We are publishing here the lecture that our Marija Stajić gave on the 15th of November 2022 in the Church of the Ascension in Belgrade, Serbia.
iFamNews editorial
For more than a year now, the topic I have been dealing with the most is gender ideology and everything related to it. This is one of the greatest dangers that threatens not only the family but also the very nature of man as divided into two sexes. It is not so easy to make someone think that they are gay – although even that is becoming easier under the influence of mass media and popular culture–but it is quite easy to influence young people in a sensitive period of life when gender ambivalence often arises and teenagers define themselves in relation to their environment, which means both people of the opposite and the same sex–through friendships and love relationships.
No one will convince us, adults, that the cause of all our problems in life and the reason for feeling like we do not belong or fit into social patterns is that we are “trapped in the wrong body”. But young people, especially girls who are beginning to develop secondary sexual characteristics as they begin to produce female reproductive hormones, are very sensitive and susceptible to environmental influences. We used to have the problem that otherwise slim and even thin teenage girls go on strict diets because they think they are not starved enough as fashion models, and today such insecure girls fall prey to gender ideologues who tell them they are actually boys.
The numbers are relentless and tragic. The latest research, published on 17 October in the prestigious scientific journal JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), showed that between 2016 and 2019, the number of double mastectomies–surgical removal of breasts, in this case completely healthy ones–among girls who want to become boys increased by 400%. The research says that in that three-year period, “about 1,130 chest reconstruction surgeries were performed on children under the age of 18,” with girls making up the largest number of patients (1,114 compared to 16 breast reconstruction surgeries for boys).
The research also showed that many children had underlying problems and diagnoses in addition to gender dysphoria (feeling of not belonging to one’s gender): “Psychiatric conditions are the most common comorbidities, 21.1% of patients had anxiety and 16.2% depression.” Only 19.9% of adolescents undergoing breast reconstruction surgery used hormone therapy for ‘gender confirmation’.”
Thousands of girls fall for the lie that they can actually change their sex. They go for amputation of healthy breasts to look like boys, but that doesn’t mean they can actually become boys. Dr. Paul McHugh, Professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, stated: “Men who change gender do not become women, nor do women who change gender become men. They all become feminized men or macho women, fakes and imitators of the gender they ‘identify’ with.”
The most thorough study that followed people after sex change surgery, some even for 30 years, was conducted in Sweden, a country where homosexuality and transgenderism are widely accepted in society and where gender ideologues cannot say that LGBT people have mental problems because society condemns them. That study concluded that 10–15 years after gender reassignment surgery, the suicide rate among these individuals is as much as 20 times higher than that of their peers who did not undergo such surgery.
Then we have a review paper (conducted by an institute at the University of Birmingham) that looked at more than 100 studies that followed transsexuals after sex reassignment surgery. The bottom line is that no study provides conclusive evidence that gender reassignment is good for patients. The institute found that most research was poorly designed and that they skewed the results in favor of physical gender reassignment. There was no evaluation of whether other treatments, such as long-term counseling, could help transsexuals, or whether their gender confusion might diminish over time.
The director of that institute stated: “It is very uncertain whether gender change is a good thing or a bad thing. Even when doctors are careful to perform these operations only on ‘appropriate patients’, there is still a large number of people who undergo the operation but are still traumatized–often enough to commit suicide.”
And on the other hand, we have the modus operandi of gender ideologues who recruit children and instruct them, telling them that if their parents prevent them from dressing as the opposite sex, they should say that they will kill themselves if they are not allowed to do this. When parents come to such psychologists and experts for counseling, they tell them: “It’s better to have a living son than a dead daughter.” And this is repeated thousands of times in those “developed countries” to which our people in Serbia flock for a better life, and which our liberals here say are “ordered”, and that we should emulate their way of life so that we too can be “like all normal world.”
Well, in that “normal world” of theirs, you are a racist and a hater if you believe that marriage is the union of a man and a woman, that only women can give birth and breastfeed, if you are against the fact that a man can also give birth to a child (even if it is in fact a biological woman who kept her internal organs, but takes testosterone to grow a beard, and often has had her breasts removed), and if you refuse to use the neologisms–according to which there are no longer pregnant women but birthing persons, mother’s milk has become human milk, and breastfeeding has become chest feeding. We are at such a moment in history when the very existence of women is a problem for gender ideologues, so they try to erase words such as woman and mother and replace them with demeaning phrases such as “birthing persons” for mothers, and even worse “persons with a uterus” for women. This is not done only by some individuals who want to live as they think they should and how they feel, but it is imposed on the whole society because the guidelines for medical staff in Great Britain and Australia, for example, have been changed, instructing medical staff to use precisely such “inclusive” expressions so that no one would be offended. Not hurting someone’s feelings has become more important today than science, reason, and truth.
