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Salvo 03.18.2022 15 minutes

First, Do Some Harm

Sick little girl covered in blanket is hugging teddy bear and looking sadly on medicine while lying on couch

While we are finally starting to win the fight for our children’s minds, we are losing the battle for control of their bodies.

The Hypocritic Oath

First, the good news. Recent legal wins over woke schools in Florida have the education industrial complex reeling. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis successfully banned his state’s education lunatics from “injecting,” as he likes to say with a twinkle in his eye, depraved gender poison into the state’s Kindergarten-through-3rd grade curriculum. This is the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” Act, which produced some hilarious meta-content, like braindead woke celebrities screeching “Gay!” repeatedly on social media.

Even better, the dead-eyed do-nothings who sit on school boards and the moldering teachers’ unions who control them are getting b*tch slapped—finally—by outraged parents who are taking the fight to them. The battle is over who, exactly, has control over a child’s mind. Until now, the people in full control of the minds of our youth have been the army of 31-year-old TikTok-and-Adderall addicts with multiple piercings and furry fetishes and baroque multisyllabic pronouns who seem to work at every preschool and elementary school in the country. I don’t know where these weirdos come from, but I want to thank the China-owned TikTok app for giving them a platform on which to expose themselves. 

These “teachers” get their jollies by stocking kindergarten bookshelves with dystopian titles like “She’s My Dad” and “I’m Not a Girl” and by instructing five-year-olds who barely know how to wipe themselves properly about how fun it is to touch their own private parts.

You should see what they do on Show-and-Tell day.

We are slowly chipping away at the rotted American education colossus. It feels good to notch a few Ws in our belt. Been awhile, right? 

But—don’t get too comfortable. A new, even more powerful enemy has entered the game: the pediatric industrial complex. 

This battle is going to be more difficult. Why? Because if your school is bad, at least you can switch schools or homeschool. But unless you went to med school and can write prescriptions, stitch a wound, and reset a dislocated shoulder, you can’t home-doctor. 

Teaching multiplication is one thing, diagnosing pediatric cancer is quite another.

Paging Dr. Munchausen

The phrase “First, do no harm” is not actually in the text of the Hippocratic oath, but it is widely considered the bedrock of Western medical ethics. Let’s take a quick look at part of this remarkable ancient Greek pledge, attributed to Hippocrates, a doctor who lived in the fourth century B.C.:

I will use those dietary regimens which will benefit my patients according to my greatest ability and judgment, and I will do no harm or injustice to them. Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course. Similarly I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion… Into whatsoever houses I enter, I will enter to help the sick, and I will abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm, especially from abusing the bodies of man or woman, bond or free.

It’s no wonder modern doctors ignore this oath. After all, Hippocrates was a terrifying pro-life extremist who refused to perform abortions. 

Modern American doctors of all specialties are now aiming for full control over children’s bodies, and not just the ones they are allowed to abort. Pediatricians and plastic surgeons, psychologists and endocrinologists: all are conspiring and colluding to trap your kids on a one-way train to trans land. They have designed a final solution for your child if, God forbid, he or she ever suffers from body dysmorphia or rapid onset gender dysphoria, a devastating social contagion among teen girls, many of whom are autistic.

“Gender affirmation is fully reversible!” they tell us, these medical experts. Meanwhile surgeons are doing breast mutilations on girls as young as 12. 

Sydney Watson of The Blaze exposed one such plastic surgeon. Remember the old days when plastic surgeons kept busy by putting butt implants into Kardashians and cranking Nancy Pelosi’s eyebrows skyward? Watson quotes a representative for the clinic, who said, “we were 12-and-over as long as the child had already met all the requirements and had been in therapy for a long time, you know, had followed all the guidelines and they were on hormones or the therapist was already following them and recommending this next stage.” 

Mengeles like this are not rare. Watson cites a whole raft of doctors who advocate for mutilating surgeries on otherwise healthy young girls. “One of these doctors believes so-called sex-change operations should be available to pre-pubescent children.”

