Oh, the insecurities of youth! “Will I be popular?” “Can I play basketball as well as the other boys?” “Will the others let me hang out with them?” “Will boys like me?” “Will girls like me?” “Am I as strong/smart/good-looking/funny as the cool kids?”

Most kids and teens endure these doubts about themselves. It’s a normal part of growing up. This coming-of-age emotional agony was described as early as 1774 in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. In this novel, young Werther’s sorrow over unrequited love eventually becomes so unbearable that he leaves his hometown. Next, he is greatly embarrassed when he encounters a gathering of aristocrats. They ask him to leave since he is not a nobleman. Rejected by a girl and now rejected by aristocrats—the exquisite agony! What’s a boy to do?

The Transgender Recruitment Model

Today’s transgender activists know this youthful insecurity very well. They skillfully use it to get sensitive children and teens to identify as transgender. The process goes something like this:

1. A child or teenager is worried about being accepted by his peer group.
2. The left-wing teacher (or school counselor) notices this and offers an alternate explanation: “Do you think that maybe you feel weird because you are actually the other gender?” After skillfully sowing doubt, the counselor offers acceptance and reassurances that the child is special if he thinks he might be the wrong gender. And who doesn’t want to feel special?
3. Once the student says the magic words, “I think I’m a girl” (or for girls, “I think I’m a boy”), the counselor praises him and invites him to act and dress like the opposite sex at school. “We won’t tell your parents. It’s our little secret. Everybody at school will now treat you like you are the opposite sex, your true sex. We’ll even help you get surgery that will make your body look like the opposite sex.”

Bingo! Another recruit for the transgender movement. These children are being taught they are in the wrong body. Like the song “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” from the musical South Pacific about learning to hate people of another race:

“You’ve got to be taught from year to year
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught”

A recent case in point involves a mother who raised her two boys as gender neutral as possible. When the older boy appeared to enjoy the company of females over males, this was taken by the mother to mean her son might be transgender, and the younger son followed suit:

“Instead of orienting him to the reality of his biological sex by telling him he was a boy, we wanted him to tell us if he felt he was a boy or a girl. As true believers, we thought that he could be transgender, and that we were to ‘follow his lead’ to determine his true identity. …

None of the things that made our older son ‘different’ were true for our younger son.  He was more of a stereotypical boy, and did not show the same affinity for feminine things or females that his older brother did. We began to look more deeply at attachment again, and realized that the drive for ‘sameness’ is a primal attachment drive.  We felt that this assertion of being a girl was very likely a desire to be like his older sibling, in order to feel connected to him.” [italics added]

The younger son wanted the group connection—in this case, to be like his big brother.

“I felt like I was leaving a cult.”

This mother then took the younger son to a “gender therapist” who told her it was transphobic to not believe her younger son was transgender like his brother. Eventually, she rejected this. She wrote in a new essay, “I felt like I was leaving a cult.” Cults enforce their “one true way” of believing with ostracism. And this mother realized she would face ostracism from social justice activists and transgender believers:

“I assure you, nothing anyone could say or do can come close to the feelings of anguish I have felt in realizing that my beliefs and actions could have caused irreversible harm to my own child.”

Once the self-righteous transgender zealots have a child in their grip, they fight ferociously to keep him there. They fight with invectives, not logic: “You’re a racist transphobic neanderthal!”

But in reality, as this story shows, it’s only these concerned parents and alarmed Americans that stand between these kids and the harms of radical transgender ideology. As the Bible says, “It is better for him if a millstone is hung around his neck and he is thrown into the sea, than that he may cause one of these little ones to sin” (Luke 17:2).

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Image credit: Pexels-Rosemary Ketchum

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