Several new words have entered our English language that have powerfully changed American and Western family structures, legal systems, military, politics and social norms: cisgender, gender-fluid, nonbinary (gendered), pansexual, trans and transgender. A cisgender is an individual who identifies with his or her birth sex. A nonbinary or pansexual is one who has not made up his mind yet—he does not identify as either male or female. A trans, or transgender, has changed or is in process of changing his birth sex, often with the help of medical intervention.

Transgenderism made big headlines when Olympic gold medalist Bruce Jenner changed to Caitlyn Marie Jenner and North Carolina had a legal furor over whether transgender schoolchildren could use bathrooms matching their new identities.

Now the transgender movement continues to march into new territory. What’s the new turf? The physical and mental health of very young children.

The University of California–San Francisco director of mental health now claims that 2-year-olds can know they are transgender. According to Dr. Diane Ehrensaft, a 2-year-old boy can know he should have been born a girl, and a girl can know, at 2, that she should have been born a boy.

“We expect a 2-year-old to know ‘I am boy. I am girl,’” she explained. “So why can’t that also apply to transgender children?”

Child Psychology Gone Mad

Dr. Ehrensaft has a history of advocating for children to determine themselves whether they are transgender. She supports the Rainbow Day Camp in northern California—where transgender youths as young as 4 may attend. According to her, the camp has experienced a “sea change, maybe we can even call it a tsunami, in the number of little kids showing up with their families.”

What if a boy wants to wear dresses? “I would say, get him the dresses,” Ehrensaft says. “Have your child free to choose. Maybe, they’ll stop wearing dresses. Maybe, they grow up to be gay” (cnsNews.com, August 14).

Ehrensaft suggests parents listen carefully to their children’s “use of [pronouns] regarding gender,” that they look for frustration concerning his or her own genitals, and take it seriously when a boy wants to wear a dress or a girl wants to play with trucks. This last suggestion is called, in professional terms, “gender expansion play.”

cnsNews.com offered advice for parents from another gender expert, Johanna Olson-Kennedy, from the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles. She recommends “that parents go away for a weekend with your child in order to learn more about his or her gender preference.” Would you take them to the beach, the zoo or an amusement park? No. “Do a weekend as a different gender, and see what you learn … letting them use a different pronoun or wear a dress or other clothing of their choice.”

I ask: What has happened to human minds that could think or advocate such things?

I am a father of four daughters and grandfather of nine grandchildren. Not one of my daughters ever questioned her birth sex. None of the grandchildren (five girls, four boys) has proclaimed, “I should have been a boy,” or, “I should have been a girl.”

What 2-year-old, just learning to talk, doesn’t at times mix up her pronouns? How can a 2-year-old girl playing with her brother’s cars or trucks represent gender confusion? It takes an adult mind to see this innocence as some form of transgenderism.

Let’s be truly honest, adults. Playing at cross-dressing with a child is the best way to introduce confusion into a child’s mind concerning sexual identity.

The New Normal

Michelle Cretella, M.D., pediatrician and president of the American College of Pediatricians, has a different view of the transgender ideology. She views it as an infection disrupting American politics and our legal systems.

“[T]ransgender ideology is not just infecting our laws. It is intruding into the lives of the most innocent among us—children—and with the apparent growing support of the professional medical community,” she wrote for the Daily Signal. “I have witnessed an upending of the medical consensus on the nature of gender identity. What doctors once treated as a mental illness, the medical community now largely affirms and even promotes as normal” (July 3; emphasis added throughout).

The diagnosis for children distressed by their biological sex used to be called “gender identity disorder.” In 2013, the term was changed to “gender dysphoria.”Disorder means “a state of confusion,” whereas dysphoria means “a state of unease.” This change was accomplished by the often-unseen hand of the transgender movement.

In 2014, there were only 24 pediatric “gender clinics” along the East Coast and in California to help children distressed by their biological sex. By 2015, there were 40 across the nation. “With 215 pediatric residency programs now training future pediatricians in a transition-affirming protocol and treating gender-dysphoric children accordingly, gender clinics are bound to proliferate,” said Cretella.

