Gender Ideology & Child Sexual Abuse
Part 1: Transition as a Response to Abuse
This is Part 1 of a series of articles exploring the connection between the Gender Affirming Medical and Education models and the problems of child sex trafficking and child sexual abuse.
The erosion of parental authority when it comes to protecting and guiding children in developing their identities has deep implications.
It presents the idea that the people who have conceived a child and guided them from their first steps, who have gotten to know their habits, patterns and inherent struggles, know less than gender-affirmative doctors, and progressive teachers who have known the child for a tiny fraction of their lives.
The assumption that the state knows better and that parents can be removed from the delicate process of a child deciding who they are is a very large change for an entire nation to write into law!
Especially when these laws are based on a gender-affirmative model that has an international reputation for being medically unfounded and inherently dangerous. For example, a child in the UK cannot get access to puberty blockers to deal with their gender confusion unless they are part of a formal research setting, while in Canada it’s legally dangerous NOT to give a gender non-conforming child the exact same untested puberty blockers.
Canadian laws empower the state to transition children against the will of the parents, using the conversion therapy bill alongside the Infants Act, which states that doctors can administer any medical procedure they feel a child needs so long as the doctor believes the child understands.
This was the case for CD, a father whose name I cannot write because the Canadian government placed a publication ban on his name and face after he went public with his child’s story. His daughter was first socially transitioned, and then medically transitioned, without the mother’s consent, and without his consent. He was eventually imprisoned for speaking out.
Where did this secret transition process begin?
In his daughter’s school.
The gender affirmative model has been baked into the school system using SOGI 123 curricula since it was first implemented in British Columbia in 2016. Much like the conversion therapy bill has done for doctors and therapists, SOGI reinforces the power teachers have to socially transition children without parental involvement.
These changes in the school system do not empower teachers to do this after any kind of process proving that there is abuse or bigotry in the home. There is no process proving that it would be dangerous to invite the parents into a discussion about socially transitioning their child. They merely ask the children “Do you want your parents to know?” If the child says no, that’s it.
If you’re an adult human reading this then you likely remember how empowering it felt to keep secrets from your parents. You likely remember that, for a teenager, cutting your parents out of your life was sometimes “cool.”
Whether or not one supports these laws, there is no question that, generally speaking, they empower the state, and state-run educational institutions to take over the parental role of guiding children through important decisions. From socially transitioning to the permanent choice of medically transitioning, if the parents don’t align with a gender affirmative model that is deeply questioned in other nations, the state garners all the power.
These changes in the relationship between children, their parents and the state are important to outline because they are the roots of the rising conflict in Canada (and the Western world in general) in which parents are gathering across the nation to demand parental rights and to protect the innocence of their children.
These changes are at the heart of why parents walked in the 1 Million March 4 Children event across Canada. They are at the heart of why two Canadian provinces have now implemented laws banning schools from secretly socially transitioning children under 16 without the involvement of parents.
So what, if anything, does any of this have to do with the issue of child sexual abuse and child sex trafficking? Are the two issues related? Is one side of this debate more aligned with stopping child sex trafficking and sexual abuse than the other?
One of the first and simplest ways to answer this question is to ask if any of the systemic and societal changes being implemented in support of the gender affirmative model, such as schools being given the power to secretly social transition children, have checks and balances to ensure that a young person’s gender incongruence is not a response to sexual trauma.
Considering that the gender affirmative model being implemented in Canada and America is designed to follow the WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health) standards of care for transitioning trans youth, it’s relevant to point out that advice or insight about gender incongruence as a response to sexual trauma is nowhere to be found in the WPATH model. This is massive because it means that all the government employees, all the clinicians, and all the teachers being led by WPATH across Canada, are explicitly given a model that does not guide them to consider this possibility whatsoever.
As another example of how ideologically driven WPATH is, and how disassociated they are with the healthy development of sexuality in youth, one needs only to listen to Marci Bowers, the president of WPATH, admit that "Every single child who was truly blocked at Tanner stage 2 (9 - 11 years old) has never experienced orgasm.”
So is it any wonder that the WPATH model is blind to children who may have already been trafficked or abused, and are responding to their trauma by socially and medically transitioning? Does this seem like a world-class organization capable of protecting children from sexual abuse?
The sense that one is trapped in the wrong body is known to be a trauma response of victims of abuse. Body dysmorphia and childhood sexual abuse have long been understood as related struggles.
“In a recent study of the prevalence of childhood maltreatment among adults with body dysmorphia, researchers found that more than 75% of respondents had experienced some form of abuse as children. Indeed, the researchers found that adults who had a history of emotional neglect as children were especially vulnerable to BDD, though other forms of abuse, including physical and sexual abuse, were also identified as significant risk factors.”
