Progressive and pro-transgender groups are trying to close down the heated debate over James Younger, the supposedly transgender seven-year-old caught in a bitter divorce.
“It is unfortunate to see this situation being politicized, rather than focusing on what is in the child’s best interest,” lamented Casey Pick, a lobbyist for The Trevor Project, which promotes young people who say they are gay or transgender. The media should focus on the children’s personal stories, not on the rival political agendas, Pick told the Daily Beast.com:
When the lives of transgender youth are sensationalized and treated like political footballs, the reality of their personal struggles and needs is lost in the shuffle.
So far, the pro-transgender groups and the establishment media are following the script suggested by Pick.
The divorce court’s dramatic testimony and trial have been almost universally ignored by pro-transgender groups, including groups that loudly champion claims of transgender youth. Progressive media outlets have also minimized coverage, aside from a Washington Post article which downplayed the drama of a child facing the threat of sexual sterilization by his mother:
experts on health care for transgender children told The Washington Post that Georgulas’s approach to the child would not involve any kind of surgery or hormones for years.
…
“The only interventions for young children is affirmation and acceptance for who they are.”
The calm-down pitch was boosted by an article in the New York Daily News, which used a female name, “Luna,” for the boy: “The headline-generating controversy, which has been highly politicized, was seen as damaging not only to Luna, but to the transgender youth community as a whole.”
The many pro-transgender groups have kept the issue off their Twitter feeds and their websites. They are instead posting low-drama events about “asexual” people, “trans-competent health care providers,” or “Our program associate Mariah and friend Tristan are dressed to dismantle transphobia.”
Breitbart News could not find any coverage by ABC, CBS, or NBC. The New York Times disdained coverage, and even the Washington Blade — a D.C. newspaper that effectively covers gay and lesbian issues — kept the dispute off its website.
“The left will always will always try to shut down debate,” said Jane Robbins, an attorney and an expert on the transgender trend at the Witherspoon Institute.
“It is always unwilling to engage with ideas, and it shuts down debate in this case by [promoting professional expertise], saying ‘The experts agree, there’s a consensus, this is what you’re supposed to do,’ and [by saying] the parents who don’t get on board are either backward or bigoted,” she said.
But ordinary Americans are using the Internet to share their own expertise and to debunk progressive claims, Robbins said. “I don’t think that [progressive] ‘reality’ can be preserved forever, and the more people, the more doctors and therapists [and] parents’ rights activists who get on board with this [pushback], then we have a better shot at getting something done about it,” she said.
The mainstream effort to save the child has already cracked the progressives’ wall of silence. For example, Pick at the Trevor Project spoke out to urge silence, and the National Center for Transgender Equality offered its supporters the opportunity for moral preening:
Charlotte Clymer, a PR manager at the Human Rights Campaign, swatted at commenters who oppose the boy being forced to undergo a lifetime of medical treatments:
Clymer’s group has recently shifted its focus from gays and lesbians over to transgender advocacy. The group has made that shift even though there is growing evidence that some parents are sending their effeminate boy and tomboy girls — who may grow up to be gays and lesbians — back into the medical industry for surgery, hormones, and “transition.”
“It is a terrible medical scandal,“ said Natasha Chart, a co-founder of Women’s Liberation Front, a feminist group that argues that politics must be based on the capabilities and needs of women’s and men’s bodies.
That focus on the practical needs of human bodies is very different from transgender activists, who believe that human expertise can help liberate people from the limits of their own bodies. So without safety data and long-term studies, the transgender industry “is experimenting with kids and I don’t think that should be allowed,” said Chart.
When progressives talk about crime and jail, they understand that children cannot be held fully responsible for crimes they commit, she said.
But when considering whether young children should be sent back to make life-changing medical decisions, she said, “the logic should be exactly the same as the [idea of the] ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ … [where children] are recognized as minors under someone else’s guardianship [and] they cannot be making decisions like this.”
Also, many progressives dare not engage in a debate, said Chart, because they fear fellow progressives will ostracize them.
But progressives’ extreme emphasis on fairness for marginalized groups — and their trust in their peers’ professional expertise — means they feel little cause to worry about the medical risks within the transgender promise of personal liberation via medical technology:
“The federal government and state governments are going to have to confront this issue,” responded Robbins, adding:
When you start to connect with people’s kids, it becomes something a lot deeper than just, “Oh, I don’t I agree with this particular economic policy” or “I don’t agree with this interpretation of history,” or whatever. It becomes personal, and this issue shouldn’t be a liberal or conservative thing — this is about the health and wellbeing of children.