3 Fundamental Truths that DESTROY Childhood Gender Ideology ｜ Mia Hughes
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Summary
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender children are being treated in Canadian Pediatric Gender Identity Clinics as if they were born in the wrong body. In fact, there is no such thing as a transgender child. And yet we somehow allow this to be taught to our children as if it is fact.
Transcript
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For the last six years I've been trying to alert Canadians to the medical
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scandal unfolding in our pediatric gender clinics, which is a difficult task
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because the truth is so extraordinary that it defies belief. Doctors in these
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clinics are treating a type of young person that contradicts all existing
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knowledge about child and adolescent development. They pump this fictional
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patient cohort with toxic unproven drugs in the complete absence of
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scientific justification. And then they usher them into the operating theatre to
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have healthy body parts needlessly amputated. So I'm delighted to be here
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today in the only Canadian province that has made any attempt to shield young
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people from a field of medicine that has catastrophically lost its way.
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And I'm especially delighted to be taking part in an event with the theme of
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fundamental truths because this is actually something I think about all the
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time when I'm reading the mainstream coverage of pediatric gender medicine,
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when I see the trans activist response to puberty blocker bans, and when I listen
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to practitioners in the field of gender affirming care, so-called, talk about their
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patients. Because everything they say is wrong, dangerously wrong, but they are
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completely incapable of seeing it. And that's because the entire field of
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pediatric gender medicine is built on faulty foundations. And basic logic tells us
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that when the first step in your reasoning is wrong, everything that follows will
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also be wrong. So now I'm going to share with you three fundamental truths that
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everyone involved in the scandal of pediatric gender medicine has either forgotten or is
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choosing to ignore. Three fundamental truths that are the key to bringing an end to this scandal.
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Fundamental truth number one, there is no such thing as a transgender child.
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Now, that's a simple but highly controversial statement. So let me explain.
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First of all, to state the obvious, it's not possible for a child to be born in the wrong body.
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That shouldn't need saying, but such is the time in which we live.
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And of course, it's not possible to have a girl brain in a boy body, or vice versa.
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This is absurd nonsense. And yet we somehow allow this to be taught to our children as if it's fact.
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But nonsensical political slogans aside, to believe in the existence of transgender children,
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you must believe three impossible things. First, you have to accept that a child, still young enough to
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believe in Santa and the tooth fairy, has a fully formed, stable identity, something that even most
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adults struggle to attain. I'm 47 and I still haven't found mine.
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And you must believe that a child that lives in a world of fantasy and magic somehow knows with
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certainty who they are. Second, you must believe that a child can distinguish stereotypes from this
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deep inner identity, meaning that they can tell the difference between liking certain toys and clothes
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and having an authentic identity that somehow makes them a member of the opposite sex.
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And third, that this inner subjective identity is so important that it overrides biology
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All that requires an enormous leap of faith. It requires that you reject all existing knowledge
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about childhood development, decades of high-quality, replicated, long-established research.
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And you must take this leap of faith because political activists demand it.
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These activists do not have any science to support their claim that transgender children exist.
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The reality is, every story of a trans child consists of nothing more than stereotypes.
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Little boys who like Barbies and princess gowns, or tomboys with short hair and a dislike of dresses.
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And yet, at the behest of a political movement that has no grounding in truth,
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we tell these innocent children that their likes and preferences mean they are members of the opposite sex.
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And because children have a great capacity for imagination and magical thinking,
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and because they trust the adults who are tasked to guide them safely through the world,
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Astonishingly, many people think it's harmless to lie to a little effeminate boy and tell him he's a girl,
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And on the surface, it may appear to be the compassionate thing to do to relieve the child's suffering,
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because, after all, it's not easy to be different from your peers.
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But at some point in the future, these children collide with reality, and that reality is called puberty.
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It's quite easy to turn a little boy into a girl by putting him in a dress and giving him a girl's name,
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or vice versa, but the illusion becomes unsustainable once the hormones begin to surge.
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So now the child must be medicalized, the natural developmental stage of puberty blocked with
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potent endocrine disruptors, followed by powerful wrong sex hormones.
