Boston Children’s Hospital offers a “full suite of surgical options for transgender teens and young adults,” a video made by the hospital explains. A cheerful woman doctor in the video says, “A gender-affirming hysterectomy is very similar to most hysterectomies that occur,” and goes into more detail I won’t belabor here.

The video is devoid of caution and very much in the spirit of the current Department of Health and Human Services, which is encouraging children who think they are born in the wrong body to get puberty blockers and gender-affirming surgery.

A Terrifying Time to be a Parent

Boston Children’s Hospital, of course, didn’t start this movement. TikTok videos evangelize to young people. It’s a terrifying time to be a parent. Children can be cruel, and instead of acknowledging that reality, adults are putting dangerous ideas into kids’ heads.

Public schools in Portland, Oregon, have adopted a curriculum that presents the “gender binary” as having been introduced by colonizers as a tool of oppression. “Any gender and kid can have any type of body,” the curriculum declares.

The Independent Women’s Forum has released video testimony of a mother whose 11-year-old girl decided she was a boy. School officials referred to her by a boy’s name, using male pronouns. Her fifth-grade teacher (a man) even went so far as to ask her if she wanted to stay in the boys’ cabin during an overnight trip. After canceling a meeting in which a school therapist was going to help the girl come out as transgender to her parents, the parents took her out of public school and kept her offline. The idea of being a boy soon lost its hold on her — even in a house with two brothers.

The mother describes their experience as “like we have gone to war together.” And, of course, those most harmed in this war are children.

Protecting Children From Physical and Mental Harm

The trailer for the documentary “The Detransition Diaries: Saving Our Sisters” from the Center for Bioethics and Culture features young women who explain how they came to believe themselves to be trans. One girl was prescribed testosterone over the phone by Planned Parenthood at 18. Another recounted how she was told that if she didn’t feel comfortable in her body, then she was trans. (Do adults remember being teenagers?)

It’s not impossible to be sensitive to confusion without putting ideas and pressure on children, teens and adults. Life is messy and confusing, and transitioning to another gender is not a solution to the imperfections of life. Children need adults to protect them from physical and mental harm.

President Biden issued a video message this spring saying, “To parents of transgender children, affirming your child’s identity is one of the most powerful things you can do to keep them safe and healthy.” Around the same time, the Department of Justice sent a letter to all states attorneys general warning that it could be a civil rights violation to deny children such gender-affirming “care.”

Mandatory “sex denial” — as some critics call it — is the policy of the current administration, and the medical experts we should be able to rely upon to tell the truth are instead going along, and even cheerleading. Brave parents are sounding an alarm. As it is happening before our eyes, we should join them in protecting our youth from unnecessary and irreversible harm.

Kathryn Jean Lopez is senior fellow at the National Review Institute, editor-at-large of National Review magazine and author of the new book A Year With the Mystics: Visionary Wisdom for Daily Living. She is also chair of Cardinal Dolan’s pro-life commission in New York. She can be contacted at [email protected].