by CBN News
NEWS ANALYSIS
By Deborah Bunting
The state of Illinois is changing the parental designations on its birth certificates to accommodate the wishes of transgender people.
In the past, the parent who gave birth was listed as the baby’s mother. But when Myles and Precious Brady-Davis of Chicago found that out, they asked that Myles, who is the parent who actually gave birth, be listed as the baby’s father instead. Myles is a biological woman who identifies as transmasculine. Precious, the other parent, is a biological man who identifies as a woman (transgender woman) and is considered the child’s mother.
ccording to NBC5Chicago, Melaney Arnold, a spokeswoman for the Public Health Department, said they were the first transgender parents to bring up the issue to the state.
Arnold said the department is still updating its system to allow for a father to be listed as the birth parent.
“Growing up, I always wanted to be a dad, so now that I’m a father, it means a lot to me that my child’s identifying document states that,” Myles Brady-Davis told the TV station.
The LGBTQ nonprofit Lambda Legal represented the couple and approached the state about making changes to the official document. The thinking is, since the birth certificate is the main identification used until a driver’s license can be obtained, if not changed, the people listed as mother and father could “out” a transgender couple before they choose for that to be revealed.
“This is a document that any young person uses to enroll in school, join a little league team, or maybe start treatment with a new doctor, and Myles and Precious should have the control to decide if, when, and how they wish to disclose their trans identity,” Kara Ingelhar, a Lambda Legal attorney, told the Chicago NBC affiliate.
While the couple may be the first to change how they are designated on a birth certificate in Illinois, they are not the first to change the law as regards gender status.
Jamie Shupe, a retired US Army veteran, made headlines four years ago when he chronicled his change from a man to a woman in The New York Times. Then a year later, Shupe stood before a judge in Oregon who agreed to let him identify as a third sex, neither male nor female. He was the first American man who previously identified as transgender to obtain non-binary status in the eyes of law.
Basic Rights Oregon called it a “momentous day for genderqueer Oregonians.”
But Shupe no longer celebrates that day. As CBN News reported earlier this month, now Shupe, who was born male, says he regrets what he did and it was all a big mistake. On Christmas Eve, an Oregon judge restored his gender to be legally male and his name to James Shupe. He also recently received a new driver’s license to prove his recovered identity.
Shupe told The Star-Banner newspaper in Ocala, Fla. that he blamed his mistake on mental illness, but also on the current mental health system.
“The mental health system just rubber stamps you with gender dysphoria [discontent with a person’s assigned gender] and they don’t look at the underlying behavior,” Shupe said. “Educating myself about why I was doing the things I was doing was key to being able to make peace with it and allow me to get back to reality.”
In an article published last March in The Daily Signal and reported by CBN News, Shupe says the fact that he was suffering from chronic post-traumatic stress disorder after serving in the military for almost 18 years was ignored by medical professionals. Some believe, he wrote, that he now also suffers from bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder.
“I do not have any disorders of sexual development. All of my sexual confusion was in my head. I should have been treated. Instead, at every step, doctors, judges, and advocacy groups indulged my fiction,” he wrote.
Why does he think this happened? Shupe says the medical community is so frightened by transgender activism that nurses, physicians, and even therapists are too scared to say no to a patient.
Today, that fear of transgender activism is bringing about changes in the guidelines even for the treatment of young children who are confused about their gender. Intensive and compassionate counseling used to be the go-to treatment for this disorder in kids.
“With counseling, or even watchful waiting, an average of 85% of these children would have a resolution of their distress by early adulthood. There are currently 10 studies in the medical literature demonstrating this,” endocrinologist Dr. William Malone told the Christian Post.
But a radical shift has occurred from counseling to what is called “gender affirmative care.” As a result, some doctors prescribe controversial puberty blockers and eventually opposite-sex hormone therapy in an attempt to chemically alter the biological gender of a child to satisfy who the child thinks he or she is. The final step is surgery to remove or alter genitalia.
CBN News reported last fall that California endocrinologist Dr. Michael Laidlaw told the Christian Post that the Endocrine Society, Pediatric Endocrine Society, and the American Academy of Pediatrics have been taken over by the most radical elements of the profession.
“These radical trans activists were involved in writing the Endocrine Society guidelines in 2009 and 2017. These are low to no quality evidence guidelines, and anyone can read for themselves the poor evidence they have for these treatments for children and adolescents. There is no long-term evidence for benefits for these treatments,” Laidlaw stressed.
Dr. Laidlaw equates the “gender affirmative” treatment with brainwashing young children. They are psychologically damaged by puberty blockers, he believes, and then made even more confused, depressed and even psychotic by cross-sex hormones, according to an interview he gave to the CP.
Dr. John McHugh, a distinguished professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University, calls this chemical treatment of minors who are uncomfortable with their birth sex “reckless and irresponsible,” and “comparable to doing frontal lobotomies.”
CBN News previously reported about Dr. McHugh’s grave concern.
McHugh believes there could be a link between feelings of transgenderism and a lack of good mental health.
“I think their mental problems, often depression, discouragement, are the things that need treatment,” he said. “I’m not positive about this. It’s a hypothesis, but it is a very plausible hypothesis, and it would explain why many of the people who go on to have treatment of their body discover they are just as depressed, discouraged, and live just as problematic lives as they did before, because they did not address the primary problem.”
Additionally, McHugh cited the results of a 2018 study by Brown University assistant professor Lisa Littman that showed a transgenderism “contagion effect” among young people. The study, which was reportedly censored by the university, observed that some kids who had a friend or knew of someone who was gender dysphoric were experiencing “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” themselves. In other words, when young people had peers who were confused about their gender, they, too, began to think they might actually be another gender as well. McHugh says this study lends credence to his hypothesis that gender confusion among young people is “mostly being driven by psychological and psychosocial problems these people have.”
So what does this all have to do with a biological woman who gives birth and wants to be identified as the father of the baby rather than as the mother, and a government willing to alter documents to accommodate this desire? It shows that something other than reality is driving changes in our society. Bowing to political correctness, and allowing it to set the standards, rather than abiding by the age-old standard that God created us male and female, will only end up hurting people and throwing society into even greater confusion and upheaval. This current course can not end well.
“BUT GOD who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.” (Ephesians 2:4-7)