Gender Ideology and the Destruction of Parental Rights: BC Case Shows the Totalitarian Underbelly of SOGI Politics

By Jenn Smith.

[Note: This is an unedited version of the article I wrote for the Post Millennial; it contains names of doctors involed].

“When an opponent says to me, ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I reply calmly, ‘Your child belongs to us already… What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing but this new community.’”
– Adolf Hitler

In a technocratic totalitarian country, one of the first and most important tasks is to gain control over the nation’s children. Of all the foundations upon which free societies are built, the most commonly overlooked and yet one of the most critically important in terms of protecting diversity of belief is the protection of parental rights. As the opening quote shows, totalitarian rulers have always known if the state can just get parents out of the way, the future belongs to them.

In a previous Op-Ed I wrote for the Post Millennial I pointed out the dangers of child transitioning and how my research and personal experiences as a transgender person has led me to believe that child transitioning is a very bad idea. That op-ed was written in response to Tanya Granic Allen’s struggles trying to keep gender ideology out of Ontario schools. This highly dangerous ideology is now being promoted in schools all across this nation and in many cases in direct opposition to parental wishes. This aggressive move by the state towards taking over the minds of children must be resisted, because as George Orwell once pointed out, by keeping the totalitarian dictator out of your child’s mind you are at the same time keeping him out of your home.

Recent developments in British Columbia suggest that SOGI (sexual orientation and gender identity) politics are now actually helping to move our society closer and closer towards becoming a totalitarian state, in which the hearts, minds, and even the bodies of children are being taken from parents and handed over to the technocratic agents of the government.

Almost six months ago I revealed on Facebook and Twitter, that children expressing as transgender could now begin medical transition not only without parental knowledge, but even directly against parental wishes. While researching another subject, I stumbled across references to something called the “Infants Act,” which was originally designed to give underage youths the legal authority to receive immunization shots without parental approval, but was expanded to include prescriptions for birth control, STDs, abortion, and more. It essentially emancipated what they called “capable” children to make their own health decisions — with “capable” being loosely defined as being able to understand the nature and implications of the treatment.

Most of the leading opponents of gender ideology I knew, however, were unaware that it applied to transgender treatment. The idea that it would be used for something as controversial as so-called “sex reassignment” seemed unfathomable.

I was unaware that its use in this regard had already been discussed by gender “experts” in BC until I discovered a peer-reviewed document entitled, Caring for Transgender Adolescents in BC: Suggested Guidelines (CTABC). This document was published in 2006 (updated and renamed in 2015) and was coordinated by Joshua Goldberg as part of a joint project between Vancouver Coastal Health and other organizations.

The fact the Infants Act can be used to undermine parental authority in regard to gender transition has not been discussed either by the government or the media. There was, for instance, a case in Prince George where a father had been ordered to facilitate his daughter’s transitioning, but media reports did not mention that the Infants Act was used to justify the ruling — a fact I did not confirm myself until I acquired court documents while writing this article.

While the general public is largely unaware, gender specialists in BC have known for some time that this could be used as a weapon to undermine parental objections to “sex reassignment.” The CTABC document clarified the issue for “care” providers by noting, “in BC, as with any other type of non-emergency medical treatment, sex reassignment of adolescents is governed by the Infants Act.” When I first read this statement, I was quite shocked. I highly doubted those who drafted the original Act even considered the rare and highly dubious “sex reassignment” procedures. The fact these “experts” were now advising it be used to override parental objections to “sex reassignment” was alarming, and I immediately went public with the information.

I had extensive debates at that time with pro-child transition advocates who claimed that I was being alarmist and that even though the law existed there was no evidence doctors would actually use it to undermine parental rights. While I did not possess such evidence at the time, that has now changed.

About a week prior to writing this article, Angelina Ireland, who is seeking the candidacy for the Conservative Party in Delta, BC, came to me with a story that essentially underscored and validated all of my concerns about the potentially lethal combination of gender ideology and the Infants Act. She told me about a father (whom I shall call Michael) in her riding whose young teen daughter (whom I shall call Crystal) had been going through a classic identity crisis. Knowing that I have been heavily involved in this transgender debate, Angelina arranged for us to meet with Michael and discuss his case.

Crystal’s story was one I have heard many times. She is just one of countless millions of young girls over the last several decades that has felt uncomfortable with the changes taking place in her body and the psychological pressures associated with not feeling like she fits in with her peers. After years of troubles with peers, she began engaging in self harm, cutting, and consuming small amounts of poison, which led to her being taken to the hospital by her parents. The hospital examined her and released her the same day. While Crystal was never tested for autism, it should be noted that many of these behaviors are common in people with autism.

Crystal became immersed in online chat groups, including ones dedicated to gender transition. One day she cut off her long hair and began suggesting that she felt like a boy. Her parents actually worked with her in this regard and allowed her to socially transition, which included the adoption of a male name for school.

