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Sarah Parshall Perry
May 19, 2023
We were called alarmists. Bigoted. Christo-fascists. After all, the transgender contagion was not spreading, drag was just an art form, and school employees were not facilitating children’s social gender transitions and hiding it from their unwitting parents.
Except, none of this was true. Turned out, the trans movement pointed not to a slippery slope, but to a cliff.
Earlier this year, the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), a self-described defender of human rights around the world, presented to the United Nations Human Rights Council a report titled The 8 March Principles for a Human Rights-Based Approach to Criminal Law Proscribing Conduct Associated with Sex, Reproduction, Drug Use, HIV, Homelessness and Poverty.
Among the report’s recommendations and policy statements were these gems: “sexual conduct involving persons below the domestically prescribed minimum age of consent to sex may be consensual in fact, if not in law,” and “enforcement of criminal law should reflect the rights and capacity of persons under 18 years of age to make decision about engaging in consensual sexual conduct.”
These statements directly contradict Article 34 of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which obligates all signatory nations to protect children from sexual exploitation and abuse. Yet the U.N. received and highlighted the report. As for the ICJ’s premise that pesky age-of-consent laws should be ignored, because sex with minors isn’t really the social evil we think it is—well, so much for the human rights of children.
In the States, Leigh Finke, a transgender-identified (biological male) legislator in Minnesota, drafted a bill declaring Minnesota a “refuge state” for the medical transitioning of minors, and has now proposed an amendment to state legislation that would classify “sexual attachment to children” as a protected sexual orientation.
In Colorado, twenty-seven Democrats in the State House of Representatives just voted against making indecent exposure to minors a felony, with one legislator commenting that the criminal prohibition unfairly targets the drag and trans communities.
And in Washington state, Democrats passed Senate Bill 5599, which would allow the state to legally hide runaway children from their parents if the parents don’t consent to their child’s “gender transition” or abortion.
Clinical research is even being done on the distinctive features of particular populations with sexual attraction to children. Two researchers recently focused on the unique experiences of “minor attracted” women, for example, and called the link between “minor attraction” and “sexual offending against children” theoretical. The link can hardly be called “theoretical.”
Although some individuals who are sexually attracted to minors may resist the urge to act on their impulses, many will not. It is estimated that 30 percent of one-time and 61 percent of three-time male child-sex offenders are pedophiles. Acknowledging this reality, the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of Mental Disorders defines pedophilia by either impulse or behavior.
In 2022, the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Abuse at Johns Hopkins University proudly touted its hire of a non-binary professor after she had resigned from Old Dominion University. She left ODU because of an uproar over her normalization of language on “minor-attracted persons,” which she preferred to the more “stigmatizing” word “pedophile.”
Progressive culture has insidiously moved the needle on the notion of sex with minors now that transgenderism is in its heyday. It employs a favorite tool of persuasion: kids. Just a few days ago, a drag show in New York sponsored by a gay hookup app featured a 13-year-old “drag kid.” Advocacy of purportedly age-appropriate books like Gender Queer (thank you, National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers)—with its full-color illustrations of minors engaging in fellatio—has infected public school libraries and triggered school board meetings rife with irate parents.
A teacher in Texas was fired after undercover footage indicated her jaw-dropping near-advocacy of pedophilia to a classroom full of minor children: “We’re gonna call them MAPs, minor-attracted persons. So don’t judge people just because they wanna have sex with a five-year-old.”
Um, what?
There also appears to be a connection between medical gender interventions and pedophilia advocacy. The relentless push for gender-affirming “healthcare” for minors posits the notion that castrating healthy boys or giving healthy girls double mastectomies is “settled” science. (In fact, it is anything but.) It grants medical professionals, who have a financial interest in performing such surgeries, a license to do so under the guise of performing “life-saving care.” What is more, the continued insistence that minors possess the maturity and agency to consent to irreversible “gender affirming” medical procedures supports an argument that they likewise possess the capacity to consent to other life-altering decisions. Like having sex with adults.
Sometimes, the connections between “gender medicine” and pedophilia are too apparent to ignore.
In the United Kingdom, for example, Mermaids—an organization billing itself as one of the biggest LGBTQ+ organizations supporting transgender children in the country—is still digging out from its most recent public relations nightmare. A trustee of the charity resigned in October when reports surfaced that he spoke at a conference organized by a group that promotes support for pedophiles.
Trans-advocacy has fast become the harbinger for other disorders repackaged in advocacy’s anodyne language. Its precipitous spread now heralds other, irreversible body modifications and noxious cultural trends. Consider what some have called the “next abyss” of body integrity disorder—a condition in which a person "identifies" as handicapped. Seeking to exploit the cultural domination of the transgender movement, advocates have reclassified it as “transableism,” for which treatment includes amputation, a snipped spinal cord, blindness.
Given current trends, such medical barbarism may also be classified as “life-saving healthcare” soon enough.
Once we deny biological reality, the dissolution of moral order follows. When we profess that our eyes are lying about our sexed reality, high-headed notions of consent, capability, or natural law are that much easier to denounce.
The trans mind-virus is mutating. The time to find an antidote is now.
Sarah Parshall Perry is a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies.
