by Rabbi Michael Barclay, American Thinker:
As a Rabbi in Southern California, I have been confronted recently all too often with tweens and teenagers wanting to become a different sex. Clearly a lot of this has to do with the push for gender modification from the leftist establishment in California, including especially schoolteachers who seem to think their agenda on this issue is more important than the wishes of the parents, let alone the children themselves.
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But while this external push to lose gender identity is being thrust upon our children, it seems that an inordinate percentage of them are accepting this notion of becoming “gender fluid”. In working with youngsters in our religious school and Bar Mitzvah program (the Bar or Bat Mitzvah is the rite of passage a 13-year-old Jew goes through), it has become clear to me that we, as parents and teachers, must understand the deeper issues that are troubling young people so that we can combat this abuse of our youth by the political and leftist elite.
There has always been an extremely small percentage of people who have gender dysphoria, formerly called Gender Identity Disorder (GID). According to DSM-5 (the 2013 official diagnostic tool of the American Psychiatric Assoc.) it is approximately 1/100 of one percent of the population that experiences this condition. In many tribal cultures this rarity has always been recognized, and often the person with this condition is trained to be the shaman or medicine person for the tribe as they are considered special and with more potential conscious spirituality as true gender dysphoria is so incredibly rare. And it has always been extremely rare.
But while the statistics are that less than one person in 10,000 has this condition, the media, politicians, and leftist elite would have us think that at least five percent of young people are actually transgender. This is a disparity of a factor of 500. Seemingly, in only a few years, there are 500 more times transgender individuals than only a few years ago.
According to a recent UCLA report, transgender identification currently is 130 times the statistics as understood in the official DSM-5 of 9 years ago, less than the media would have us believe but still a significant increase. These disparate statistics point to one of two explanations: either individuals were underreporting by a factor of 500, or recently people have suddenly started accepting and self identifying as transgender. Given the political agenda to maximize this self-identification, we must look at why teenagers and tweens have suddenly started embracing this new self perception foisted upon them.
I found the answer to this question through dialogues with young people exploring their gender identity and seeing a consistent pattern. After exploring this pattern more deeply, I believe that we all need to have a greater understanding so that we can help those young people who are dealing with gender issues and being pressured by the left into true gender confusion.
The primary challenge is that Western society in the 21st century has conflated three different aspects of individual identity into one, and has resolved these three issues with one purported solution: changing gender identity.
There are three aspects of identity that are related, but should never be conflated: sex, sexuality, and energy. While they are tangential to each other, they are distinct and separate. It is their conflation that is causing the gender identity issues, and only through re-separating them can we begin to help young people navigate their journey of self exploration in a healthy way.
Sex is, simply put, a person’s plumbing and DNA. All cultures throughout history recognize this truth with the rare exception of hermaphrodites or intersex, a segment of the population (currently estimated at .02 percent, or 2:10,000) that are born with both male and female physical characteristics. But other than this rare exception (whose percentage is nearly the same as the DSM-5 statistic of true gender dysphoria), a person is born to either the male or female sex. It is in the physical body, and in the DNA.
While elective surgery may be able to change the physical characteristics, the DNA cannot be changed. Despite whatever hormone blockers, drugs, or surgery; on a purely genetic level the sex remains the same throughout our lives as x and y chromosomes cannot be altered. All science agrees that our genetic identity is the same throughout our life as it was at birth, as x and y chromosomes cannot be changed.
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