Rejecting Gender Ideology for the Sake of Children

America has tolerated the sexualization of children for far too long,
and we have reached a breaking point—between 2019 and 2023, almost 6,000
minors underwent surgical mutilation for a “sex-change” to the cheers of
the American medical community, and almost 9,000 children received
experimental puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. 

Teachers hang LGBTQ flags in elementary classrooms, and public school
libraries lend pornographic books detailing gay sex acts to children.
The average age of first pornography exposure is 11 years old, and 41
percent of programs rated for children on Netflix contain LGBTQ content,
characters, and themes. 

I have seen this crisis up close. Last year, I attended a school board
meeting in the suburbs of Chicago where a girl had been forced to change
with a trans-identifying boy in a locker room. The board meeting was
full to the brim with LGBTQ advocates waving pink, white, and blue
flags, and the first speaker walked to the mic from the seat behind
me—he had on a knee-length dress, dark red lipstick, a little too much
blush on his cheeks, and a long, grown-out comb over. 

His two-minute testimony about “inclusivity” for “trans kids” was met
with enthusiastic applause, but my gut reaction to this old man in a
possible. Later that night, I found the man’s Facebook page, and I was
unsurprised to see it was filled with fanciful pictures of little girls. 

trans-identifying man attend a school board meeting to demand that a boy
have full access to the girls’ locker room? Soon enough, I found that a
look at history proves that LGBTQ ideologues have been sexualizing
children for decades. 

The western roots of gender ideology can be traced back to “sexologists”
John Money and Alfred Kinsey. In the 1960s and 70s, Dr. Money conducted
his “research” on a pair of male twins from their infancy to age seven
at Johns Hopkins University. One twin was raised as a boy (the control
twin), and the other was forcibly raised as a “girl” after an
unintentional castration of his genitals. Dr. Money forced the twins to
perform sex acts with each other as part of his experimentation. 

Dr. Money published his findings to his fame, coining the terms “gender
identity” and “sexual orientation,” while the twins went on to die
overdosed on antidepressants. 

Dr. Money’s contemporary, Dr. Alfred Kinsey, was the director of the
Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. His
seminal works on human sexual behavior contain data gathered on
“pre-adolescent orgasms,” and the youngest child Dr. Kinsey induced and
measured an orgasm on was two months old. 

Money and Kinsey laid the groundwork for today’s gender ideology; so did
their “research.” The fathers of the LGBTQ agenda built its foundation
on perverse child abuse. 

As evidenced by the thousands of sex-rejecting procedures American
doctors have performed on children, the ideology built by Money and
Kinsey’s child-abusive pseudoscience has persisted unchecked. What is
more, “Drag Queen Story Hours” are held at elementary schools and kids’
libraries far too often, and we have seen an increase in drag
performances in front of children—even some where children are the ones
dressing and performing in drag for adults. 

From public schools to music, Netflix series, social media platforms,
and toys, almost no arena of American life with influence over children
has gone untouched by gender ideology. In theory and in practice, the
sexualization of children is a hallmark of the LGBTQ agenda. 

At the Chicago school board meeting last year, I went to the mic after a
transgender parent spoke with his young “transgender” child on his

"Transgender ideology is an adult fantasy that should not touch
school-aged girls and boys. Adult sexual perversions have no place in
the classroom, and adult gender delusions should never be pushed onto
vulnerable boys and girls. There is no amount of emotional manipulation
or noise that will change the fact that transgenderism confuses, grooms,
sexualizes, and mutilates children. There is no such thing as a
transgender child, only misguided parents, pedophiles, online predators,
and their underage victims." 

My testimony was not popular in that room, and the Chicago Tribune
called me an “anti-trans firebrand” in the days to come—but I know that
for the good of our nation, not one more child should be sexualized,
abused, or mutilated under the guise of an ideology manufactured by the
likes of John Money and Alfred Kinsey. 

So-called “gender-affirming care” is starting to crumble—for that, we
should celebrate. Last month, New York City’s NYU Langone Hospital
closed its pediatric gender clinic, one of the largest peddlers of
harmful puberty blockers (administered to children as young as 12) and
sex-rejecting procedures in the country. The hospital cited fiscal
pressure from the Trump Administration in its decision, joining almost
40 hospitals and clinics that have done the same. But celebration means
we keep working. America’s child sexualization cultural rot runs deep,
and it will take more than temporary hospital closures to reverse
course. 

Only with scalpels down permanently, pronouns away, gay characters out
of kids’ shows, classroom pride flags thrown out, and drag queens out of
libraries do we stand a chance at restoring our nation for children.
Gender ideology needs nothing less than wholesale rejection from the
American public. 

Hannah Lape is Legislative Strategist for Concerned Women for America,

https://townhall.com/columnists/hannah-lape/2026/03/20/rejecting-gender-i
deology-for-the-sake-of-children-n2673135