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Which brings me nicely to my next fundamental truth.
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Not a single adolescent is capable of consenting to the medical interventions on offer in pediatric gender clinics.
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The treatments euphemistically packaged as gender affirming care involve drastic irreversible interventions
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that have the potential to rob a young person of their health, fertility, sexual function, or future ability to breastfeed.
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No adolescent has the cognitive capacity to understand what that means.
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And crucially, the clinicians prescribing these interventions understand this perfectly well.
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In the leaked WPATH files, internal communications from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health,
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that Michael Schellenberger and I released last year, a leading Canadian pediatric endocrinologist admitted
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that discussing fertility preservation with a 14-year-old is like, and I quote,
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He also admitted that he sees significant regret about fertility loss in his patients when they reach adulthood.
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He also admitted that he sees significant regret.
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Now, I know this to be true because I, at 14, like so many other women, was that blank wall.
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All the way into my late 20s, I was adamant that I would never want children.
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And then at 30, it was as if someone flipped a switch inside me and I needed to have a baby right away.
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And today, at 47, I'm the proud mother of three children.
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And they've brought more joy into my life than my teenage self ever could have imagined.
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It's the reason we would never offer vasectomies or tubal ligation to adolescents,
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no matter how strenuously they may insist that they will never want to be parents.
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Everything we know about adolescent development tells us that this is a life stage defined by
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It's a period of identity exploration where young people try on different selves.
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When beliefs are held with passionate conviction one day only to be discarded the next.
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And because we know that adolescents don't have fixed, stable identities,
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we should also know that permanent, irreversible medical interventions that imprint adolescent
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identities onto the body could never be appropriate or ethical.
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It has long been recognized that the messaging adolescents are exposed to as they come of age and
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Because humans are social creatures, we mimic the behaviors of those around us, absorb the emotions
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circulating through our social networks, and consciously or unconsciously shape our identities
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around the ideas and the people that we encounter in our lives.
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And no group in society is more malleable or more impressionable than adolescents.
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In the 1980s, there was a global contagion of bulimia triggered by magazines and talk shows running
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stories warning teenage girls and young women about this new and concerning eating disorder.
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media coverage inadvertently caused the behavior to spread by planting the idea that it was possible
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to binge and purge into the fertile minds of millions of adolescent girls and young women
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under immense pressure to meet the era's expectations of thinness.
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Bulimia was the culture-bound syndrome of the 80s and 90s.
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Celebrities shared their battles with it, characters suffered from it in television shows,
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and every story sucked more girls and women into the epidemic.
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But that was the pre-internet era. In the digital age, social contagions are turbocharged.
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My favorite example, my favorite parallel to what we're witnessing today actually occurred
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recently in Germany. And it's the outbreak of tick-tock tics.
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In 2019, German psychiatrists observed a sudden surge in adolescent girls presenting to clinics
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with abrupt onset Tourette-like symptoms, Tourette-like tics. This immediately
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raised alarm bells because Tourette's typically affects boys and starts in early childhood.
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This was an entirely new patient population. So researchers scrambled to find the trigger
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and quickly identified the index case. Adolescent girls with sudden onset
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Tourette-like symptoms began appearing in German clinics just three months after Jan Zimmerman,
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a young Tourette sufferer, launched a YouTube channel that exploded in popularity.
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The girls displayed the exact same symptoms as Jan, the same outbursts and the same catchphrases.
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The phenomenon soon migrated to TikTok, where it spread like wildfire.
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Researchers coined a new term for what they were observing, mass social media induced illness,
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a modern iteration of the long recognized phenomenon of mass sociogenic illness.
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So now let's go to 2014, when pediatric gender clinics across the Western world witnessed an eerily
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similar event. All of a sudden, those waiting rooms also began to fill with an entirely new patient cohort,
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adolescent girls, when historically the patient population just like Tourette's would have
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consisted predominantly of young boys. The surge was so sudden and the inflection point so obvious
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that in a sane era, clinicians would have scrambled to identify the trigger of what was clearly a social
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contagion. Instead, in the era of trans rights, no one even bothered to look.
