutions, advocacy groups, and organizations. They dominate political discourse and popular culture. They have transformed the perception of gender as sex-role stereotypes to an essentialist definition of a person’s sense of self. As a result, many have embraced this radical shift without fully grasping how truly peculiar it is.

How does this information relate to what schools need to do?

The best current research we have in the English-speaking world (the Cass Interim Report, UK) concludes that the “affirmation” model in schools and social transitioning are not neutral acts. Something as simple as asking for “pronouns” can be actively harmful when children are led to believe that they may be born in the wrong body and that they are able to change sex.

Exploring, experimenting, seeking greater independence, and pushing boundaries is the work of adolescence—a period marked by physical and emotional growth and change. We, as educators, need to be wary of attempts to medicalize this natural and important developmental and biological process.

What are Schools Doing?

There are schools where children are taught that sex and gender are interchangeable and that gender identity (and by implication sex) is fluid and can change over time. There are schools that ask elementary students for their pronouns and how they identify. There are schools that teach that children may sometimes feel like a boy and sometimes feel like a girl and sometimes both or neither.  

Muddling sex and gender in this way seems dangerous to me. It puts the idea into children’s heads that they can change sex. The reality is: A boy is a boy. A boy who plays with dolls and wants to be a princess is a boy who plays with dolls and wants to be a princess. Similarly, a girl is a girl. A girl who has short hair, climbs trees, and plays soldiers is a girl who has short hair, climbs trees, and plays soldiers. 

These are healthy and normal activities for children of both sexes. They are not signs that a child has a “gender” or is “trans”. Why don’t we simply recognize that there are two sexes, without reductively aligning a child’s sex with a choice of toys, activity, dress, hairstyle, etc.? 

Some of us thought we had left such sexist stereotypes behind long ago. The current gender identity discourse brings them roaring back, this time with added mystical language, magical thinking, experimental drugs, cross-sex hormones, and life-altering surgeries. 

What about your school?

• How does the concept of gender identity show up in your school?
• Do you know what is being taught?
• Is the concept of gender embedded in the DEI work?
• Are children who do not fit within the norms of sex-stereotyped behavior considered “trans”? If so, are you OK with that? If not, how do you think this should be addressed?
• Should we be suggesting to children that they may be born in the wrong body? If not, how do you think that should be addressed?
• Has your school reviewed its policies and programs to ensure that you are not reinforcing narrow sex stereotypes including in dress code and uniforms?
• Is anyone questioning or talking about this stuff?
• What do you think?
• Would it be safe to say what you think?

This article was first published by Intrepid Ed News August 9th 2023.