Where child sex-change social contagion was birthed, nursed – and the rising rejection of it

As public support for sex changes on minors craters, one has to wonder: How did we ever get to the point where it’s socially and medically acceptable to “transition” children and sexually disfigure and arguably disable teens?

The answer appears to be a perfect storm of modern medicine’s capacity for overreach as well as social media’s insidious reach into pliable young minds – the extent of damage from which is only now being understood.

Then add in a suffocating, often ruthless societal pressure to nod and accept, without question, a rather sudden notion in the evolution of mankind that changing sexes through the magic of medicine and the illusion of “identity” is not only possible but perfectly fine even among the toddler set.

Indeed, at HealthyChildren.org, run by the American Academy of Pediatrics – “Powered by pediatricians. Trusted by parents” – a 2018 article (updated in 2024) claims that, “By age four: Most children have a stable sense of their gender identity.”

“Can a child this young actually know if they identify differently than their assigned gender at birth?” the mother of a 4-year old writes in a 2022 article at the leftist RethinkingSchools.org. “Yes.”

In the article, she initially calls the boy her son. But while reading him the cross-dressing children’s book Jacob’s New Dress “at his request for the umpteenth time over the past week,” she asks him: “How is school going? Do kids say anything about the dresses you wear?”; “Do you believe that there are lots of ways to be a boy? That boys can wear dresses?”

When he replies in the affirmative, she asks, “Do you feel like a boy?”

“No, mom. I’m a girl,” he says.

That’s apparently enough for the mother to go on, as she then writes, changing how she refers to his gender, “My daughter’s statement could not have been more direct, honest, and clear.”

Such facile, uncritical acceptance of a child’s disregard of basic biology – by parents and pediatricians alike – has led to countless kids and adolescents taking puberty blockers that impede sex hormones, for which the side effects include “reductions in bone density and fertility, and changes in adult height,” and for which “longer term data … are still lacking.”

Meanwhile, based almost exclusively on the often-fickle feelings of a minor, his or her reproductive organs may be removed and cross-sex genitals fabricated from other parts of the anatomy not so designed.

To call that experimental may be to vastly understate the case, with critics calling “sex-reassignment surgery” the stuff of Frankenstein.

In an article headlined “Vaginoplasty for Gender Affirmation” at hopkinsmedicine.org, updated only last June, two “featured experts” tidily claim “Gender affirming surgery can be used to create a vulva and vagina. It involves removing the penis, testicles and scrotum.

“During a vaginoplasty procedure, tissue in the genital area is rearranged to create a vaginal canal (or opening) and vulva (external genitalia), including the labia. A version of vaginoplasty called vulvoplasty can create a feminine-appearing outer genital area with a shallow vaginal canal that cannot be used for receptive penetrative intercourse.”

For girls, Johns Hopkins writes in a separate article, there’s phalloplasty – which can include:

• Creating the penis using tissue from the forearm. The area where the forearm tissue is taken will require a skin graft.
• Lengthening the urethra so you are able to stand to urinate
• Creating the tip (glans) of the penis
• Creating the scrotum
• Removing the vagina, uterus and ovaries
• Placing erectile and testicular implants

But is this really “creating” the same reproductive organs that nature does – or is it just the faint illusion of it?

Then there’s the field of “non-binary” operations, which one surgeon describes as “removing all external genitalia to create a smooth transition from the abdomen to the groin.” Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo writes that that doctor “styles himself as a champion of science and equality, but he more closely resembles Dr. Frankenstein.”

The truth is, neither a Mary Shelley novel nor the Dark Ages ever saw the kind of mutilating sex-change surgeries that today’s formerly respected medical institutions have performed and stood behind.

The question is, how did we ever get here?

The Dutch Protocol

While claiming “there have always” been gender-dysphoric youths, The New York Times contends modern medicine’s intrusive intercessions have “a really clear beginning, and it’s one that pretty much everyone in the field knows about and points to, and it starts in the Netherlands.”

In a podcast series last June called “The Protocol,” the Times interviewed FG – a Dutch girl, now living as a grown man, who is purported to be the first to be given puberty blockers in the 1980s to ward off regular-onset puberty, in procedures that would become known as the Dutch Protocol.

