Communicating the Truth about Gender Ideology – Part 1

Communicating the truth about gender ideology has sometimes been difficult for social conservatives, because gender ideology changes terms of the debate (“gender” instead of “sex,” and hitherto unknown terms “transgender,” “cisgender,” which are presented as realities). The Colson Center for Christian Worldview presented a discussion on how to think about and engage gender ideology on January 16. Colson Center President John Stonestreet interviewed Dr. Miriam Grossman, a psychiatrist “with a subspecialty in child analysis and psychiatry,” and Dr. Stephen Grcevich, and child and adolescent psychiatrist and President of Key Ministry, which provides “training, consultation, and resources” to churches seeking to welcome families with disabilities.  

Stonestreet emphasized that things change quickly in the modern world. The idea of transgenderism, that someone can be “born into the wrong body” has suddenly appeared in the Western world, but it cuts across the life of many people in many walks of life. If people cannot be objectively classified as male or female, enormous disruption occurs in families, schools, churches, businesses, social services and the world at large.

Like many radical ideologies, gender ideology at first seemed unstoppable. This was the case at the beginning of 2023, Stonestreet maintained. But by the beginning of 2024, pushback is in evidence. “Just getting the medical facts out” has been important. “The kids will be fine, and the science is settled” was the slogan gender ideologists used. To the contrary, Stonestreet said, our so far relatively brief acquaintance with transgenderism shows that “the kids aren’t fine, and the science is anything but settled.”

The Danger of Transgenderism in the New Social Environment

In introducing Miriam Grossman, Stonestreet said that her practice “focuses on gender distressed young people and their parents, [and] she believes that every child is born in the right body.” He mentioned her book, Lost in Trans Nation: a Child Psychiatrist’s Guide Out of the Madness.

Grossman said that she “wrote the book because I couldn’t not write it. I had seen too much over the years … too much to be able to just sit on it, and not do anything.” She said that gender doctrine is a “belief system” and an “ideology,” which has “no basis in science.” From her work she “has seen how it shatters lives, the lives of young people, the lives of their parents, their parents’ marriages sometimes end, and it’s an incredibly destructive force, and so I had to speak up about it. There are terrible wrongs that are being done, there are atrocities that are being performed in the offices of doctors and hospitals. It is flat out wrong, and without evidence of long-term benefit.” But not only are people in general not supposed to criticize it, she said, but children at school are expected to conform to the ideology, using the new names of classmates who have decided (or agreed to) “gender transitioning,” and using new (and false) pronouns in referring to those classmates. Additionally, girls are expected to accept boys in their bathrooms and locker rooms.

Grossman said “it is a dangerous idea for a child to believe that their sex was randomly assigned when they were born. It’s a dangerous idea to lead a child to believe that their physical, their biology can be denied without paying a price … It’s wrong to tell children that adults that want to be cautious …  before accepting any of this [transgenderism] are [one of the] bad people, are ‘transphobic’ and bigoted. And perhaps the children are told ‘if you live in a home like that, where your parents are not accepting your identity automatically, in a knee-jerk way, if your parents are not celebrating and supporting you in your ‘gender journey,’ well maybe that’s a toxic home that you need to get out of. And P.S., we can help you get out of your home.”

She said that this does really happen, when Child Protective Services intervenes, and considers parents to be “‘emotionally abusive,’ and ‘medically neglectful’ for not putting their child on this path toward medical treatments [i.e., puberty blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones] and surgical intervention [e.g., castration and mastectomies]. They have actually lost their children.” Grossman said she wanted parents to be well-informed about transgenderism and “gender transitioning” before it happens that their child claims to be “transgender.” They need to know the changes that have happened with the medical profession and legal doctrine before they face their own personal crisis.

Stonestreet observed that many of the chapters in Grossman’s book each talk about a different “dangerous idea.” He mentioned such things as “sex is assigned at birth,” and that “parents are potentially enemies.” He also mentioned “John Money’s dangerous idea.” Grossman said that “John Money’s dangerous idea was that we have something called a psychological sex in addition to our biological sex, and the psychological sex overrides the biology. That’s a dangerous idea. Don’t try to override your biology, you’re going to run into trouble.” Stonestreet observed that even if a child does not believe that he or she was born into the wrong body, the child may be affected by some other idea related to transgenderism through a peer group or social media.

Grossman added that there is enormous trauma to parents, grandparents, and siblings in the denial of true, biological sex involved in “gender transitioning,” and “my profession, the mental health profession, instead of being there for the parents and helping them with the trauma, instead they demonize them, and they tell parents ‘you are the problem …you’re going to make your child suicidal.’”

Colson asked Grossman if she sees “bright spots” in the controversy over transgenderism and “gender transitioning” of minors. Grossman said that she was “very encouraged” by some things. “Number one, the pushback is finally being heard and the other side is having to acknowledge it … I wrote about this back in 2009, and I warned parents. And the Left, the proponents of gender ideology, they just ignored … it. They can no longer ignore us … there are de-transitioners that are speaking out, and they’re talking about their regret, and their anger about what happened to them. And they are suing.” She said that there are “a number of law firms in this country that are specializing” in these cases of young people who underwent gender transitioning as “the answer to their emotional problems. And then they wake up shortly afterwards and they realize in no way was it the answer. They still have their emotional problems, and now they have a list of physical problems as well, including perhaps, they are sterile.”

