Values Voter Summit Panel: Gender Ideology Is 'Large-Scale Child Abuse,' Threat to Basic Liberties
WASHINGTON — Transgender ideology results in "large-scale child abuse" and poses a threat to all kinds of cherished rights, a panel at the Values Voter Summit said Saturday.
Before hundreds assembled at the Omni Shoreham Hotel for the largest annual political gathering of social conservatives in the United States, psychiatrist Dr. Paul McHugh, pediatrician Dr. Michelle Cretella, and Elizabeth Johnston, who is known as the Activist Mommy, spoke about the harms that gender ideology poses to children.
"America is engaged in large-scale child abuse," Cretella said in her remarks. "And complicit in this is my field, my field of pediatrics, psychiatry, our education system, mass media and social media."
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She urged the crowd to not employ the language of transgender activists. Every being has a biological sex, not something additional called a gender or a gender identity hardwired into one's brain or DNA, she explained.
Cretella, who is the executive director of the American College of Pediatricians, outlined the effects of Lupron, a drug that's being given to children who suffer from gender dysphoria.
Lupron is an FDA-approved drug used to treat precocious puberty in children, prostate cancer in men and endometriosis in women. The drug, however, may have serious side effects including bone fractures and memory loss. Lupron has never been tested or approved to treat physically healthy children with gender dysphoria. Sex change hormones may put children at risk of heart attacks, strokes, blood clots, diabetes, various cancers and emotional instability — the same instability the drugs are purported to alleviate in dysphoric youth, she explained.
"Sex is not assigned by people. I don't assign sex to my patients when I see them in the delivery room. It declares itself. We recognize it. Our bodies tell us who we are," Cretella went on to say.
Worldwide, medical referrals for gender dysphoria in which youth are seeking to transition to the opposite sex have increased astronomically. As The Christian Post reported earlier this week, in England such referrals have risen over 4,000 percent in less than a decade. And this is in no small part due to the kinds of practices being carried out by activist pediatricians.
To many gasps and other expressions of horror from the crowd, Cretella described several instances in which pediatricians disseminated confusing messages to young children about their sex.
One Los Angeles based pediatrician counseled an 8-year-old girl who was tomboyish, athletic and being bullied at school. After asking the child if she was a boy or girl, and the child replied that she was indeed a girl, the pediatrician used an example of a Pop-Tart to suggest otherwise.
The doctor asked her what she would think if she was given a Pop-Tart in a strawberry wrapper but when she bit into it there was blueberry inside. What kind of Pop-Tart is it really? The analogy worked and the girl subsequently inferred that she thought she was really a boy in a "girl wrapper."
Yet the doctor maintained she did not influence the girl in any way, but just gave her language to help her express "himself." This same doctor has also referred 13-year-old girls for double mastectomies.
Gender ideology, Cretella added, threatens other political freedoms.
"If individual beliefs trump reality, our First Amendment rights are gone. No parent rights, no religious rights, and [no] girls' and women's rights. Total erasure. We need to stand up not just for the sake of our children but for our very most basic liberties," she said.
In his remarks, Dr. Paul McHugh, a longtime Johns Hopkins University psychiatrist, cited a long term study out of Sweden where the rate of suicide of postoperative persons who underwent sex reassignment surgeries is 20 times higher than the general population, despite being one of the most tolerant of countries of trans-identified persons.
He noted that in the first 10 years people seem satisfied with the procedures, but after that, great regret often ensues. Such is often the case with tattoos; people often regret them after 10 years, his dermatologist friends have told him.
The surgical and hormonal treatments for gender identity disorders are "experimental, not evidence-based" procedures, he emphasized.
"We are now working to give children, particularly hormones and surgery, that we are not sure are the best for them. The scan data that is available for these treatments and hormones have been described officially in the literature as evidence of low-quality," McHugh said.
"With this kind of a title to evidence, you wouldn't use an aspirin if it had that kind of quality."
Many children are being affected by this because of social contagion, furthered by the internet, he said.
Elizabeth Johnston, who also spoke during the panel, said she has led movements of parents to push back against all kinds of gender madness in public schools. Her speech, however, was cut short to allow time for Vice President Mike Pence to speak.
