This video has been making the rounds on my Facebook feed. Corey, a 14-year old boy who has decided to live as a girl, tells of the bullying he experienced in elementary school, how he struggled to even have a few male friends and after fifth grade decided to reject his maleness altogether.

The real take-away for parents should be: teach your kids to reach out to all their peers, whether or not they conform to superficial stereotypes.  We all have a God-given need for close, same-sex relationships at all phases of life.  Model deep friendships so that your kids know how it’s done.

But alas, that is not this video’s message, which seems to be to pressure schools to allow boys to use girl’s bathrooms and locker rooms and play on girl’s sports teams. So here I am to explain what this emotional four-minute snapshot of innocence won’t tell you about “transitioning.”

Of those who suffer from gender dysphoria, nearly 2/3 have co-occuring disorders such as depression, dissociative disorder, phobias, etc. People with expensive letters behind their names call this “comorbidity.”  The greatest need for a child or adult struggling with gender dysphoria… is therapy. Deep seated gender confusion can be a product of untreated trauma or psychosis, but pop culture’s recommendation is to build the child’s identity around the symptoms of the problem, rather than seek to resolve the problem itself. When these underlying issues are addressed and effectively treated, often times the gender confusion disappears, as in the case of Walt Heyer.

But the course of treatment prescribed for Corey wasn’t counseling, it was puberty-blocking hormones.  What should be considered malpractice is now cause for celebration.  Because when it comes to this Identity Du Jour, the Hippocratic Oath has been subject to the same malpractice these patients have. 

Hormones are nothing to be trifled with, as anyone who has tried to solve a medical mystery in endocrinology will attest.  Even small amounts of hormonal birth control can have long-term side effects.  Hormone treatment for performance enhancement in sports is illegal. Yet this healthy boy is being given a puberty-altering hormone (to the tune of a $21K implant) to block his normal development. He will likely need steady doses of hormones throughout his life, because every cell in his body bears the mark “XY” and will need to be suppressed daily. I would venture that many of the same people who look for the “no added hormones” sticker on their chicken are the same people encouraging little boys and girls to stunt their own development with hormones. In addition to these drugs, Corey will be directed to websites on how to tuck and tape his penis with the warning “this may cause damage to your genitalia” visible only after you scroll past the helpful video.

And after puberty has been blocked, after he has “tucked” his penis through his teen years, then he’ll likely be encouraged to really embrace himself by amputating his genitals. The “professionals” that this family has chosen to consult won’t tell him that sex-change regret is common.  Nor will he hear that he will never be able to make himself whole again if he ever does resolve the phobia, or the depression, or the dissociative disorder and his feelings of being male returns.  He won’t be shown research which reveals that sex change surgery has not improved the lives of those who seek it. He won’t be told that the surgeons at John Hopkins University have stopped performing gender reassignment surgeries because the sad truth is that the rate of suicide remains constant, or may increase, for those who go undergo sex change operations. And why is that?

Because you actually cannot change your sex.  

As Dr. Paul McHugh of Johns Hopkins states, “transgendered men do not become women, nor do transgendered women become men,” he said. “All (including Bruce Jenner) become feminized men or masculinized women.” The claim that Corey is, or can become a girl, is simply a biological lie. 

Corey, who might actually be happier living as a boy after puberty has it’s way with him (70-80% of gender-confused children spontaneously lose those feelings) is, in essence, being experimented on by medical “professionals.”  The celebration of these kinds of risky measures has no doubt contributed to one clinic in the UK seeing a five-fold increase in gender confused children seeking medical help.  These practices go against everything that the medical community is supposed to support. I can’t help but wonder what the public response to pumping an adolescent boy full of female hormones followed by castration would be if the doctor was Joseph Mangele.  Here’s a statement on the dangers of gender ideology from the American College of Pediatricians.

With gender dysphoria, the mind and body are in conflict.  The PC solution is to alter the body to fit the mind.  If that’s the right course of action, why not do the same with other mind/body disconnects? Take anorexia, where the girl believes she is overweight when in reality she is tiny. Do we as parents go hold her hair back from her face as she vomits her lunch? No. And we certainly don’t start a GoFundMe page to pay for her liposuction. What about Body Identity Integration Disorder (BIID), a condition where someone believes they are disabled and they seek to have the healthy, fully-functioning leg or arm removed? Here’s an example of a woman with BIID whose doctor chose the most unethical response to her psychosis and assisted in blinding her because she believed that being blind was her identity. 

The truth is that with any other condition where mind and body are in conflict, we seek to heal the mind rather than alter the body.  Why?  Because the mind is pliable and feelings can change, but surgical alterations and hormonal damage are permanent.

It cannot be easy to have a child who is struggling with their gender. But parents need support to steer their children toward embracing reality and celebrating their bodies. Because if their kids do “transition,” it’s not from girl into boy or boy into girl. They are transitioning from physically healthy children into life-long customers of cosmetic surgery and the pharmaceutical industry.