How do you get largely reluctant parents -- and a resistant American public generally -- to cooperate with transitioning kids? Bring in legal penalties and state surveillance, of course!  Not to go along will be discrimination and require intervention.  Becoming an enemy of the state is looking easier for trans-nonconforming parents

When it comes to big stick policy, the Biden administration has it down. Looming in March 2024, Biden’s about face on Title IX is already acting as an invitation to put the squeeze on parents, since schools strive to stay ahead of changes tied to federal funding by instituting policy early. Not to cooperate with social transitioning such as decisions concerning restrooms, sports, and hotel accommodations will make a parent subject to scrutiny, targeting, stigma, and coercion. As many have observed, expanding sex to encompass “gender” reverses the sex-based protections Title IX was set up to uphold.  Parental protections as well would be eroded, as for instance, by removing parental opt-outs from lessons covering gender or their ability to help identify pornographic books in school libraries. 

Something happens to those posturing as educators; they want the public to get educated, quickly. Recalcitrant families can look like malefactors. Parents of children identifying as trans can be reported and investigated for creating a harmful environment and their child taken into custody by Social Services. That’s because “Parents who refuse to acknowledge a child using other gendered pronouns would be discriminating against their kid under the new definition.” Parents who do not go along with imposture name and pronoun adherence would be potentially tagged as child abusers.

School procedures override parents who are suspected of harboring discriminatory views, blocking the transitioning process from parental view on a kid’s say-so. However, Canadian therapist David Minor poses the question: “is the problem with the parent not affirming or with the child’s belief that non-affirmation equals abuse?” Policies that impede normal parental concern, according to Luke Berg of the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty “violate parents’ constitutional rights under the United States Constitution, and possibly many state constitutions as well.” Parental authority is protected by the 14th Amendment and the 1974 Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). Vernadette Broyles, who runs the conservative Child and Parental Rights Campaign, explains: “Privacy rights are held by the parents for the child, not by the child against their parents.” By not telling parents what’s going on, the schools withhold critical medical records and information parents require to make informed decisions and to protect their children.

The suicide trope has teachers running scared. Noting that the “suicide or affirm” myth underpins the recent revision of Title IX, Leor Sapir reviews the suicide premise, concluding that the suicide panic “is based on a small handful of deeply flawed studies that, at most, find loose correlations between ‘affirming’ interventions and improved mental health. Some find no reduction of suicide at all, and a new study claims to find that puberty blockers actually increase the risk of suicide.” Conceptualizing these kids within a Title IX Rights framework, Sapir argues, leads teachers an others into contradiction. On the one hand, the increasing society-wide acceptance of gender identities has led to gate-crashing at gender clinics; on the other, kids cannot survive any delay because they face widespread lack of acceptance.  Besides, the affirm-or-suicide framing creates a false dichotomy given the dozen studies proving therapy tied to “watchful waiting” successful. Sapir further warns that suicide fearmongering, especially mouthed by teachers one would assume, can actually provoke the well-documented pattern of suicide contagion among youth.

Schools have the effect of pitting parents against their children. Minor theorizes that the gender industry’s deployment of the suicide trope is producing a nocebo effect. With the potential to have as profound effect as its well- known counterpart, the sugar pill tied to health-improvement, the nocebo effect involves the association of nonintervention with harm or abuse: “A gender-affirming approach teaches young people that if their parents don’t affirm their new identity, then they don’t love and support them, or worse, are being abusive. The school’s predisposition to vilify parents wanting to put the brakes on the rush to affirm shows they are entirely captured by the suicide panic.

Pamela Garfield-Jaeger, a licensed clinical social worker in California with over 20 years of clinical experience, notes that this hyper-focus on suicide with its corresponding panic to affirm erodes children’s ability to self-validate, making them prone to an abandonment cycle. Garfield-Jaeger writes “Teaching young people to parrot “If you don’t affirm my gender identity, I will kill myself” results in “raising a generation to be non-resilient, empty and lonely.”

The suicide trope is a mechanism of behavior control keeping parents in line as well. Most parents of teens end up in a minefield, their beliefs conditioned by popular cultural equations. Everything from the Biden’s expected Title IX revisions to ads are made to appear as cultural norms individuals at whatever age need to embrace for acceptance.

Romancing the Trans Family

People who pretend that a 24- hour image-based marketing machine has no effect on culture are fooling themselves. It doesn’t exactly help matters that the American Academy of Pediatricians, (AAP) labels as reversible the kind of social transitioning observed in an infamous 2019 Sprite commercial. The ad’s romanticized depiction of breast binding (the flattening of breast tissue utilizing a compressive garment) serves as an idealized view of AAP-backed gender affirming care (GAC).

Epitomizing the romantic force of trans propaganda, the ad relies on sentimental images of intimate family scenes to portray binding as merely a familiar coming-of-age ritual. In one tranquil half-lit scene, a dreamy rendition of breast binding appears. Softly playing in the background, the ad incorporates “You'll Never Walk Alone,” a widely acclaimed song of hope in the face of death, most recently making a return as a COVID anthem. Meanwhile, the mother’s smile models collusion with a feigned identity.

Programming comes in when the scene mimics any first bra fitting session, in which a mom boosts the daughter’s confidence by showing her how the closure works. Binding is thus passed off as normal female development. In the ad, the mother leans in with a reassuringly gentle smile to fasten the corset- like binder. The ad celebrates binding as rite of passage in the quest for the self. Binding heralds a renewed romance with corseting. 

In the sentimental plotline of the ad, a bright ending is made possible by acquiescent family members.  Americans go along with the program to a fault. Female breast binding is the ultimate social media hatched overture to mastectomy.  So too, in the GAC world promoted by the AAP, where blocking puberty is also falsely designated as reversible, support for the re-imagined self and defying normal puberty is considered critical to growing up.  

The expected supporting role of the parent in making social transitioning possible is shown as natural and uncomplicated. Sprite’s saccharine ad reassures hesitant family members ‘complicity with an agenda and ends with parents’ wistful smile as they drop off kids to a smoke-filled street protest. 

How do you get protective guardians to let down their defenses? You scare them with the suicide panic.  You bombard them with chimerical images to charm them into assent. But you also carry the big stick of educational policies and executive orders. Parents can’t help but absorb the messaging.

Image: PxHere