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Last Saturday’s Conway Daily Sun reported on a “Drag Queen Story Hour” at the local public library scheduled for later this month. According to the national organization for drag queens who want to read books to children, the target demographic is children aged 3-8. Books that “may be read” include: "Jacob's New Dress" by Sarah and Ian Hoffman and "Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress.” Children must be accompanied by an adult so parental permission is assumed. If that’s something to which parents want to expose their kids, so be it.
It’s hard to see this as anything but a further assault on societal sexual norms. I mean it’s not as if homosexual men are suddenly dedicated to raising literacy rates. The library program is voluntary but elementary schools are mandatory and supported by our tax dollars. Similar homosexual propaganda is endorsed by teachers’ unions and education bureaucrats at all levels and we’re paying for it.
Just before I retired from teaching, I learned that a boy in the lower grades thought he was a girl. His parents evidently believed he was and insisted that everyone at the local elementary school behave as if he were. I figured I’d be gone before he got to my classroom and wouldn’t have to deal with the situation, and that’s the way it worked out. All elementary staff used female pronouns and he used the girls’ bathroom. I don’t know how long his confusion lasted and I wondered if the parents went ahead with puberty-blocking drugs and penis amputation for him as well.
Perhaps the boy overcame his confusion. Seventy or eighty percent do according to brave psychiatrists not afraid to speak out, but when everyone with whom a sexually confused young person comes in contact cooperates with the pretense it will likely persist. I felt bad for the little boy because the rate of suicide attempts for so-called transgenders was and is higher than 40%. The LGBTQIA (and whatever other letters have added to the ever-expanding acronym) lobby insists it’s because of discrimination by people who continue to maintain that humans are male and female and cannot switch sex on a whim.
Others dispute that. According to Daniel Payne writing in the Federalist: “[I]t utterly ignores the most salient feature of transgender individuals: that they are mentally ill and need serious treatment. This is not a moral or ethical judgment. It is, rather, a fact. Individuals who believe they are a different sex than that of their biology are psychologically ill—self-evidently so—and one would quite reasonably expect a higher suicide rate from a portion of the population that suffers from so significant a mental illness (particularly a mental illness it is fashionable to indulge rather than treat).”
It was possible that a sexually confused student might transfer into my class and I resolved that I would not call her “him” or him “her” even if school authorities insisted and if I were fired I’d sue. I didn’t want to hurt the student’s feelings but I had a responsibility to other students. If I went along I’d signal that I believed it was possible to change from male to female or vice versa, and I didn’t. I wouldn’t pretend to admire the emperor’s new clothes or Morris’s tangerine dress as it were. I would resist the education Thought Police as well.
Mainstream media ignore developments counter to the LGBTQIA narrative so you’re not likely to read about so-called “transgenders” who regret their transition and seek to reverse their surgery. The Daily Wire quotes Professor Miroslav Djordjevic of Belgrade, one of the world’s leading genital reconstructive surgeons: “Definitely reversal surgery and regret in transgender persons is one of the very hot topics. Generally, we have to support all research in this field.” But universities will not fund it because it counters the LGBTQIA narrative.
Last week, Maine Governor Janet Mills signed a bill banning “conversion therapy” defined as: “any practice or treatment that seeks or claims to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity.” Maine therapists could lose their license if they help a child accept his/her biological sex. Canada’s Supreme Court ruled last month that a parent must allow his 14-year-old daughter to receive male hormone injections. Last year, an Ohio judge removed a female child from her parents’ custody because they refused to allow hormone injections.
Last year, Brown University Assistant Professor Lisa Littman MD published a research study on ROGD — “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” in PLOS One a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Among her findings: “Parents describe that the onset of gender dysphoria seemed to occur in the context of belonging to a[an adolescent female] peer group where one, multiple, or even all of the friends have become gender dysphoric and transgender-identified during the same timeframe.” To this former teacher of adolescent girls, her conclusions seemed eminently plausible.
Littman was vilified by the LGBTQIA lobby for “using transphobic dogwhistles” because she pulled the rug out from under the fashionable transgender juggernaut now getting its nose in the tent of the Conway Public Library.
