This, in short, is how the conveyor belt works: The school encourages the child to embrace a new gender. Teachers must affirm it and hide it from parents. Counselors must support it. Parents must go along or risk losing custody. Employers and insurers must pay for it. Doctors must perform it. All of this is imposed by law. And then we wonder why cases are skyrocketing. What can be done?  

Almost everyone agrees that rates of transgender identification are skyrocketing, especially among young girls. But nobody seems to agree on the cause.

Is it social contagion, fueled by social media and peer pressure? Is it social acceptance, as a more tolerant society finally lets transgender kids embrace their true selves? Or is it just good business, as gender clinics profit by shuffling children through an expensive series of drugs and surgeries?

Maybe the answer is all of the above—at least to some degree.

But one important contributor is often overlooked: the law. Over the last decade, a complicated network of state and federal laws has increasingly channeled children down the path of gender transition. These laws operate in a wide variety of settings—from public schools, to professional counseling, to custody disputes, to foster care, to adoption, to health insurance, to the practice of medicine itself. And in each setting, the law places a heavy thumb on the scale, pushing children and parents toward gender transition. The law operates, in effect, as a transgender conveyor belt.

Here’s how it works. But buckle up, because there are many stages in the process.

First, school districts across the country have adopted curricula that require teachers to introduce the concept of gender identity as early as pre-K. In Montgomery County, Maryland, for example, the Board of Education mandated a series of “inclusivity” books for pre-K through eighth grade that promote gender transitioning and “disrupt students’ either/or thinking” about gender. The school district refuses to notify parents when these concepts are taught and refuses to allow parents to opt kids out of the teaching. Not surprisingly, some children exposed to this teaching (and social media and peer influence) begin questioning their gender identity.

Once a child questions his or her gender identity, many public schools are legally required to affirm the child’s new gender identity with pronouns, bathrooms, and the like—and to conceal that identity from the child’s parents. California and New Jersey have even sued school districts that dared notify parents, arguing that it violates the child’s “privacy” and is “discriminatory” to inform parents that their child has a new gender.

If parents find out about their child’s new identity and seek counseling, they will discover that twenty-two states and over one hundred local governments have now adopted so-called “conversion-therapy bans.” These laws operate as a one-way ratchet on professional counselors. Michigan’s law, for example, requires counselors to provide “acceptance,” “support,” and “assistance to an individual undergoing a gender transition,” while making it illegal to talk with a child about “behavior or gender expression” that aligns with his or her biological sex. This means counseling in many states can go in only one direction: toward a gender transition.

If parents nevertheless persist in affirming a child’s God-given body, some states have begun removing children from their parents’ custody. Illinois is considering legislation that would define child abuse to include a parent’s refusal to medically transition a child. And Indiana stripped Catholic parents of custody after a report that they wouldn’t call him by a new female name and pronouns. Even though the state concluded there was no abuse or neglect, it kept him in a foster home that would affirm his preferred identity, saying he “should be in a home where she is [ac]cepted for who she is.”

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