Saturday, April 28, 2007

Are ABC & Barbara Walters Advocating Child Abuse?

Is it child abuse to give a 12-year-old opposite-sex hormone injections? Is it child abuse to schedule your teenage daughter for breast-removal surgery? Is it child abuse to send your little boy to first grade in a dress, and decorate his room in lavender and pink? Is it child abuse to let your child sleep with a 4-foot-long live snake? Is it child abuse to discuss with a little boy how he can have his penis chopped off when he's older?

Isn't this just as bad or worse than an adult sexually assaulting a child? Why is this country so up in arms over homosexual pederast priests, but accepting a major network's promotion of breast removal surgery for a teenage girl?

Hormonal manipulation and genital mutilation of CHILDREN: Sounds like a Nazi medical experiment. And it's blessed by ABC.

If you saw ABC's outrageous 20/20 show yesterday (4-27-07), you would probably say YES -- this is child abuse. The show was a sympathetic and promotional look at so-called "transgender children", called "My Secret Self." But it was more accurately a look at very confused parents and health professionals, and a media personality who's lost all common sense. Barbara Walters was at her simpering worst, putting leading questions to very troubled children and their possibly more troubled parents. ABC has truly reached a new low, instructing us bigoted plebes to "open our hearts and our minds" and thank these "courageous and loving parents."

Unbelievable. If anything illustrates how far this country is sliding into unimaginable evil, this show does. What is wrong with the endocrinologists, psychiatrists, and school staffers who advise parents that their child should "transition" to the opposite sex? What about Dr. Spack here in Boston at Children's Hospital "Gender Management Service Clinic" who advises "early [hormone] intervention is best"? (More on him in an upcoming post.) And the young female doctor at Children's Hospital in Los Angeles who administers hormone injections to children, rendering them forever infertile? Is this child abuse? It goes beyond the promotion of sodomy and other unhealthy sex practices in our schools and media -- because it's actual physical manipulation and mutilation of the child's body -- and soul.

Three children and their parents were profiled:

6-year-old boy: We learn from his mother that we're bigoted if we don't accept "children's transgenderism". We need to listen to the child, she says. He knows if he's really a girl. How could the parent possibly know? The mother recounts him asking as a 2-year-old when the good fairy will come and take his penis off. (Not believable if you've ever had a 2-year-old.) Then we learn that the parents had a "coming out" party for the boy's fifth birthday, where he was allowed to wear a one-piece bathing suit, with his little bulge apparent to all the invitees (proudly recorded on a home video). Next, we see the dance recital where he refused to participate because he couldn't wear a tutu. (But no mention of what sort of parents would sign him up as the only boy in a girly class.)

10-year-old boy: How hideous to hear his mother say of her little boy, "She has a birth defect, and we call it that. I can't think of a worse birth defect, as a woman to have, than to have a penis." We also learn that this mother underwent 11 in-vitro procedures before getting pregnant with twins (a girl, and this poor little boy), plus five miscarriages. (That would make anyone nuts.) The father seemed extremely emotionally unbalanced as well. The mother allowed the boy to cross-dress starting at age 3 without the father's knowledge. When he did find out, he disapproved and the marriage almost dissolved. Now the father sits crying during the interview. The interaction between the twins is clearly unbalanced.

... when Richard was just three years old, Stephanie made the drastic decision to let her son start dressing as a girl. They called it "girl time." Richard could dress up in his sister's clothes but only when his father neil was out of sight. The secret between mother and son went on for months. "I took him shopping by himself and we bought his own skirt and his own little tank top because…that little girl trapped inside was so happy when this would happen. But we knew we had to hide it, and we hid them in the back of the closet," she said.

It's no surprise that this mother credits her son's elementary school principal with encouraging the boy's cross-dressing at school: Feeling helpless, Stephanie spilled all of her secrets to Richard's principal. The response took Stephanie by surprise: Why couldn't Richard come to school in a dress, the principal asked. Then the school directed the Grants to a gender specialist who diagnosed Richard with Gender Identity Disorder. For Stephanie, the diagnosis came as a relief. "Oh my God, we're not making this up. This is real. There's a diagnosis," she said.

And here's the Boston link in this story: Dr. Norman Spack, founder of the Gender Management Service Clinic at Children's Hospital, Boston:

But a growing number of specialists, including Dr. Spack, believe that early intervention is a better option, and the Grants say that Riley can't wait to undergo this protocol. First, at the onset of puberty, hormone blockers are prescribed to stop the surge of hormones coursing through an adolescent's body. "It basically puts you at a kind of pre-pubertal state, or in limbo, so to speak. Still growing, but not really maturing in either direction," said Spack, founder of the Gender Management Service Clinic at Children's Hospital of Boston.

A few years later, cross-hormones are taken. For biological males, this means taking estrogen; for biological females, testosterone. These cross-hormones simulate the puberty of the opposite sex. In Riley's case, for example, estrogen will cause her to grow breasts and develop a feminine body shape. But hormone therapy is expensive and comes with risks. Riley increases her chances of getting breast cancer because of the estrogen. And cross hormones render transgender teenagers sterile.
And the boy's mother says he's already prepared to take the next step: having his penis chopped off.

17-year-old girl: How awful to hear parents supporting their teenage daughter's plans to have her breasts removed before going to college, and in the interim allowing her to have testosterone injections (which have already lowered her voice). The girl shows the uncomfortable "binder" she wears now to smash her large breasts. She has gone through a bout with "cutting" (though the mother was too upset to say where on the girl's body), as a way of "getting out her anger." (If she cut her breasts, what's the problem? They're about to be chapped off anyhow ... with the parents' approval.) It's not surprising to learn that she is in a suburb of Los Angeles, and that there's a young doctor who has absolutely no qualms about injecting her with male hormones. Ask yourself where this girl came up with this terminology when she wrote to her parents (at age 14):

What am I? I ask myself this all the time. Right now what I believe myself to be is an FtM, or a female-to-male transsexual. A male identifying individual. A boy in a girl's body. That's what I think I am. That's what I believe I am, but I may be wrong. Gender and sexuality are such strange things. They're not really things that can be defined, but we've tried as hard as we can to separate ourselves into groups, haven't we? Male and female. Straight and gay. Maybe it's something to do with my chromosomes, or some traumatic experience I had when I was very young. What I think I know is: I'm a boy.

Send your comments to ABC 20/20!