Here is a clip from my documentary film CUT showing a trans influencer admitting they got a phalloplasty as a response to sexual abuse:
Coming back to the changes in the gender affirmative model in the UK right now, one of the issues cited for the changes was that it was blind to children presenting with gender dysphoria due to sexual abuse.
The drastic changes to UK affirmative care were based on a review performed by Dr. Hillary Cass, which set out to see if the clinical model in the UK was really helping children and to understand why the number of teenage girls seeking gender affirmative care had gone up by 4000% in 8 years.
Data coming out of the UK also showed that a notable number of the patients seeking gender-affirmative medical intervention had early childhood sexual abuse. They noted that this was being missed via clinical attempts to “affirm what the child felt.”
Given all the nuanced relations between cause, effect and treatment in gender-incongruent children, the Cass Review also warned against the dangers of early social transition, the foundational “right” trans activists are currently fighting to maintain in Canadian schools.
They insist that children have a right to socially transition without any parental involvement and, as a wildly progressive Toronto Star article recently put it, “Knowing Your Child’s Gender Identity is a Privilege, Not a Right.”
And yet here is what the Cass Review says about socially transitioning children:
“Social transition – this may not be thought of as an intervention or treatment, because it is not something that happens within health services. However, it is important to view it as an active intervention because it may have significant effects on the child or young person in terms of their psychological functioning. There are different views on the benefits versus the harms of early social transition…it is important to acknowledge that it is not a neutral act, and better information is needed about outcomes.”
Again, this is extremely important information when considering that children seeking transition could be doing so a response to sexual abuse. What if a child is being trafficked already and is trying to cope with the trauma?
“Sure,” you may say, “there may be rare cases in which gender nonconformity is related to abuse, but most are just trans kids trying to find themselves.”
Even if one capitulates to that conclusion, where are the checkpoints to consider this possibility and to protect childhood survivors of sexual abuse? Where are the systems in Canada to see if this child is responding to being physically or digitally trafficked?
It is nowhere in the WPATH guidelines. It is nowhere in the SOGI curriculum being given to teachers and school counsellors. It certainly doesn’t come into the consultations with surgeons performing double mastectomies.
As reported in Abigail Schrier’s Irreversible Damage:
"Dr. McLean and other top surgeons like him offer masculinizing double mastectomies to natal females who do not even identify as men."
A girl simply needs to feel she is "non-binary" and his clinic will make it as easy as possible to give that girl a double mastectomy. Schrier questioned this in her interview with McLean:
"Wait a minute, I pushed back. I thought the point of the surgery was to turn a woman into a convincing man? What is the justification for cutting off a woman's breasts to turn her into a-neither?”
"You know, I long ago stopped trying to totally understand this," he conceded. "I think more than understanding, you need acceptance of this is how the patient is, how the person feels about themselves, and they need to be understood that this is how they feel."
So instead of using mental health checks, as is now mandated in the UK, Mclean doesn't require a therapists referral at all:
"Top surgeons like Dr. McLean do not require a therapist’s referral; their patients are admitted for surgery based on their own desire to appear more like a boy (or a "non-binary" person)."
McLean's website states that:
"While we at the McLean Clinic use “Informed Consent”, many other surgeons will require a support letter from a qualified mental health professional attesting to the above and recommending top surgery."
What about parental consent? More from McLean's website:
"Although it’s a requirement that patients be over the age of majority, in some cases adolescents have undergone this procedure with the permission of their parents. In these cases it’s generally recommended that the patient has spent a significant amount of time adjusting to their new gender role before the procedure is performed."
The point is that all the changes in Canada being made in the name of gender-affirming care, also happen to disempower parents, while “empowering” potentially traumatized children to make life-altering decisions.
They are given this power while being surrounded by adults outside their family who are legally and socially pressured to push children toward transition. And all of this is set up without any systemic checks and balances for children who have been or are being sexually abused.
Why has the gender affirmative model been set up to ignore sexual trauma?
Why have all these changes, allegedly set up to protect gender non-conforming youth, failed to guard children in this way?
Why has the power of a stable family unit, filled with the trust and privacy of a healthy, thriving child-parent relationship been so easily discounted as a front line?
Stay tuned for part 2: Gender Ideology & Child Sex Trafficking - Destabilization of the Family.
This is profoundly important. Thank you.
I sent it to a woman whose moving story told of her own abuse, trauma-driven descent into self-hatred, the dysphoria accompanying it, and the “professionals” who’s ministrations deepened her trauma. Her lament and plea: ask these children if they have been abused. Help them. No one ever did.
That is where our compassion should take us.
I hope she will send it to you.
Thank you for writing this. Restacked. Saved.