Last updated on February 20th, 2021 at 03:51 am
If you’re a parent, a teacher, an uncle or aunt, or anyone who, in any capacity, has children in your life in whose welfare you take an interest or for whom you are responsible: then you need to read this.
Rod Dreher at the American Conservative has a blockbuster article that every single grown-up in our country (which, sadly, is not synonymous with “every adult,” as we see more clearly each day) needs to reflect upon and help disseminate.
The article is in essentially two parts. In the first part, he covers a shocking report by author Abigail Shrier (on whose book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, iFamNews has previously reported—here and here).
In Shrier’s piece, entitled “Inside Planned Parenthood’s Gender Factory: An Ex-Reproductive Health Assistant Speaks Out,” she interviews a former Planned Parenthood employee who worked in a clinic “located in a small town of roughly 30,000.” It is notable that the interviewee is an abortion supporter; therefore, not someone ideologically opposed to Planned Parenthood’s central mission or with an “axe to grind.” She even notes, apparently unabashedly, how “[a]bortions were the clinic’s ‘bread and butter.'” However, another of her clinic’s procedures was less palatable for this particular employee, though a promising business avenue for Planned Parenthood.
She told Shrier that the new phenomenon of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) was a lucrative prospect for the organization; in the woman’s words,
[T]rans identifying kids are cash cows, and they are kept on the hook for the foreseeable future in terms of follow-up appointments, bloodwork, meetings, etc., whereas abortions are (hopefully) a one-and-done situation.
Shrier says her own research was unsuccessful in finding out just how much of Planned Parenthood’s revenue stream is based on this emerging, diabolical market—unsurprising given Planned Parenthood’s perennial reluctance to report firm numbers or allow proper oversight of its operations. But Shrier did find that Planned Parenthood itself reports that it is “the second largest provider of Gender Affirming Hormone Care” in America.
Shrier’s interviewee told her, shockingly, that she recalls an average of “1-2 new biologically female teen patients seeking testosterone… per day” [!] at the clinic where she worked (emphasis added). Even if we take the low end of that estimate, and say it was one per day during the employee’s 18 months working at the clinic, that would still mean about 542 teenage girls during that time. And in a town of 30,000, assuming an average national demographic distribution of age/sex for the population, this would amount to between 9 and 10% of all the teenage girls in the community seeking testosterone in the clinic in just that 18-month period!
Shrier’s interview details how Planned Parenthood employees were taught to ask leading questions; how they lacked proper certifications to make diagnoses but did so anyway; and how ultimately there was an “off-site… rubber stamp” approval process for this new “cash cow” of the clinic’s work.
Dreher brings out more of the most essentially salient points in Shrier’s article, but her whole piece is worth reading.
Back to Dreher’s piece itself. In the second part of his article, he presents his own interview with Mary Hasson, director of the DC-based think tank, the Catholic Women’s Forum at the Ethics & Public Policy Center. Her organization recently launched a new project, Person and Identity, which Dreher notes is primarily directed toward Catholics, but relevant for a much wider audience. In his words, “my perusal of [Person and Identity’s] pages reveals that most of the information there is useful for all Christians. Not only useful, but a godsend.”
The interview with Hasson is as stirring and shocking as Shrier’s interview with the anonymous Planned Parenthood worker. Hasson tells Dreher of a conference addressed by Dr. Jo Olson-Kennedy, Medical Director of The Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, one of the top trans-affirming doctors in the US. In one of Olson-Kennedy’s presentations, Hasson reveals, she,
advised pediatricians to be proactive in raising sex and gender questions — asking questions about whether kids like boys or girls or both, or whether they are comfortable in their bodies, etc. — no matter whether a kid comes in for a sore throat, bee sting, or for a physical. (The parents [sic] is always shooed out of the room). It is insidious and designed to sow self-doubt in kids, who can’t help wonder why the doc is always asking if the child is gay, etc. Docs are told that their operating presumption should be that “any” child could be LGBTQ, so all kids should be addressed in a way to make it easy to “come out” or explore those identities.
The rest of Hasson’s interview reads like a prophetic warning for parents, pastors, educators, medial professionals, and anyone who wants what’s best for the young people of our country. For example, she cautions about the “social contagion” element at play in teen transgender diagnoses, in stark terms:
3% of young people identify as trans, but this is the tip of the iceberg. Social contagion is at work, which means it’s more important to pay attention to your child’s immediate environment. A school with one “trans” child will soon have five, with a dozen more who are “questioning.” The adolescent world is flooded with images presenting “trans” as normal and healthy. Teens on social media face daily dilemmas – when a classmate (or a celebrity) “comes out” as “trans” or “non-binary” on Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok, should they “like” the trans declaration or risk being tagged as a “hater”? Should they signal their wokeness by adding trans or rainbow flags to their profiles for Pride month or any of the dozens of LGBT-themed days?
The stakes of what Hasson is warning us about could not be higher. It really is a life-and-death matter, and Hasson does not mince words in her interview with Dreher: “The culture is like a powerful riptide pulling our kids out to sea, and many of them are drowning.”
I encourage all our readers to go and read the whole thing. Then read Shrier’s pieice. Then read her book. And share this information with everyone you know.
There is a war on for the lives and souls of our children, and the Vandals are at the gates. Long past is the time when simply hunkering down and waiting for the crisis to pass was a viable option. We need to go on the offensive, driving this ideology out of our schools and out of kids’ lives: by following more closely the education they’re receiving, by inquiring about their peer relationships, by monitoring assiduously and policing their social media interactions, by censoring the television, movie, and music content they are allowed to consume, and really by keeping a close watch on any potential pathway whereby this pernicious and deadly message can make its way into our homes.
The warnings Dreher, Shrier, and Hasson have for all of us are as urgent a message as could be, and most timely: to be informed in these matters is to be forewarned, and therefore armed for vigilance. But the duty incumbent upon each of us goes beyond simply protecting our own families and homes: we need to form a concerted joint resistance to this dangerous ideology and its rapid colonization of our culture.
Hasson’s closing words, about the Church, can just as easily be applied to all of us regardless of creed or confession: “If the Church”—that is, if each of us—“doesn’t stand up and speak the truth with confidence and boldness, then who will?”