David Marcus

Gender self-ID and the challenge for America’s children

America’s Surgeon General Vivek Murthy wisely advised this week that thirteen years of age is too young for kids to be on social media. Hear, hear. But we must ask: if thirteen is not old enough for Twitter or Facebook, how is it, according to the Biden administration, totally old enough to opt for life-changing hormone blockers if a child just knows deep down they are a different gender?

According to Murthy, thirteen-year-olds are still ‘developing their identity’. Therefore, he rightly reasons, the experience of social media with all of its mean-spiritedness and self-aggrandisement may harm a child who stares too long into its distorted funhouse mirror.

But if a thirteen-year-old is still ‘developing their identity’, then how on earth can we allow him or her – yes, him or her – to decide on a course of medical treatment that could have negative long-lasting effects solely on the basis that he or she is fully aware of what their ‘gender identity’ is? You see the problem here?

Too young for Twitter is too young to chop off body parts or suppress hormones

The proponents of treatment, be it in the form of hormone blockers or even surgeries, assure us that these horrors are ‘gender-affirming care’. Who could object to such a warm and fuzzy sounding thing? After all, don’t we want to care for children? But this is a diabolical and Orwellian lie. These are sex change operations conducted at the discretion of kids whom the Biden administration says are too young for a Tumblr account.

And let us also posit here that social media and the ‘transing’ of America’s youth may not be entirely separate phenomena. According to Komodo Health Inc, the number of American youths diagnosed with gender dysphoria – a fancy name for a child who thinks they are the wrong gender – leapt from 15,172 in 2017 to 42,197 in 2021.

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