As a father, it is my job to protect my children from harm, and this gender ideology threatens multiple harms. It threatens to confuse my young children about what men and women are. It threatens to mutilate their bodies and deprive them of the long-term fulfillment of having children of their own one day. It threatens to deprive them of their father, based on how I answer when my 3-year-old daughter asks, “Daddy, are you a man? Am I a girl?”
As a father, it is my responsibility to watch out for my children and to protect them from demonic lies and from medical interventions that would leave them scarred, stunted and infertile.
Yet a growing chorus of activists and legislators seem intent on taking children away from parents like me, not because we would harm our children but because we would protect them from harm.
Naturally, these activists don’t admit the truth of what they plan to do. They couch the language in Orwellian terms like “gender-affirming care,” in order to make it seem like they, not parents, have the children’s best interests at heart.
These activists insist that if a child — barely old enough to grasp basic concepts of grammar, mathematics or geography — claims that he or she identifies with the gender opposite his or her biological sex, that self-identity must override all other concerns. Woe to any parent who dares to disagree with the declarations of an 8-year-old.
Expanding the Definition of Child Abuse to Include Good Parenting
In my home state of Virginia, Del. Elizabeth Guzman — a Democrat who represents portions of Prince William and Fauquier counties — supports a bill to expand the definition of “child abuse.”
Guzman’s bill (HB 580 in the 2020 session) would define as “abused” any child “whose parent or other person responsible for his care creates or inflicts, threatens to create or inflict, or allows to be created or inflicted upon such child a physical or mental injury on the basis of the child’s gender identity or sexual orientation.”
The bill doesn’t spell out exactly what a “physical or mental injury on the basis of the child’s gender identity” means, but “mental injury” can be rather broadly construed to include a parent’s disagreement with a child’s self-declared “gender identity.”
Nick Minock, a reporter for WJLA-TV (Channel 7), asked Guzman: “What could the penalties be if the investigation concludes that a parent is not affirming of their LGBTQ child? What could the consequences be?”
Guzman did not question the reporter’s framing of the question, but responded that if Child Protective Services runs an investigation and finds the parent guilty, “it could be a felony, it could be a misdemeanor, but we know that a CPS charge could harm your employment, could harm their education, because nowadays many people do a CPS database search before offering employment.”