Such treatments were beginning to be offered to younger patients than previously – in FG’s case, at age 12 or 13.

“The next step would be to go off the blockers and onto hormones,” the Times reports. “In [FG’s] case, testosterone – a step that was only available because [Dutch doctors had arbitrarily] lowered the age from 18 to 16.”

But “rather than go through this transition in front of his classmates, FG decided to stay on the blockers an extra two years – meaning his body essentially remained frozen in his 13-year-old state until he was 18.”

“Because of him,” the protocol’s lead Dr. Peggy Cohen-Kettenis said of FG, “we thought maybe we should do this more often, giving blocking hormones.”

“Because of FG,” echoes the Times, “Peggy thought that more kids could benefit from what had clearly been a transformational treatment for him. And she thought that the benefits of puberty blockers were twofold: They could prevent young bodies from growing in an undesired direction; they also made it possible for kids to consider, without that stress, whether they wanted to go on to the next steps, which would be irreversible.

“She felt the blockers would give kids time to think. But to give this treatment to more kids, Peggy felt they needed a process.”

“You cannot just start and do whatever we want, particularly in the beginning, when you have no idea whether what you’re doing is OK,” she said.

“She began to codify a protocol – what would come to be known as the Dutch Protocol,” said the Times, asking her: “How would you define the Dutch protocol?”

“Well, I think, as a very careful way to figure out who should have what kind of treatment to feel like they want to feel.”

Unravelling research

The Dutch Protocol for use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, first published in 1998, set the stage for the subsequent explosion in what’s euphemistically called “gender-affirming care.” But both the sex-change treatments for minors and the protocol that gave rise to it have come into disrepute, with hospitals ending them, laws banning them and lawsuits punishing them.

Critics have pointed to the research’s small sample sizes and lack of control groups, and the protocol’s later expansion from severe and early dysphoria cases to sudden-onset cases in adolescents where other purely psychological variables are present.

Opponents also argue puberty blockers aren’t harmless “pause buttons” but in fact may raise concerns regarding brain development and cognitive functioning.

Fact is, European countries in recent years began restricting or prohibiting puberty blockers for gender dysphoria, including Finland, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Even the Netherlands is evaluating its own protocol.

Public opinion also appears to have turned, perhaps as more people feel empowered to speak their minds on the topic: A 2023 poll by Saint Louis University and YouGov found 73% of Missouri voters oppose sex-change surgeries for minors.

In February, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons pulled its support for sex-change surgeries for those under 19, noting a lack of evidence that the benefits outweigh the risks.

The belated scrutiny of the sex-change craze comes far too late for many, particularly young girls whom author Abigail Shrier argues in her landmark 2020 book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters have suffered from a social contagion as much as anything.

It’s a phenomenon coined “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” by Dr. Lisa Littman, president of the Gender Dysphoria Institute.

“First introduced by Lisa Littman in a 2018 study of parental reports,” says a study at the National Library of Medicine, “it describes a subset of youth, primarily natal females, with no childhood indicators of gender dysphoria but with a sudden emergence of gender dysphoria symptoms during puberty or after its completion.

“For them, identifying as transgender is assumed to serve as a maladaptive coping mechanism for underlying mental health issues and is linked to social influences from peer groups and through social media.”

Gender ideology, incubated in academia, has done its most damage in social media and society at large, argues Dr. Kurt Miceli, chief medical officer at medical nonprofit Do No Harm.

“Powerful peer and social media dynamics unfortunately amplified this framework,” Miceli told The Lion, “encouraging many children to falsely interpret their distress through the belief that they were ‘born in the wrong body.’

“Today, we see the tragic consequences of an ideology that has led children down a path of considerable, irreversible harm through interventions with no demonstrable benefit. Medicine must do better. We must confront these failures honestly and rebuild a standard of care grounded in evidence, developmental reality, and the duty to protect children from irreversible harm.

“Psychological support must once again become the foundation of care, ensuring that vulnerable youth are appropriately supported and not medicalized.”

This is the first part of a multi-part series.