The Doctor Will Groom You Now

They did this to themselves.

A century of institutional trust has been vaporized. Respected medical authorities are revealing themselves as demons complicit in child abuse and grotesque malpractice.

A year ago, I wrote an essay about a trip to the pediatrician where my teenage son was asked, “Are you comfortable with your gender?” This year, I decided to switch doctors, take him to a male this time. I had outsmarted them, I thought. No man would think my son was a girl.

But the office forms wanted me to leave the possibility open. “Child’s gender assigned at birth: male, female, intersex.” Then a second question: “Child’s gender identity: male, female, other.” 

The nurse came in. I mentioned he had been having recurring headaches and we wanted to rule out anything bad. She acted like I’d told her he was bleeding out of his eyeballs. 

“He has a headache? Okay, the doctor will have to take his history over the phone.”

“He’s not in the office?”

“Oh no, he’s in the next room. Your son could have Covid so the doctor has to call you.” 

After a long wait, my son shivering in his paper gown, the doctor called and asked me a few questions about his health. 

“He doesn’t have Covid, Doctor. We all had it ages ago.”

“Well, you don’t know that.”  

Finally, the new doctor came in. He examined the kid, told me his headaches sounded like allergies, and declared him fit and healthy. Then he checked his doctor’s laptop. 

“He hasn’t had a Covid vaccine?” I braced myself. I had prepared for this. 

“Nope!”

“I can give it to him right now.”

“No thanks!”

“I highly recommend it.” 

I took a deep breath. “Well, according to the science, boys his age are more likely to develop myocarditis from the shot than from the virus.”

The physician/Pfizer sales rep stared at me like he was short circuiting. “I still strongly recommend it. Did you know it also prevents Type 1 Diabetes? And you don’t want him getting long Covid, do you?” 

“We had Covid and he’s fine. No long Covid.”

We had run the gauntlet! We were gonna make it out of the doctor’s office alive, with his gender, gonads, and heart muscle intact. I wondered if the doctor was going to hit the red button on the phone and the social workers were going to come in with the vaccine for him and chloroform and a body bag for me. 

How can I trust my pediatrician about anything when the office forms ask me what gender my son is? 

Don’t Trust Me, I’m a Doctor

Consider that medical “experts” are now using the Genderbread person in hospital employee training. If doctors can’t tell you are male by looking at your body, can you really trust them to know…anything?

It’s not that they don’t know, of course. Everyone—especially doctors—knows there are only two genders, and they align pretty convincingly with the two sexes that are evident from birth. They are simply barred from acknowledging this by powerful political lobbies. It’s the medical equivalent of agreeing that if your patient doesn’t float, she must be a witch, and then helping push her into the freezing lake. 

But instead of doctors pushing back on the political pressure to “affirm” patients, doctors who promote transgenderism complain if they are criticized. Time published a long, whiny essay about the harassment and threats these faux pediatricians are receiving from “transphobic bigots.”

A few state legislatures have tried to slow the rush to provide “affirming” (read: “mutilating”) care for confused children. “[We] strongly oppose any effort to criminalize or penalize physicians for providing necessary care for their patients,” read a April 2021 joint press statement from AAP, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American College of Physicians, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Osteopathic Association, and the American Psychiatric Association.”

Gosh, it must be so hard treating transgender youth these days. Only every single pediatric medical institution, psychiatric body, government agency, the White House, the media, and the culture at large is on your side. How do they keep soldiering on alone like this?

Also, what’s the fuss about, when medical intervention is so harmless? “Dr. Morissa Ladinsky, a pediatrician at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, claims that puberty blockers are ‘simply a pause button,’ says Ladinsky, to stop the continued development of a puberty incongruent with a child’s gender identity. Used at this stage, blockers are reversible.”

Are they though? Lupron, from Chicago drug maker AbbVie, is the primary puberty stopping drug given to children. In 2019, they enjoyed record Lupron sales of $892 million, up from $821 million three years earlier.