Since this has been happening in the West for several decades, and intensively in the last two, we now have persons there who changed their gender–in the process called transition–realized that this did not solve their psychological and other problems, but rather it often amplified them, and then went back to live in accordance with their biological sex (detransitioned), to a greater or lesser extent successfully, depending on what kind of interventions they had underwent. Among those people is a girl from Britain named Keira Bell, who at the age of 16, after just three one-hour conversations at the Tavistock clinic, was given hormone blockers, a year later she started taking testosterone, and at the age of 20 she had her breasts removed. Due to testosterone, her voice became rough, she grew a beard and became more muscular.
Keira Bell’s family history tells us everything we need to know: a child from a mixed marriage, her parents divorced when she was five years old, her mother was on welfare and later became an alcoholic and mentally ill, her father was not interested in her and her younger sister. She could not identify with her mother, whom she was ashamed of, she had no self-esteem or self-confidence, she was depressed because of the bad family situation, and she easily believed that her life would be better if she were a man. Over time, she realized that her gender dysphoria was a symptom of a overall bad psychological and mental state, and not its cause. Five years after the transition, she detransitioned–returned to her biological sex. Now she has to live with the knowledge that she may be infertile because of so many hormones she had taken, and even if she is able to give birth to a child, she will never be able to breastfeed it; the nerve endings in her chest are damaged, hence she feels nothing in certain parts of the chest; her genitals have atrophied, her voice is permanently altered, and the facial hair will never completely disappear. At the time Keira sued the clinic, the NHS officially claimed that the effects of puberty blockers are “completely reversable”, although they had no proof of this whatsoever. It now admitts that “little is known about the long-term side effects (of puberty blockers) on the teenage body and brain.”
Many other transgender cases that we write about on the Serbian page of the International Family News portal (ifamnews.com) concern persons with a similar background–problematic family history, broken and unstable families, one parent absent from the child’s life. Such is the example of a young man from Britain who was 25 years old when he changed his gender in 2010, and now, ten years later, he is trying to live as a man again, but he will never be able to do that completely. We published his truly shocking experience on iFamNews. We also have video testimony of a man named Walt Heyer who suffered various abuses in his childhood, and from his grandmother who was a seamstress and had made him a dress, he received affirmation as to how cute he was in that dress, so in the end he began to believe that he would solve his problems caused by various traumas by becoming a woman. He lived as a woman for eight years and only when he met a psychologist who is a man of faith and who brought him to God, did he manage to overcome those traumas and return to living as a man. Dysfunctional, and especially broken families are the cause of many social problems and unhappy individuals.
- 90% of young people who run away from home and live as homeless–do not have a father
- 85% of convicts in prisons grew up without a father
- 63% of teenagers who commit suicide grew up without a father
- 71% of pregnant teenage girls grew up in a family without a father
- 71% of high school dropouts grew up in fatherless families.
Marriage is not just an outdated religious concept. Marriage is a combination of three things that are necessary for children to grow up into stable persons–a mother, a father and stability. These are the three basic elements necessary for the proper social and emotional development of a child. If one of them is missing, children are disproportionately exposed to the risk of unfavorable physical, psychological and emotional development.
In today’s society, many forces work in the direction of individualism; thus, feminism tells women that they don’t need a man to be happy or have a fulfilling life. This is essentially a simplification and a half-truth because we know that the only thing we need in life is the Lord; if we have Him, we will have everything else that He knows is good for us. Thus, it is good for someone to live as a virgin in a monastery, and for another to have a family and live in the world. With His presence at the wedding in Cana of Galilee, the Lord blessed marriage as a union between a man and a woman, and now science shows that it is indeed the best and most stable environment for children to grow up in. Of course, life is what it is, and we are all people with weaknesses, so we also have not so perfect situations where one parent is raising children alone, or where children grow up with grandparents, and in those situations we try to do the best we can to help to such families and find a substitute for the parent or parents who are not there. But we don’t want to make single parents the norm to strive for in society, and we especially don’t want to encourage the practice of manufacturing babies at order, renting wombs and birthing children to same-sex couples where we know from the very moment of conception that the child will be intentionally deprived of at least one parent, and often of both biological parents.