Comorbidities and the Need for an Evidence-Based Response

Stonestreet then turned to Stephen Grcevich, President of Key Ministry. His 2018 book, Mental Health and the Church, “presents a method for evangelism with individuals and families impacted by mental illness.” He has particularly worked with children on the autism spectrum. Grcevich noted that he is an associate professor at his medical school, Northeast Ohio Medical University, and the only psychiatrist at his school who teaches “the evidence-based medicine thread in our school’s curriculum.” He said that he “loved being a doctor, but the positions that the medical community and our professional societies have taken with regard to treating kids with gender dysphoria is a major source of the anger and the shame and the embarrassment that I’ve experienced over the direction of my profession in the last few years.”  He called “the embrace of the gender revolution” by professional associations “the ultimate gaslighting.” Very incisively, he said that if the medical establishment can convince the public that a person “with male genitalia and a ‘Y’ chromosome in every cell in their body is a female there’s no end to the lies that our culture shapers will be able to propagate.”

Grcevich said that his organization, Key Ministry, provides “training, consultation, and resources” to churches seeking to welcome families with disabilities. It is from this work that he has become concerned about transgenderism. He noted that “the disability community has been disproportionately impacted by the gender revolution.” Using data from the Human Rights Campaign, he said that transgender adults are overrepresented in every category of disability relative to the general population, and also the LGB population. He referred to another survey from Great Britain that showed the transgender population significantly more likely to suffer from autism (5 times more likely), ADHD (6-7 times more likely), depression (4 times more likely), bipolar disorder (5 times more likely), learning disorder (3 times more likely), obsessive compulsive disorder (5 times more likely), and schizophrenia. The last category was more than 28 times more frequent with transgender identifying individuals. Grcevich pointed out that schizophrenia is a condition that cuts to the heart of reality testing.

In dealing with the surge of children coming to him who presented as transgender, he tried to understand why they were claiming to be transgender, looking in particular at comorbid mental health conditions. What he found was that “a lot of them would cling to this newly discovered identity with a rigidity and inflexibility not unlike that that I see with my kids on the autism spectrum.” He also sees “the disconnect from reality that we see in young people who are beginning to develop some sort of psychotic disorder.” Additionally, a study of school children showed that students identifying as transgender reported half or more with “clinically significant anxiety,” “clinically significant depression,” “non-suicidal self-injury,” and nearly half with post-traumatic stress disorder. Another issue associated with transgenderism is adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). In yet another study, it was found that transgender identifying young people reported more ACEs, such as “emotional abuse, physical neglect, [and] emotional neglect” relative to the LGB population.

A problem with studies on transgender identifying youth is that many of them have small sample sizes and little follow-up. In other countries, with centralized health systems, there are much larger sample sizes because all the nation’s health information is collected into a single database. These studies “are less likely to be manipulated or biased by the processes through which the study subjects are recruited and selected.”

Military health care does, however, provide a large sample size of American subjects. A study of all military dependents reporting gender dysphoria (3,700 minors) between 2010 and 2018 was referenced. It had two control groups, one of the siblings of the subjects, another of minors with a diagnosis of gender dysphoria who did not “undergo gender affirming care” (puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones). The study found that the “gender transitioned” group “compared to its siblings used significantly more mental health services, and about two and half times as many prescriptions for psychiatric medication relative to their siblings.” But Grcevich found “the most stunning finding” to be that psychotropic drug use increased 67% after “gender affirming care” began.

Grcevich said that an important fact about gender dysphoria is its connection with autism. In Great Britain, the Tavistock Clinic (since shut down) engaged in “gender affirming care” to minors, at least 35% of whom “met criteria for at least moderate to severe autism.” At the time in Great Britain, about 2.1% of children presented with symptoms of autism. Thus, they were 17 times more likely to be directed by medical personnel to “gender transitioning.” He said that many parents who have children who “are on the high end of the spectrum” of autism are afraid to take their children to see a professional counselor, “out of the fear that the child will be encouraged to consider gender dysphoria as the source of their distress.”

Families and minor children wresting with gender dysphoria “are extraordinarily fragile and vulnerable.” It is the institutions who profit from directing minors toward and administering “gender transitioning” who deserve scorn, “while minimizing in what they call ‘informed consent,’ the potential long-term risks of treatment.” Minor children, who have not been through puberty cannot give truly informed consent, he said. U.S. professional associations which shut down debate even as other Western countries pull back from a dogmatic commitment to gender transitioning are especially culpable. They are “undermining the credibility of our profession.” Politicians who seek to undermine the authority of parents in determining the course of treatment for their children also deserve the public’s scorn.

Turning to pastors and church workers, Grcevich said that churches “need to be places where our kids and teens wrestling with gender dysphoria and other issues around identity need to be able to experience a place where they can belong.” Believers know that whether a child is being treated by secular counsellors or not, for them and their parents “their greatest need, their family’s greatest need, is for a relationship with Jesus.” Families with children facing gender identity difficulties “are far less likely than their friends and neighbors to ever set foot in a church.” Struggles over gender identity should not be made a focus of attention for those sex-confused children who are coming to church. A “fully accessible family bathroom” is something good to have in accommodating sex-confused children, but children should not be referred to by “pronouns that diverge from biological reality.”

Questions and further discussion regarding how to engage the threat of gender transitioning will be reviewed in a subsequent article.

It can be viewed here.