We are failing the test of protecting our children

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-aggrandizement 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?

The proponents of this child mutilation, 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. How does that number nearly triple in just four years?

The only explanation for such a surge is social contagion, which is to say a fad. And where’s the most likely place that your child or mine might discover or develop that fad? Of course it’s social media, where transgender advocates prey on kids, telling them that if their own family rejects their claims of transsexuality, there is a willing and waiting family of drag queens and activists ready to provide them a new home. There oughta be a word for that…

As Katherine Dee posits, “the internet has, historically, created a weird environment where these identities can be ‘tried out,’ usually in the context of certain subcultures. None of this starts on Tumblr. I’d say Tumblr was the lab leak. It amplified problems, it created new ones, it refined others. It’s definitely the point of this cycle going mainstream with a lot of help from the press.”

Meanwhile in public schools all across the country, these childhood fantasies of being born in the wrong body are nurtured by teachers and school systems who rely on faux-experts to defend their meddling in the minds of our kids. You see, they know better than us ignorant parents.

They offer us a menacing Sophie’s choice, arguing that if we do not agree with the fantasy, embrace it and allow medical treatment for it, we put the child at risk of suicide. The evidence of this is slim to none — and yet these activists happily point a metaphorical gun at the heads of the kids of terrified parents. That is if they even bother to inform the parents at all.

This is madness. It’s not nuanced, it’s not complicated: it’s insane. Even worse is that this has nothing to do with helping kids. This is about affirming adults whose delusions about gender only make sense if they are born that way, and for that to be true, they need trans kids, even if, as the surgeon general made clear, those kids’ identities are still developing.

This needs to be a wake-up call for every adult in the United States. We can no longer pretend any of this makes the slightest bit of sense. Kids are being irrevocably harmed — and that is our fault. If this recommendation about social media and kids doesn’t open our eyes, then what will?

The curtain needs to come down on this damaging farce. Of course thirteen-year-olds should not be able to choose their own gender and suffer the myriad physical risks of medical intervention to cure an ailment that doesn’t exist. Make no mistake, this is a test and we are failing it. Too young for Twitter is too young to chop off body parts or suppress hormones. It’s clear, it’s obvious — and it’s time to stop the madness.