Last week, the national press reported on a 56-year-old high school biology teacher in California who plans to undergo a sex-change operation (i.e. cosmetic surgery) and to return to the classroom appearing as a woman. “To have a teacher be authentic ultimately is good for students and for the community,” said Jennifer Levi of Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, or GLAAD, an advocacy group in Boston.

Sadly, the situation is far more complicated and confusing than advocates of gender confusion or their allies in the media will admit. 

Although the American Psychiatric Association dropped the diagnosis of gender identity disorder in 2012, the APA merely renamed the condition gender dysphoria in its manual of mental disorders (the DSM-5). What was the reason for the change? To reduce stigma while maintaining access to medical care. 

Understandably, most people suffering from a serious mental illness would like the stigma of their medical conditions to magically disappear. But simply renaming “bipolar disorder” as “intensely sporadic mood swings” does not remedy a patient’s condition any more than rechristening “gender identity disorder” as “gender dysphoria.” 

In fact, in a USA Today article on gender confusion, Jack Drescher, a psychiatrist who helped revise the APA’s DSM-5, stated, “[Gender Dysphoria is] different from other mental disorders.”

"Usually with a mental disorder, we try and change the person's mind. This is the only mental disorder where the treatment is changing the body. In a typical mental disorder, we try to make those symptoms go away. Here the treatment has emerged to align the person's body to match their gender identity." 

He went on to say,

"The truth is we actually don't know what it is. Is it a mental disorder or does the cause of gender dysphoria lie somewhere else? We don't know what causes it, so there's no absolute reason why it has to be in the mental disorders section, except as a fact of history, it's always been there."

Does Dr. Drescher’s last sentence not sound like one Alice might have encountered among the symbolic nonsense she endured in her Wonderland dream?  

Simply acknowledging that the APA’s own psychiatrists remain vexed by this serious medical condition would generally heighten concerns for most responsible adults. Most youngsters are generally experiencing all sorts of issues related to their own developing identities. Pretending that individuals who exhibit signs of serious mental illness in the classroom are helping impressionable children defies common sense. 

Then again, compelling juvenile minds to believe they understand complicated medical conditions that psychiatrists themselves still have not resolved is par for the course. If public schools have succeeded at anything over the last 60 years, they have painfully revealed that they can convince impressionable minds of many things that are just untrue. But so long as students graduate feeling good about their dismal knowledge, subpar reading levels, and their politically correct indoctrination in to absurdity, who cares about reality? 

If the media and advocates for gender confusion were interested in reality, the rest of us would see more coverage about psychiatric experts who can explain the seriousness of gender confusion. Dr. Joseph Berger, a distinguished psychiatrist in Toronto, clarifies that gender confused individuals claim “they really are or wish to be people of the sex opposite to which they were born, or to which their chromosomal configuration attests." The medical classification for those symptoms include the following, according to Dr. Berger: “delusion, psychosis, or emotional unhappiness.” He adds that none of those conditions associated with other mental illnesses call for cosmetic surgery as the medical treatment.  

Furthermore, Dr. Paul McHugh, a distinguished professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, has written, “We psychiatrists, I thought, would do better to concentrate on trying to fix their minds and not their genitalia...to provide a surgical alteration to the body of these unfortunate people [is] to collaborate with a mental disorder rather than to treat it.”

Public education went down the rabbit hole where feelings trumped facts a long time ago. Experimenting with the minds of children by teaching them to ignore reality or teaching them things that are simply untrue is nothing short of brainwashing. 

A society that promotes such confusion under the ruse of education is lost. Wishful thinking does not maintain childhood innocence any more than pretending wrong is right. Alice in Wonderland should have taught us that.

When Alice asked the Cat, “How do you know I’m mad?” The Cat responded, “You must be, or you wouldn’t have come here.” 

Who knew that the Cat’s response would apply to Little Johnny’s public education today? 

A former high school English teacher and United States Marine, Lee Culpepper is a contributing writer at Townhall.com and BearingArms.com.  Follow Lee Culpepper on Twitter @drcoolpepper.