Michael’s ex-wife Debbie arranged for Crystal to get psychological counseling with Dr.Wallace Wong, one of BC’s leading transgender focused psychologists (Wong also helped create the CTABC). While Michael was convinced his daughter was just going through depression, Wong dismissed that and said Crystal was transgender. Then, with Crystal in the room, he suggested that testosterone treatment might help. Crystal immediately became fixated on this idea. Wong then referred her to the Gender Clinic at the BC Children’s Hospital (BCCH).

Michael did not pay too much attention to the first appointment at BCCH. Crystal’s mother Debbie took her and Michael assumed there would be multiple visits before any decisions were made. It was thus with some surprise that on Crystal’s very first visit to BCCH Michael received a call from Debbie saying “they want to start giving her testosterone today.” Shocked that they would immediately rush to giving a 13 year-old girl testosterone injections, Michael said “no way, this is too fast.”

The sudden move towards medically transitioning his daughter inspired Michael to research some of the long term and irreversible side effects of testosterone therapy. What he discovered was that these drugs come with serious and irreversible side effects, including permanent facial and body hair, an irreversible deepening of the voice, and other potential problems including the possibility of sterilization — although consent forms are very careful to note that the long term consequences of cross sex hormones are not yet fully understood. For those females that do go through with testosterone “therapy” and later regret it, they can find themselves trapped in a kind of nightmare where they have all of the physical appearances of a male but are actually still female with no functional male parts.

The idea that his daughter might be making emotional decisions today and find herself trapped in a permanently disabled body later severely concerned Michael, as such he informed Debbie, Crystal, and the doctors that he would not support such a drastic action.

Michael resisted and delayed the testosterone treatments, despite several attempts by BCCH staff to (in his words) “bully” him into accepting the decision. When it became clear he was not going to acquiesce, the BCCH informed him that he could not refuse and they were going ahead with treatments. Michael threatened legal action.

In a letter dated December 1, 2018, Dr. Brendan Hursch and social worker Robyn Lalani wrote a joint letter on behalf of the BC Children’s Hospital acknowledging Michael’s concerns, but cited S.17 of the Infants Act and noted that Crystal was evaluated and it was determined that she possessed “sufficient maturity and intelligence to be capable of consenting” to testosterone therapy. As Crystal was deemed “capable” of making the decision, the “right to consent to treatment belongs to the child alone… [and] the parent cannot veto that decision.”

Hursch and Lalani further informed Michael that his request to be kept up to date on his daughter’s medical treatment could not be honored without express approval from Crystal. Michael informed the hospital that he would seek legal recourse to stop them, to which the hospital replied saying they would delay the treatments by two weeks allowing him time to get a lawyer. Treatments were scheduled to begin on December 15, but privacy provisions mean that there is no way of knowing if the first injection was administered.

So what we have here essentially, is a social worker tasked with the responsibility of protecting vulnerable children, and a pediatric endocrinologist and professor at UBC, an institution heavily funded by numerous pharmaceutical companies, jointly concluding that a young girl who had been engaging in self harm, cutting herself, and consuming small amounts of poison, was somehow mature enough and responsible enough to make a decision with permanent irreversible consequences for her life. When her father protested, he was told he had no say in the matter and not even the right to be kept informed. Parents have thus been rendered as little more than propaganda pawns at best (if they agree) or problems to be silenced if they disagree.

In his now classic novel 1984, George Orwell conjured up a vision of a nightmarish dystopian state in which all “links between child and parent” were severed; a technocratic state in which children were “taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen.” The case of Michael and his daughter strongly suggests that we are now not very far from this dystopian hell, and it should serve as an alarm bell for all those that believe in the sanctity of parental rights, because this could happen to any parent.

While the technocratic, self-obsessed, narcissistic elite in our society may believe that they know better than the average parent what is good for their children, countless generations of humanity have gotten along just fine without them. While these “inclusive” yet remarkably exclusive biological reality-denying moral supremacists may believe that they are the unquestionable übermensch masters of mankind, I will reiterate the fact that parental rights are one of the key battlements that protect a free society from a stealth totalitarian takeover.

BC’s Infants Act and its application to gender identity issues in children must be regarded as one of the most heinous assaults we have ever seen not only on parental rights, but upon freedom itself. I am going to suggest to the reader, that any state that has seized for itself the power to trample a parent’s rights in order to artificially, medically, and permanently transform a child from one gender into another is a state that has run totally amok and must be brought to heel forthwith.

It is incumbent upon we the people, to finally stand up and demand that they return the God-given right of parents to control their own households and look after the well being of their own children without having to worry about the intrusive power of an increasingly totalitarian state.

And for those who would argue the government line that the state has only seized these powers for the “good of children” and for the “good of society,” I will leave you with the timeless warning of C.S. Lewis: “Of all the tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under the omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber barons cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”