Here is the problem with the expansion in the number of clinics.

Children who “consistently and persistently insist” that they are not their birth sex are considered innately transgender. (“The fact that in normal life and in psychiatry, anyone who ‘consistently and persistently insists’ on anything else contrary to physical reality is considered either confused or delusional is conveniently ignored,” writes Cretella.) Then trained medical professionals recommend parents adhere to a transition-affirming protocol: They are to act as if the child is the gender he or she desires. When the child is 11 or 12, parents should place him or her on puberty blockers. If by age 16, the child still believes he or she is trapped in the wrong body, the child should be placed on cross-sex hormones; girls may receive a double mastectomy. “[G]enital reassignment surgeries are not recommended before age 18, though some surgeons have recently argued against this restriction,” continued Cretella.

None of this sounds normal to me.

Large-scale Child Abuse

Dr. Cretella confirmed Ehrensaft’s view that the number of children claiming to be transgender is increasing dramatically. The United Kingdom alone has seen a 2,000 percent surge in referrals since 2009. “The transgender movement has gained legs in the medical community and in our culture by offering a deeply flawed narrative,” she wrote (ibid). She believes the transgender movement has opened the door to large-scale child abuse. You can read the details debunking the transgender movement’s flawed claims in her full article.

“These professionals are using the myth that people are born transgender to justify engaging in massive, uncontrolled and unconsented experimentation on children who have a psychological condition that would otherwise resolve after puberty in the vast majority of cases,” warns Cretella. “Today’s institutions that promote transition affirmation are pushing children to impersonate the opposite sex, sending many of them down the path of puberty blockers, sterilization, the removal of healthy body parts, and untold psychological damage” (ibid).

A little child’s life is precious. It is natural for parents to be protective. One of the biggest scare tactics transgender supporters throw at parents is that they must allow gender transformation in order to prevent suicide. This is a huge lie. In Sweden, one of the world’s most lgbt-affirming countries, the suicide rate for adults who undergo sex reassignment is 20 times greater than that of the general population.

“These harms constitute nothing less than institutionalized child abuse. Sound ethics demand an immediate end to the use of pubertal suppression, cross-sex hormones, and sex reassignment surgeries in children and adolescents, as well as an end to promoting gender ideology via school curricula and legislative policies,” Cretella states (ibid). This is a laudable desire. Sadly, it is unlikely that Dr. Cretella and her peers will appear on our nightly news or in our national newspapers. They have great difficulty finding amplification for their message.

Destruction of Biblical Family

This trend is part of a highly organized plan to destroy biblical family, commonly known as traditional family. It has been happening for decades. Dr. Ehrensaft admits her part in the movement in a book she coauthored, My Son Wears Heels. “A long time ago, I grew up to be a feminist of the 1960s. Looking back on that time, we all thought we were kicking up some dust, and we were happy for it,” she writes. “We had no idea we had started a landslide, earthshaking tremors that would set in motion, with our allies in the lgbtqi movement, a new era in which homosexuality would be deleted as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual (1973), gay marriage would be legalized in the United States (2015), and reparative therapy to try to fix the gender identity for minors [seeking to change someone’s homosexual orientation] would be banned in several states in the United States and a province in Canada. … When even Target stores dispense with gender categories in their toy departments (which they announced in the summer of 2015), we are definitely in a whole new world.”

Long forgotten is the fact that a supreme, all-powerful Creator God made a man and a woman out of the dust of the earth. The history of this event is recorded simply and beautifully in the first pages of the Bible. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27). You can read further details of Adam’s creation in Genesis 2:7 and of Eve’s in verses 21-23. Then, on the very day of their creation, God instituted marriage, making these two human beings—a man and a woman—a family!

Sadly, soon after, that man and woman rejected the God who made them and the way of life He had mapped out for them. They thought they could devise something better. Mankind has been cut off from God and lived miserable lives ever since (Genesis 3:22-24).

