Pro-Family Leaders Condemn Administration’s Imposition of ‘Abusive’ Transgender Policy

National pro-family leaders are condemning President Barack Obama’s imposition of transgender ideology on America’s schoolchildren  – what the American College of Pediatricians says amounts to “child abuse.”

“This attempt to bully our local schools into submission to the Obama Administration’s agenda is shameful and a gross abuse of the federal government’s power,” Rep. Diane Black (R-TN) said in a statement. “It has nothing to do with compassion for minority student populations and everything to do with political opportunism for the next election.”

Black continued:

We all agree on the rights of students to be treated with dignity and respect, but that right must also exist alongside the rights of students to maintain their privacy and safety in their own schools. As a grandmother of young girls, I believe the Obama Administration is now directly responsible for endangering our students.

Black’s words echo those of the American College of Pediatricians, which has asserted that gender ideology is harmful to children. The College states that it “urges educators and legislators to reject all policies that condition children to accept as normal a life of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex. Facts – not ideology – determine reality…”

The College adds:

No one is born with a gender. Everyone is born with a biological sex. Gender (an awareness and sense of oneself as male or female) is a sociological and psychological concept; not an objective biological one…

A person’s belief that he or she is something they are not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking. When an otherwise healthy biological boy believes he is a girl, or an otherwise healthy biological girl believes she is a boy, an objective psychological problem exists that lies in the mind not the body, and it should be treated as such. These children suffer from gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria (GD), formerly listed as Gender Identity Disorder (GID), is a recognized mental disorder in the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-V)…

According to the DSM-V, as many as 98% of gender confused boys and 88% of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty.

“Conditioning children into believing that a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful is child abuse,” the College asserts.

The Obama administration decrees that schools must welcome a tiny number of apparently transgender children by taking single-sex bathrooms, single-sex locker rooms and sexual privacy away from almost 55 million American students in 100,000 K-12 public schools.

“The Obama Administration once again overstepped legal boundaries by redefining the scope and reach of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and slapping the heavy hand of government on local schools,” said Penny Nance, President and CEO of Concerned Women for America, the nation’s largest women’s public policy organization.

“Whether or not people who identify as transgender are indeed a protected class will get worked out in the courts,” Nance continued in a statement. “Meanwhile, schools all over this nation who have rightly worked on a case by case basis to accommodate kids struggling with gender dysphoria may be forced to violate the privacy of other students and perhaps even create trauma for the very kids Obama pretends to protect.”

Both Black and Nance urge parents and local school districts to make the decisions about what is best for children.

“It is worth noting that this directive does not carry the force of law and I would encourage Tennessee school officials to continue following their consciences,” Black asserted. “States like Tennessee should be able to make these decisions for themselves without fear of reprisal from a heavy-handed federal government.”

Black said she plans to introduce an amendment to an appropriation bill later in the year that bars the Department of Education from withholding funds from states that pass “commonsense legislation protecting our children from sharing a bathroom with students of the opposite sex.”

Nance adds: “Local school districts with the input of parents and health professionals should be setting school policy on such a sensitive and controversial issue – not Washington.”

“The left always uses children to accomplish its goals of social reengineering,” she added. “The adults closest to these children should decide what’s best for all the children in the school. Safety and kindness should be the guiding principles not threats from the bullies in Washington.”