Watch the full interview: Dr. Michelle Cretella on Transgenderism: A Mental Illness is Not a Civil Right
Dr. Cretella: Essentially, transgender ideology holds that people can be born into the wrong body: It’s simply not true. We can demonstrate this by looking at twin studies. No one is born in the wrong body. So to take that lie and essentially indoctrinate all of our children from preschool forward with that lie, we are destroying their ability for reality testing.
This is cognitive and psychological abuse. I want to say just a little more about that. The reason it destroys reality testing is because most children at age three (pre-school age) can correctly identify themselves by saying “I am a boy” or “I am a girl” and most children will not understand that a boy grows into a man and stays a man and that a girl grows into a woman and stays a woman. So when many seven-year-olds see a man get into a dress and put on makeup, they may believe that he just became a woman. The other side is not being honest and not acknowledging that.
This happened most recently in Rocklin, California. It was the end of the kindergarten school year and the teacher called the whole class together, at the behest of the boy’s parents, and had the children sit down and she read them two stories. I will call them “gender bending stories.” One was The Red Crayon in which you have a crayon that’s actually blue wrapped in red paper. That primes the kids to think, “Oh, what’s on the outside doesn’t have to match the inside.”
The next story the teacher read was I Am Jazz, which is about a boy whose parents helped him impersonate a girl from the age of three. He’s 17 now, has his own television program and looks like a girl from the waist up. After these two stories were finished, a boy (I’ll call him Joey) left the classroom, presumably to use the bathroom and came back in a dress. The teacher said: “Boys and girls, Joey is actually a girl just like Jazz. From now on we need to call her Josephine” (again I’m making the names up). This was very confusing to the other children in kindergarten and it terrified one girl in particular, which was clear from something that happened when she was home with her mother. Her mom had wrapped her up after she had go out of the tub and she was going by the mirror when she saw her hair slicked back. Then, she burst into tears, saying, “Mommy, am I turning into a boy? I don’t wanna turn into a boy! Joey turned into a girl, am I gonna turn into a boy?”
Now, I know this because the mother called me. As the president of the College of Pediatricians I’ve been outspoken and parents reach out to me. This mother is being told that she is the one who’s crazy and that her daughter is the one who’s having a problematic reaction.
So transgender ideology — yes, it’s child abuse because we are gaslighting our children. And now that they’re thoroughly confused they will think that they really are the opposite sex and will be sent down a medical pathway. As they approach puberty, they will be put on puberty blockers and then on cross-sex hormones. That combination will permanently sterilize most, if not all, of those children and also puts them at risk for heart disease, diabetes, and various cancers. If girls have been on testosterone, which is their sex change hormone, for a full-year, by age 16 they can get a double mastectomy.
So, gaslighting, pubertal castration and surgical mutilation: It’s institutionalized child abuse.
To make matters worse you must realize that prior to transgender ideology, these children were treated with watchful waiting, because for many kids it may be a passing phase. Sometimes the girls may just be tomboys. So with either watchful waiting or family and individual therapy the vast majority, 75-95% of kids, would accept their biological sex by young adulthood. So yes, this is child abuse!
If the parents find that their child is questioning their sex, if things on your own at home are not going well, I encourage all parents to seek out a local therapist who will work with them to find underlying family dynamics or conflicts. If the only therapist you find locally says, “You must accept them as transgender,” you can reach out to us at bestforchildren.org, that’s our website. We can recommend some therapists who will work with families. If they’re not in the local area, they can even do it by Skype.