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And just like TikTok ticks, it wouldn't have taken much effort to find the answer.
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All it required was a glance at the cultural messaging of the time.
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Because 2014 was the year Laverne Cox appeared on the cover of Time magazine with the headline,
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the transgender tipping point, America's next civil rights frontier. And with that, the modern trans
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rights movement launched. Trans identified celebrities were everywhere. Trans characters appeared in
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children's books and television shows. Trans influencers proliferated with astonishing speed online.
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Schools began teaching gender identity ideology as if it's scientific fact. And in a perfect storm
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scenario, smartphones and social media exploded in popularity at exactly the right moment, creating
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the ideal super spreading environment for this seductive idea to go viral. The message adolescents received
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was simple. If you hate your body, that could mean you're trans. And right on cue, legions of confused
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adolescents who hate their developing bodies started showing up at gender clinics, believing themselves
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to be trans. Just like TikTok ticks, a mass social media induced illness. Except on this occasion,
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instead of scrambling to contain the epidemic, doctors picked up their syringes and scalpels and set
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about permanently medicalizing the innocent youth caught up in this powerful cultural storm. An activist
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marched in the streets demanding that these young people be allowed to sacrifice their
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health, fertility and body parts while swiftly demonizing anyone who dared point out the obvious
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parallels to social contagions of the past. Which brings me to my final point. I want to say something
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about those activists and all the people driving this scandal. When Premier Danielle Smith enacted laws
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to protect the youth of Alberta from this deeply unethical experiment, she faced a tsunami of fury from
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trans activists. An NDP MPP accused her of launching hateful attacks on trans kids. A union leader called the
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law cruelty disguised as policy. And a member of Canada's Senate said the legislation was unscientific and immoral,
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and only designed to hurt these young people. Not a word of that is true. But yet those activists believe it with a ferocious passion.
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Because they are blinded by ideology and they have forgotten the three fundamental truths that I've shared today.
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They are the quintessential true believers. They live in a fictional world and they are fighting to protect a
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non-existent type of child from an imaginary enemy. Theirs is a moral quest of good versus evil.
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And they mistakenly believe themselves to be on the side of good.
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But this is not a story about good versus evil. It's a story about ideology versus reality.
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To do evil, a human being must first believe that what he is doing is good.
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Ideology, he warned us, is what gives evil doing its justification and gives the evil doer the
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steadfastness and moral certainty to carry it out. It is ideology that drives doctors to commit acts of
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evil beyond comprehension, to amputate the healthy breasts of teenage girls, to block the natural
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development of innocent children, and to rob young people of their fertility and sexual function
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before they can even comprehend what that means. When the Canadian Medical Association launched a
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legal challenge to Alberta's puberty blocker ban, its president dismissed the law as political
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interference, explaining, and I quote, that medicine is a calling and that doctors are compelled to care
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for and promote the well-being of patients. But that statement reveals the problem. The CMA remains
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blind to the scandal unfolding in plain sight, operating under the comforting illusion that good
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intentions alone are enough to protect patients from harm. Yet noble intentions are no safeguard against
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harm. History is littered with medical scandals, and at the center of each there were well-intentioned
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doctors who left a trail of devastation in their quest to help patients. The doctors who prescribed thalidomide
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didn't do so with the intention of causing major birth defects. The obstetricians who sent expectant
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mothers for prenatal x-rays didn't deliberately set out to cause childhood leukemia. And the recovered
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memory therapists of the 1980s truly believed they were helping victims of child sex abuse when, guided by
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ideology, they implanted false memories of incest into the minds of hundreds of thousands of women, shattering families
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and destroying lives. There can be little doubt that pediatric gender medicine is destined to take its place in
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history alongside these medical catastrophes. Because the fundamental truths that make one thing unmistakably clear,
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not a single one of these kids is trans and not a single one can grasp the lifelong consequences of these interventions.
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And if they cannot comprehend the consequences, then these treatments are not appropriate for a single young person, not one.
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So this means all that is required to end this scandal is to remember the fundamental truths that every one of us
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has always known and to have the courage to speak them clearly, without apology, until they are heard. Thank you.