Helping youth toward gender reality

I don’t need to tell you that gender confusion is rampant among our youth today. Only 10 years ago, when I would ask an audience of adults or youth, everyone knew someone who was same-sex attracted, but no one knew someone who was experiencing gender dysphoria or identified as “trans.” Now everyone knows some young person fairly close to them in that situation: a son, daughter, nephew, niece, grandchild. Why?

Allow me to oversimplify here by dividing this phenomenon into three categories. The first category is youth who are being bombarded on every front by “trans” propaganda and influence. It has even become “cool” to be trans. These young people may not even be experiencing gender dysphoria at all, but are swept up in the zeitgeist and supposed “human rights” battle of our time.

The second category of youth are those struggling with something unrelated to gender such as depression, social anxiety, nascent mental illness, trouble in the family, trouble at school, not having friends, etc. Instead of getting the help they need, they’re promised happiness and a resolution to all their difficulties if they would just “transition.” Desperate to feel better, they take the bait.

The third category, which, if they lived in a different era, would be an extremely small percentage, is those youth experiencing some degree of gender dysphoria (serious, persistent discomfort being their male or female self). Not every experience of gender dysphoria is as extreme as wanting to live as the other sex. Some youth are chaffing against gender stereotypes they can’t or don’t want to fit into. Some are experiencing same-sex attraction, which may or may not perdure. Again, in a different time (if free from  agenda-driven adult interference) 70 to 80 per cent of teens who identify as some form of LGB will identify as heterosexual by early young adulthood, according to a 2007 report in New Zealand’s Archives of Sexual Behaviour.

It’s extremely important for young people and their parents to know these three simple facts about so-called “transitioning” before they listen to the “experts.”

1. A youth who takes puberty blockers is almost 100 per cent likely to continue with the entire transitioning process (before regret sets in later).
2. A youth who takes puberty blockers will be rendered irreversibly sterile/infertile.
3. A youth who takes puberty blockers will never experience sexual sensation.

When I share this suppressed information with teens and young adults, they’re outraged: “But a child can’t consent to never wanting to be a parent!” Exactly.

Before I go on with more sad statistics, here’s one BIG solution: We need to teach our young people about God and the purpose of life. “Why did God make me? To know, love and serve Him, and to be happy with Him in this life and the next.”

How much grief could young people be spared if they heard this even once? They need to know God loves them and is on their side no matter what. They need the basic truths of our faith, of life, reiterated at every stage of their lives. In every age, but especially when chaos rules the day, we must look to the Word of God (which never changes) to tell us about human nature (which never changes) and reality (which never changes) and God’s glorious destiny for each of us (which never changes). Because, folks, not only are our young people confused about what gender they are, they’re also confused about what species they are. Children who identify as animals are now going to school dressed and behaving as “furries.”

What is more “body-positive” and “sex-positive” to say to a young person: “You’re all wrong. You were born in the wrong body. You need drastic, life-shortening surgeries, and to be hooked on harmful drugs for the rest of your life.” Or: “You’re amazing, just the way you are! You can learn to love yourself, all of yourself, which includes your body. It’s a process. You’re not done yet. Hang in there.”

Something I always tell young people is: “My prayer for you is that you’ll get up every morning and rejoice in being the man or woman that the Creator who loves you made you to be.”

(Sr. Burns, fsp, is a Daughter of St. Paul. She holds a Masters in Media Literacy Education and studied screenwriting at UCLA. Hellburns.com Twitter: @srhelenaburns.)