The Trans Mind-Virus Is Mutating
The normalization of transgenderism leads inevitably to the normalization of other sexual disorders.Sarah Parshall Perry
May 19, 2023
We were called alarmists. Bigoted. Christo-fascists. After all, the transgender contagion was not spreading, drag was just an art form, and school employees were not facilitating children’s social gender transitions and hiding it from their unwitting parents.
Except, none of this was true. Turned out, the trans movement pointed not to a slippery slope, but to a cliff.
Earlier this year, the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), a self-described defender of human rights around the world, presented to the United Nations Human Rights Council a report titled The 8 March Principles for a Human Rights-Based Approach to Criminal Law Proscribing Conduct Associated with Sex, Reproduction, Drug Use, HIV, Homelessness and Poverty.
Among the report’s recommendations and policy statements were these gems: “sexual conduct involving persons below the domestically prescribed minimum age of consent to sex may be consensual in fact, if not in law,” and “enforcement of criminal law should reflect the rights and capacity of persons under 18 years of age to make decision about engaging in consensual sexual conduct.”
These statements directly contradict Article 34 of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which obligates all signatory nations to protect children from sexual exploitation and abuse. Yet the U.N. received and highlighted the report. As for the ICJ’s premise that pesky age-of-consent laws should be ignored, because sex with minors isn’t really the social evil we think it is—well, so much for the human rights of children.
In the States, Leigh Finke, a transgender-identified (biological male) legislator in Minnesota, drafted a bill declaring Minnesota a “refuge state” for the medical transitioning of minors, and has now proposed an amendment to state legislation that would classify “sexual attachment to children” as a protected sexual orientation.
In Colorado, twenty-seven Democrats in the State House of Representatives just voted against making indecent exposure to minors a felony, with one legislator commenting that the criminal prohibition unfairly targets the drag and trans communities.
And in Washington state, Democrats passed Senate Bill 5599, which would allow the state to legally hide runaway children from their parents if the parents don’t consent to their child’s “gender transition” or abortion.
Clinical research is even being done on the distinctive features of particular populations with sexual attraction to children. Two researchers recently focused on the unique experiences of “minor attracted” women, for example, and called the link between “minor attraction” and “sexual offending against children” theoretical. The link can hardly be called “theoretical.”
Although some individuals who are sexually attracted to minors may resist the urge to act on their impulses, many will not. It is estimated that 30 percent of one-time and 61 percent of three-time male child-sex offenders are pedophiles. Acknowledging this reality, the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of Mental Disorders defines pedophilia by either impulse or behavior.
In 2022, the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Abuse at Johns Hopkins University proudly touted its hire of a non-binary professor after she had resigned from Old Dominion University. She left ODU because of an uproar over her normalization of language on “minor-attracted persons,” which she preferred to the more “stigmatizing” word “pedophile.”
Progressive culture has insidiously moved the needle on the notion of sex with minors now that transgenderism is in its heyday. It employs a favorite tool of persuasion: kids. Just a few days ago, a drag show in New York sponsored by a gay hookup app featured a 13-year-old “drag kid.” Advocacy of purportedly age-appropriate books like Gender Queer (thank you, National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers)—with its full-color illustrations of minors engaging in fellatio—has infected public school libraries and triggered school board meetings rife with irate parents.
A teacher in Texas was fired after undercover footage indicated her jaw-dropping near-advocacy of pedophilia to a classroom full of minor children: “We’re gonna call them MAPs, minor-attracted persons. So don’t judge people just because they wanna have sex with a five-year-old.”
Um, what?
There also appears to be a connection between medical gender interventions and pedophilia advocacy. The relentless push for gender-affirming “healthcare” for minors posits the notion that castrating healthy boys or giving healthy girls double mastectomies is “settled” science. (In fact, it is anything but.) It grants medical professionals, who have a financial interest in performing such surgeries, a license to do so under the guise of performing “life-saving care.” What is more, the continued insistence that minors possess the maturity and agency to consent to irreversible “gender affirming” medical procedures supports an argument that they likewise possess the capacity to consent to other life-altering decisions. Like having sex with adults.
Sometimes, the connections between “gender medicine” and pedophilia are too apparent to ignore.
In the United Kingdom, for example, Mermaids—an organization billing itself as one of the biggest LGBTQ+ organizations supporting transgender children in the country—is still digging out from its most recent public relations nightmare. A trustee of the charity resigned in October when reports surfaced that he spoke at a conference organized by a group that promotes support for pedophiles.
Trans-advocacy has fast become the harbinger for other disorders repackaged in advocacy’s anodyne language. Its precipitous spread now heralds other, irreversible body modifications and noxious cultural trends. Consider what some have called the “next abyss” of body integrity disorder—a condition in which a person "identifies" as handicapped. Seeking to exploit the cultural domination of the transgender movement, advocates have reclassified it as “transableism,” for which treatment includes amputation, a snipped spinal cord, blindness.
Given current trends, such medical barbarism may also be classified as “life-saving healthcare” soon enough.
Once we deny biological reality, the dissolution of moral order follows. When we profess that our eyes are lying about our sexed reality, high-headed notions of consent, capability, or natural law are that much easier to denounce.
The trans mind-virus is mutating. The time to find an antidote is now.
Sarah Parshall Perry is a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies.