Almost every child put on them continues down the one-way train ride to synthetic cross sex hormones, and finally, surgical interventions. If you watched the TLC horror show I Am Jazz, you would know that when transgender teenager Jazz Jennings went to the surgeon to discuss penis removal and vagina creation surgery, the doctor breezily informs Jazz that because of the years of Lupron, “her” penis is miniscule and “too small for us to work with.” 

In other words, those fully reversible blockers can permanently freeze your penis so it’s the size of a six-year-old’s, forever. 

Because of this, Jazz was forced to undergo a much more complicated surgery to create what they call a “neovagina,” and spent the next few years having serious complications repaired, and then gained over 100 pounds and had to defer admission to Harvard due to “mental health issues.”

Yaeli Martinez, R.I.P.

Trans activists love to scare parents with the threat of suicide. “If you don’t instantly affirm your child’s new gender, they will die, and it will be your fault.” In 2019, Los Angeles area teenager Yaeli Martinez killed herself when she stepped in front of a train. Only she didn’t die because her bigoted parents had prevented her transition. Her mother, an immigrant, supported her daughter’s use of male pronouns and her new identity as “Andrew.” But  school administrators and its health officials didn’t think her mother’s support was sufficient, so it took over.

Yaeli was removed her from her mother’s home and put in foster care at age 16. “Martinez said she went to court ‘every single month’ to get her daughter back, unsuccessfully seeking a psychological evaluation for Yaeli. During hour-long supervised visits each week, Martinez was banned from discussing certain topics with Yaeli, including God. Officials ignored her pleas to treat Yaeli’s mental health problems instead of giving her cross-sex hormones, which didn’t make the teenager feel better, as she allegedly confessed in group therapy.”

Yaeli was essentially murdered by a death panel of merciless public school harpies and licensed state and county doctors who colluded to kidnap her and pump her full of artificial hormones.

Her mother made one fatal mistake: trusting the authorities.

Red States to the Rescue

A few states recently took important legal steps to stop the madness, namely Texas and Idaho. 

In Idaho, Republican State Representative Bruce Skaug sponsored a bill that will make it a felony to subject kids to medicalized abuse, including prescribing hormones. Instead, the bill urges children to seek mental health treatment (good luck finding a therapist anywhere for that). “It’s a bill to get proper treatment and to prevent them from lifelong, permanent decisions that will make them sterile and mutilate their bodies,” he said. Heroically, it also forbids parents or doctors helping a child leave the state to access transgender procedures. 

Texas is pursuing a similar law. Last month, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton published a legal opinion that delivering trans “medical care” to anyone under 18 will be considered child abuse. 

It worked. The largest children’s hospital in Texas stopped all gender “affirmation” medical procedures, including prescribing dangerous puberty blockers. Now, a court has ruled that Paxton’s opinion may not be binding, so the debate continues. But it’s a start.

In the car ride home after his check up, my son told me that, just like last year, after I left the room (to give my son a bit of privacy during the exam), the doctor gave him a talk about safe sex. Instead of telling teens to “use protection,” shouldn’t these “experts” be “following science” and telling them they are too young? Science proves minors are not ready for sex, relationships, and its consequences. Why not give them protection from THAT?

Plus, it is religious bigotry for an adult to instruct a devout Christian, or Orthodox Jew, or Muslim child to use condoms behind their parents back. In fact, it is a form of conversion therapy. Their goal is to convert normal kids into sexually precocious gender activists. 

It’s worth asking: Why are our children’s doctors and teachers trying so very hard to tempt happy, well adjusted kids to stop abstaining, to question their identities, and to become, essentially, lifelong slaves to the sex-positivity industry and Big Pharma? (We know why.)

“So what did the doctor tell you after I left the room? 

“He told me to remember to use protection.”  

He’s right. My kids do need protection. 

From the doctors I used to trust.

The American Mind presents a range of perspectives. Views are writers’ own and do not necessarily represent those of The Claremont Institute.

The American Mind is a publication of the Claremont Institute, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, dedicated to restoring the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life. Interested in supporting our work? Gifts to the Claremont Institute are tax-deductible.

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