But on the one hand, we should not be surprised that children and wombs (i.e., women) today have become commodified, as objects of trade, things that can be bought and sold. Since abortion was legalized, children have become something that one may or may not want, a commodity that is valued based on whether it meets one’s standards of quality, beauty, and health, or is “defective” because it has some deficiency and is therefore better for that child to be aborted than to be born because parents and society have become judges and evaluators of the quality of one’s life.
Behind us is the decades-long existence of the porn industry, which also objectifies the female body, reducing it to an object of lust and a means for satisfying one’s passion and achieving pleasure. Therefore, we should not be surprised that such films have become much more violent today than before, because if we do not see our fellow humans as persons, then that person easily becomes an object of purchase and a means of achieving pleasure.
Therefore, pornography, fornication, abortion, and I will also add hormonal birth control, as well as less and less premarital abstinence among young people–these are all products of various industries, and when we say that something is an industry, it is clear to us that the goal is profit. The porn industry is one of the most profitable in the world (up to 15 billion dollars a year), the abortion industry is worth about 3 billion dollars a year, the birth control industry about 8 billion dollars, the sex change industry in 2021 is estimated at $1.9 billion – and these figures are for the USA only. All these factors increase the probability of a dysfunctional marriage and an unhealthy family, which often ends in divorce, and then we have children from those marriages who fall prey to gender ideology, various addictions–once it was only alcohol and drugs, today there are also video games, electronic devices, pornography–and we have a vicious circle in society. Even the best government measures for encouraging births and marriages cannot yield result as long as these factors that I mentioned are dominant phenomena in society, and are even considered desirable, or a sign of emancipation, of breaking taboos, of fight against false modesty, and the like.
Thank God, we can still do a lot, at least for our families and our children, and we know that to change society we first need to change ourselves, even though the battle with the world is not easy, and has never been easy, in any period of human history. First, we as parents need to pray for our children. Second, we must show them the values we are preaching to them on our own example. A father cannot have a secret stash of porn magazines and talk to his children about virtues and abstinence. We cannot watch any and all movies and series, reality shows and other rubbish at home, and think that by going to the church service we have done what we need to do. We, mothers, cannot dress according to the latest fashion, which nowadays includes half-naked bodies, jeans that are more torn than whole, shorts with the buttocks sticking out from under them, and prevent our daughters from dressing like that too. If we want our children to leave the house decently dressed, we must be their first role model. You have to set rules that apply in your family, even if everyone else around you lives differently.
By sticking to the values that are important to you, you will teach your children an important lesson. It is important that they learn that they do not have to change to fit in with others. If we agree that today’s society is abnormal, that there are more and more divorces and unhappy people, then why would we want to fit into such a society? Why would we want our children to become like that abnormal and we can freely say sick society?
And the most important of all–we need to talk to our children. I mentioned this a lot these past months when we talked about the Europride, church processions for the family, and against LGBT ideology: children hear what we are talking about, they go with us to rallies, so when they ask you, “What is this ‘pride’?”, “What is ‘LGBT’?”, use that as a teaching moment because if you don’t tell them the truth, society will serve them ideology in colorful, rainbow colors. If your children have cell phones and use social media, chances are they know more about all this than you do, but you can certainly still talk to them, ask them what they think about it, encourage them to persevere in the values you raised them in–because society sends them different messages, and they are often lonely in their classroom or among their circle of friends because they go to church, wear a cross around their neck and fast. I know it’s scary when we hear these examples of gender reassignment and lifelong hormone therapy that leads to infertility, genital atrophy, decreased bone density and osteoporosis, increased risk of heart attack, decreased cognitive ability, and even loss of sexual ability after those surgeries, but first, we must know the enemy that is on an offensive against us, and second, we must be careful and alert, but not afraid because we know that victory is ultimately ours. It is only up to us to persevere in this one little part of the battle during our short lives.
Today is also the anniversary of the repose of our Patriarch Pavle of the blessed memory, so it is quite appropriate to end this lecture with his words of comfort that tell us that we are not alone: “Let us be God’s collaborators, doing what we can. And God will help us and deliver us from what we cannot fight.”
Thank you for your attention.
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