The same God who created a man and a woman has stated clearly that homosexuality, lesbianism, transgenderism and even cross-dressing are wrong (Leviticus 20:13; Deuteronomy 22:5; Romans 1:26-27). The Apostle Peter warned that those who commit such sins, unless they repent, will face severe punishment (2 Peter 2:6).

Can Diane Ehrensaft offer this world something better than what God offered our first parents? Read carefully what she writes: “As the 21st century rolls on, we are bearing witness to an explosion in the acknowledgment, understanding and celebration of people of all genders and sexualities. Gender used to be bedrock, and now we’ve converted it into moving boulders. Marriage used to be the sole providence of a man and a woman, and I should add as a man and a woman who started out that way. Now we recognize marriage as the loving union between two people of any gender and any sexual identity” (ibid). This psychologist celebrates the destruction of gender as a bedrock of human society; she celebrates that (according to man’s law) marriage is no longer the sole possession of a man and a woman. She celebrates homosexuality and cross-dressing. Do we see that she also celebrates confusing little children?

What Psychologists Don’t Know

“As a clinical psychologist, I am bound by the oath that dictates the actions of all medical and mental health professionals: Do No Harm. Yet all around me, physicians, psychiatrists and child therapists are doing just that—in clinics and private practice consultation rooms where parents are advised to take away their little boy’s dolls and pink tights or make their little girls grow out their buzz cuts; mothers and fathers are directed to ignore or punish their children’s ‘inappropriate’ gender expressions and pay attention to or reward only the ‘gender-appropriate’ ones; and families are sent home to make sure the gender-nonconforming children are redirected to same-sex friendships and to their same-sex parent as the main or only parent to identify with,” Ehrensaft writes (Gender Born, Gender Made: Raising Healthy Gender-Nonconforming Children). Let’s be reasonable. Who is actually harming children? It should be easy to answer that question.

Herbert W. Armstrong, the most important theologian of the 20th century, wrote a groundbreaking article titled “What Psychologists Don’t Know About Child Rearing.” He wrote: “The psychologists who reject the revealed Word of God cannot rightly teach you how to rear children. They do not know what the human mind is” (Plain Truth, October 1984). All parents must learn that eliminating gender confusion is a matter of proper child rearing.

All proper child rearing begins with understanding how God created the human mind. “Adam, the first created human, was created with a spirit in him,” wrote Mr. Armstrong. “The spirit was not a ‘soul.’ The breathing physical man was the soul (Genesis 2:7). The spirit in him did not impart life to him. His breathing imparted the breath of life to his circulatory system. So says God” (ibid). This is astounding biblical revelation that few understand today. Study Job 32:8 and 1 Corinthians 2:11.

“Adam was created with a human spirit by which, of himself, he could acquire knowledge,” Mr. Armstrong continued. Man has excelled at gaining knowledge of how to deal with material things. Mr. Armstrong explained, however, that man needed two other important kinds of knowledge to have a truly happy, successful life: how to build a relationship with God, and how to have a relationship with others, especially those of his own immediate family.

Adam needed God’s Holy Spirit to gain the other two kinds of knowledge. “The Holy Spirit would have imparted to him knowledge for contact and relationship with God—how to get along with his fellowman—how to treat his mate and rear his children. But Adam rejected the Spirit of God (tree of life) and took to himself the knowledge of good and evil,” explained Mr. Armstrong (ibid). We live in the world that Adam and Eve began—a world in rebellion against its Creator.

So where does this leave us on the subject of transgenderism? Children are born with the same human spirit as an adult. A child can think, reason and make decisions. But at birth, a child’s mind is a blank slate. He must be taught to think and reason properly. He must be taught about gender and the God-ordained purposes behind sex. Boys must be taught how to be men; girls must be taught how to be women. Parents should teach their sons and daughters about the proper use of clothing and living a sexually moral life. Parents should teach their children to live by and obey all of God’s Ten Commandments. This flies in the face of all modern thinking, but it is the only way to solve this world’s growing social problems.

Mr. Armstrong expounded on this teaching on the human spirit and God’s purpose and plans for mankind in his book The Incredible Human Potential. We are happy to send you this book free of charge and without follow up.