Alabama and at least four other states have indicated they’ll say “no” to the May 13 transgender bathroom directive issued to all United States public school districts by the Obama administration.
However, Obama’s Departments of Justice and Education, which issued the directive, warned school districts that they could lose millions in federal education funding if they don’t allow students to access bathrooms based upon their gender identity rather than their biological sex.
Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange vowed to fight the directive and said in a May 13 statement that he will “work with other attorneys general to challenge it.” Bathroom usage is a topic that local school officials and parents should be able to decide, Strange said.
‘Separate sexes’
“Title IX allows schools to have separate facilities for separate sexes,” Strange said. “The law says ‘sex,’ not gender identity.”
Other leaders throughout the U.S. have voiced their opposition to the directive.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said he will fight any attempt at coercion from the Obama administration on the issue, according to Christianity Today.
Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt said the directive is “disingenuous at best” and “elevates the status of transgender students over those who would define their sex based on biology and who would seek to have their definition honored in the most private of places.”
“By conditioning the receipt of federal funds on compliance … schools have been given an ultimatum: take it or lose it. As you must know this leaves many schools without any real choice.”
Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant said in a statement, “Mississippi’s public schools should not participate in the president’s social experiment.”
Beyond the legality of the issue lies another concern: Could the directive regarding bathrooms harm children struggling with their gender identity and increase the number who become transgender?
Two members of the Southern Baptist Convention’s (SBC) Mental Health Advisory Council, psychologists who have treated adolescents with gender dysphoria (the condition of not feeling at home in one’s God-given body in terms of gender), say it is possible.
“The science alone — neuroscience and psychology — demonstrates that what was done the other day was a terrible, terrible thing for our children,” psychologist and neuroscientist Matthew Stanford said of the directive.
Stanford, CEO of the Hope and Healing Center in Houston, Texas, said most children with gender dysphoria naturally accept their biological sex after passing through puberty because of increased maturity, positive social pressures and sometimes professional counseling. Obama’s directive strikes at a key aspect of the healing process by attempting to decrease or remove healthy social pressure for children to act according to their biological sex.
The administration “has pre-empted the process by which the majority of children go on not to live as transgendered individuals,” said Stanford, who served on SBC Executive Committee President Frank S. Page’s 2014–2015 Mental Health Advisory Council.
The departments of Education and Justice are “saying we should treat these children as if they are transgender [and] we should begin to affirm that. And what’s going to happen is those numbers [of students to naturally outgrow gender dysphoria] are going to start to slip,” Stanford noted. “We’re going to have more and more children that move into adulthood as transgendered.”
Negative effects
Even most secularists and social liberals in the counseling profession agree gender dysphoria is bad and has negative effects, Stanford said.
Obama has “come up with a policy” under which there will be “higher levels of suicide,” “more psychological distress” and “more people unable to form appropriate relationships,” Stanford said, citing demonstrated effects of gender dysphoria.
Chuck Hannaford, a clinical psychologist in Germantown, Tennessee, said that by calling more attention to transgenderism in public schools, the Obama administration might cause an increased number of children and adolescents to identify with the opposite sex.
“The old joke is when you take psychology courses in college, you begin to identify with every pathology you read about,” said Hannaford, president of HeartLife Professional Soul Care and a former member of the Mental Health Advisory Council. Similarly, “now that we’ve made this transgender issue such a big deal,” children who have “had feelings or thoughts of same-sex attraction … are immediately going to begin to think, ‘Gosh, I wonder if I’m in that category’” of transgender.
“And they’re going to feel freer to experiment with that, which is a very detrimental process,” Hannaford said.
For teens struggling with gender dysphoria, a better policy than open restroom access is to provide a single-occupant restroom or changing facility, Hannaford said. Children and adolescents with gender dysphoria are “disgusted” with their own anatomy and do not want to be around peers of either gender in situations involving nudity, he said.
Feelings of a teenager
Though media reports have pointed to some transgender adolescents who say they feel happy about Obama’s directive, Hannaford said the feelings of teenagers are a poor way to measure the wisdom of public policy.
“Kids by nature are going to over-identify with groups that make them feel valuable, that make them feel comfortable,” Hannaford said. A transgender teen who says the administration’s restroom directive makes him feel relieved “is not going to feel very relieved when he goes into a restroom and receives ridicule. It’s going to create problems. It just creates a dynamic that isn’t healthy. It doesn’t allow them to work through” their issues.
“Clinically, this is a really bad idea. There are better solutions for reducing stigma and providing support,” he said.
The views of Stanford and Hannaford align with a document released in March by the American College of Pediatricians, a socially conservative medical association distinct from the larger American Academy of Pediatrics. The document, titled “Gender Ideology Harms Children,” rejected “all policies that condition children to accept as normal a life of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex.”
Citing the American Psychiatric Association’s “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” the document noted, “As many as 98 percent of gender confused boys and 88 percent of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty.”
The college concluded, “Endorsing gender discordance as normal via public education and legal policies will confuse children and parents, leading more children to present to ‘gender clinics’ where they will be given puberty-blocking drugs. This, in turn, virtually ensures that they will ‘choose’ a lifetime of carcinogenic and otherwise toxic cross-sex hormones, and likely consider unnecessary surgical mutilation of their healthy body parts as young adults.”
(Baptist Press, TAB)
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