Last updated on August 24th, 2021 at 12:06 pm
In July 2017, Michelle Cretella, M.D. and Executive Director of the American College of Pediatricians, published a banner article titled, “I’m a Pediatrician. How Transgender Ideology Has Infiltrated My Field and Produced Large-Scale Child Abuse.” Lamenting the fact that “the transgender movement has gained legs in the medical community and in our culture by offering a deeply flawed narrative,” Dr. Cretella exploded a number of the myths fueling that narrative, and issued a sober warning: “Transgender ideology is not just infecting our laws. It is intruding into the lives of the most innocent among us—children—and with the apparent growing support of the professional medical community.”
Not four years later, in June 2021, the American Medical Association decided that birth certificates should no longer record the sex of the child: “To protect individual privacy and to prevent discrimination, U.S. jurisdictions should remove sex designation on the birth certificate.” Acknowledging that the non-public “Certificate of Live Birth”—for governmental data collection and vital statistics—will still retain the record of the sex of the child, the AMA committed to advocate for a different standard for the public record: “Our American Medical Association will advocate for the removal of sex as a legal designation on the public portion of the birth certificate.”
In this tragic betrayal of its stated mission to “promote the art and science of medicine and the betterment of public health,” the AMA seems to have forgotten that at its very inception in 1847, it urged state governments to adopt measures to register births based on the sex of the child. Unfortunately, the “woke” tidal wave sweeping society has inundated the once-respected AMA, which has now bought into the deeply flawed narrative propagated by the Human Rights Campaign on its webpage Transgender Children & Youth: Understanding the Basics:
Children are not born knowing what it means to be a boy or a girl; they learn it from their parents, older children and others around them…. As soon as a doctor or other healthcare provider declares—based on observing the newborn’s external sex organs—‘it’s a boy’ or ‘it’s a girl,’ the world around a child begins to teach these lessons…. But gender does not simply exist in those binary terms; gender is more of a spectrum, with all individuals expressing and identifying with varying degrees of both masculinity and femininity.
Compare that distortion to the immutable truth preserved about the divinely created order of society and what it means to be human as recounted in the simple but majestic creation account of Genesis:
God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.
Or, as paraphrased by IOF founder Dr. Allan Carlson in his landmark The Natural Family: A Manifesto, “the natural family” is “part of the created order, imprinted on our natures, the source of bountiful joy, the fountain of new life, the bulwark of ordered liberty.” And the tragedy of our times, continues Dr. Carlson, is that the natural family “stands reviled and threatened… Foes have mounted attacks on all aspects of the natural family,” including an “assault of new, family-denying ideas” such as “a swelling rhetoric of ‘gender’ and ‘sexual’ rights.”
As IOF and our partners and friends have repeatedly urged, we are at a pivotal time in history. We cannot afford to stand by and allow this assault to prevail. We must proactively strengthen our own families and also courageously stand up and speak up to protect what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights acknowledges to be “the natural and fundamental group unit of society,” and what historian Will Durant called “the ultimate foundation of every civilization known to history,” namely, the family. In doing so, we continue to be guided by the inspirational and aspirational vision articulated by Dr. Carlson:
What is the natural family? The answer comes to the woman and the man who take the risk of turning their love into promises of lifelong devotion. In doing so, they will discover the story of the family, at once an ideal vision and a universal reality. In our time, they will also sense crisis, for malignant forces tear at the common source of freedom, order, virtue, and children. To set things right, they will need to look for clear principles, open goals, and a firm course of action. They also will need to reject false charges and weak compromise. Still, through these acts they shall come to know true liberty, a rekindled hearth, and a real homecoming, for themselves and for all humankind.