Authors of ‘Exposing the Gender Lie’ say transgenderism is 'both an industry and an ideology'
What would it look like if gender ideology were actually a multi-billion-dollar moneymaking scheme that exploits not just adults, but small children?
Brandon Showalter and Jeff Myers explore that question in their book, Exposing the Gender Lie: How to Protect Children and Teens From the Transgender Industry’s False Ideology.
Showalter, a senior investigative reporter at The Christian Post, and Myers, who heads Summit Ministries, told The Epoch Times they believe that at the end of the day, evil and greed are what fuel this ongoing trend of “experimental medicalization” where young children are castrated and lives are irreparably harmed.
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“People stand to profit handsomely from this experimental medicalization, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and body-altering surgeries, again, all in pursuit of a lie,” Showalter told the Times.
Myers addressed a common perception of transgenderism as simply one ideology among many, when in fact, said Myers, it’s “both an industry and an ideology.”
“It’s an ideology that came out of the postmodern movement in the 1980s that is attempting to gain power by confusing people about the nature of reality,” he said. “And then there’s an industry, medically, that comes along and … they stand to make tens of billions of dollars.”
Showalter pointed to studies funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), including a $5.7 million grant given to a number of pediatric gender clinics in 2015 to study the outcomes of various kinds of trans-identified young people.
He pointed to one study on cross-sex hormones for children with a document showing the minimum age limit was lowered from 13 years old to 8 years old.
Another article in the New England Journal of Medicine with the “who’s who of gender doctors” analyzed psychosocial outcomes of 315 non-binary or trans-identified young people, ages 12 to 20. Despite two of those young people involved in the study taking their own lives, the gender doctors “breezily dismissed that as adverse events,” said Showalter.
That, he added, is how industry leaders “paper over the disastrous outcomes and they spin the narrative that this is actually a positive development.”
“Even as a whole rash of young people are being experimented on, it’s hailed as this universally wonderful, positive, groundbreaking, great thing for young people who claim to be born in the wrong body or the opposite sex,” he said. “Meanwhile, what they’re really doing is committing atrocities that should make us all hang our heads in shame.
“The U.S. government has no business funding this kind of experimental research, especially on children.”
For Myers, much of the collateral damage from the sex change industry comes the softened euphemisms like “top or bottom surgery,” which are two seriously invasive forms of surgery that he considers genital mutilation.
“That is genital mutilation and breast mutilation, and there are children being subjected to this,” he said.
Part of the fight, Myers added, is with lobbyists and what he termed the “medical industrial complex,” which is estimated to spend upwards of $750 million a year lobbying at the federal level — the equivalent of roughly $1.5 million per member of Congress.
And it’s not merely the financial costs, said Myers.
“The puberty-blocking drugs that are given to children to stop puberty, which have irreversible effects, damaging their ability to develop as their bodies naturally would, with bone density loss, brain swelling, vision loss, and all kinds of things might cost a parent between $5,000 and $30,000 a year,” he said. “If the parents don’t pay, then of course, Medicare or Medicaid or the insurance company might have to pay.
“The standards say these procedures are medically necessary. That is not my term, that is in the standards of care, that these procedures are medically necessary.”
Myers estimated that at this point, it’s difficult to determine exactly how many children are being subjected to these types of unethical procedures.
“The number of children diagnosed as gender dysphoric has tripled in the last three years, and it’s continuing to grow. Tens of thousands of children are now being treated at one of 60 pediatric gender clinics or one of 300 other gender clinics that also treat children,” he said.
“Most nations have one to three clinics. We have 360 gender clinics in this country.”
Showatler said he even has a term to describe how pervasive all of this really is: “institutional capture.”
“When I say that sometimes people will say, ‘That’s a tinfoil hat conspiracy.’ No,” he said. “You have professional societies such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, the Pediatric Endocrine Society, and all of the major counseling and therapy organizations completely buying in with brutal speed that this is how you treat this disorder.
“This is the approach you take; only affirm whatever the child or the young person says that they are. You are to immediately and unquestionably say that is correct, and never, ever challenge it.”
Perhaps most troubling, Showalter added, was the speed with which all of this has transpired.
“The remarkable thing, and it’s horrifying, is how quickly this has all happened,” he said. “But understand that a lot of the ideologues active in this space, the academic medicine types, they’ve been making very sneaky and stealthy moves very gradually, to the point where once you capture enough institutions and entities, a lot can happen very quickly.”
