In the local media it started with a report on Hawaii DOE’s reviewing transgender guidelines (TGI, May 14) and the subject prompted several letters in our newspaper. It appears to me that the bathroom use of the non-existing third gender
In the local media it started with a report on Hawaii DOE’s reviewing transgender guidelines (TGI, May 14) and the subject prompted several letters in our newspaper. It appears to me that the bathroom use of the non-existing third gender is overblown nationwide. Regarding this bathroom issue, lawsuits are filed against government orders and guidelines, emotions run high and an image is developing worldwide about a United States as a country of totally uninformed people.
This did not start with the non-existing third gender, preferably called by many as transgender people, but with the idea of some I-know-better bureaucrat who has convinced government agencies that it was improper and unbecoming to write the word “sex” in birth, marriage and death certificates.
So, instead the word sex gender was used, which is absolutely nonsense. Apparently, many were missing from biology classes in high school and forgot that no one is born with a gender. Everyone is born with a biological sex. Gender which is an awareness and sense of oneself as male or female is a sociological and psychological concept.
Can anyone tell me how the registrar can record the gender of a newborn as male or female when the gender is only awareness and a sense of oneself? Who will ask the newborn to make a statement about his/her awareness? This awareness develops over time, and like all developmental processes, may be the result of a child’s subjective perceptions, relationships, and adverse experiences from early childhood forward.
People who identify as “feeling like the opposite sex” or “somewhere in between” do not constitute a third sex. They remain biological men or biological women. It is the doctor present at birth who can make a true statement about the biological sex of the child. So, if it is politically correct to use the word gender instead of sex then this policy is dumb.
But it is not enough. A new ideology surfaced, namely the ideology of a third gender, just there is no official formulation yet what exactly to call this third gender. There are forces that try to convince you to accept the hypothesis that people who don’t know of which sex they are, should be called as a natural third gender.
And there is a new problem that complicates this ideology. Some of these “third gender” children have unstable self-awareness and they feel to be a girl one day and a boy the other day. So the advocates of the hypothesis, among them psychologists invented the name “gender fluid.” That will certainly put school officials who want to establish a bathroom choice policy into even a more difficult situation.
How can we stop this avalanche of self-created problems? The solution is simpler than you think.
Since these gender irregularities occur almost exclusively in children and teenagers, ask the highest American authority that deals with the health and physiology of children and teenagers — and this is the American College of Pediatricians.
The members of this college are famous pediatricians with life-long experience in their fields. They came out with a report in March which was updated next month. This report is available to the public at: http://www.acpeds.org/the-college-speaks/position-statements/gender-ideology-harms-children
They determined that this gender related confusion, which is called Gender Dysphoria and was called earlier Gender Identity Disorder is a recognized mental disorder. So the gender confusion is an objective psychological problem that lies in the mind not the body, and it should be treated as such. Plus according to the specialists, 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. Facts — not ideology — determine reality.
Well, nature creates some irregularities for various unknown reason but what are we going to do? Create a new and mandatory category for every irregularity? The exceedingly rare disorders of sexual differentiation, including but not limited to testicular feminization and congenital adrenal hyperplasia, are all medically identifiable deviations from the sexual binary norm, and are rightly recognized as disorders of human design. These individuals do not constitute a third sex.
In this report you can read about the harmfulness of puberty-blocking hormones, cross-sex hormones, sex reassignment surgeries that are being used as treatment without any scientific basis. Therefore, let me deal here with the bathroom choice issue.
What is it our government wants with this bathroom assignment issue? Instead of asking the pediatricians and psychologists, they try to think with the head of a gender confused child, so they combine their confusion with the confusion of the child.
They simply want to give mental comfort to them. Yes, only mental comfort, because whatever gender the child believes to have, he or she can do his or her things in any bathroom. So it is not a physical necessity to reassign bathrooms according to the confusion of a few children. Plus, giving mental comfort to a few children they definitely give a mental discomfort to the rest of the children with normal gender identity.
Is it fair? No. I don’t think so. I would go even further saying that it is more than mental comfort; it is a victory feeling for the gender confused child for achieving regulated exception supporting his/her confusion.
I feel compassionate with these confused children because of their problems, but not more than with anyone else who has other forms of mental afflictions. On the other hand, I am not compassionate with the bureaucrats in Washington or elsewhere who fail to read the pediatricians’ reports what they should have done in the first place.
And for the rest of the people who are making a big issue of this trendy, self-created problem I am saying to use their common sense first, and they will see that this country has many more burning issues that need their close attention.
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Janos Keoni Samu is a resident of Kalaheo.
