Why to Reject the WHO Over “Gender-Affirming Care”

by James Lindsay and Logan Lancing

Note: This text was lightly expanded from a piece of submitted written testimony to the United States Senate for a hearing regarding the World Health Organization and its current impacts on American life. The information provided herein is primarily derived from the book The Queering of the American Child by Logan Lancing and James Lindsay.

The World Health Organization is currently developing New Guidelines on the provision of gender-affirming care. This should concern every parent and grandparent in America.

The reason for concern is that those guidelines are not based in “any stable reality,” to quote relevant scholars, but in an academic doctrine called Queer Theory. Queer Theory is not a genuine academic theory of the world. It is the doctrine of a cult religion that seeks to initiate and capture American children in particular.

Queer Theory seeks to give our children “queer identities,” like various “gender identities” and “sexual identities”—generally, “queer identities”—and it then seeks to affirm these to lock them into a child’s psyche. The process, in their own words, quoting the Queer Educator Kevin Kumashiro, in a 2002 paper titled “Against Repetition,” meant to induce a crisis in the child and then make sure the teachers “structure experiences that can help them work through their crises productively” on the terms set by Queer Theory. To quote Kumashiro directly,

Repeating what is already learned can be comforting and therefore desirable; students’ learning things that question their knowledge and identities can be emotionally upsetting. For example, suppose students think society is meritocratic but learn that it is racist, or think that they themselves are not contributing to homophobia but learn that in fact they are. In such situations, students learn that the ways they think and act are not only limited but also oppressive. Learning about oppression and about the ways they often unknowingly comply with oppression can lead students to feel paralyzed with anger, sadness, anxiety, and guilt; it can lead to a form of emotional crisis. (p. 74)

Once in a crisis, a student can go in many directions, some that may lead to anti-oppressive change, others that may lead to more entrenched resistance. Therefore, educators have a responsibility not only to draw students into a possible crisis, but also to structure experiences that can help them work through their crises productively. (pp. 74–75)

This process, in this context, is what they call “gender-affirming care,” which is advocated by the WHO. In Mao’s China, it was called sīxiǎng gǎizào (思想改造), which means “ideological transformation” or “ideological remolding,” or, more bluntly, xǐnǎo (洗腦), which means “brainwashing.” It is no coincidence how often the cult of Queer Theory talks about the transformation of individuals, institutions, and society.

Crucially, however, “queer identities” are not identities at all. That is, they are not essential identities, like sex is an essential identity intrinsic to one’s person and that cannot be changed. They’re not part of the person themselves; they’re a political stance. David Halperin, who defined the word “queer” for Queer Theory in his 1995 book Saint Foucault, writes this, “Queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality. As the very word implies, ‘queer’ does not name some natural kind or refer to some determinate object; it acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant” (p. 62).

Halperin also takes pains to point out that “queer” has virtually nothing to do with what he terms “gay identities.” Those, he insists, are rooted in “homosexual object-choice,” a stable, if not essential, human reality. With “queer identities,” by contrast, “There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers.” He continues, “It is an identity without an essence” (p. 62).

Queer identities that are “affirmed” in our children by “gender-affirming care” are revolutionary political identities that are, by definition, framed as whatever is at odds with the normal and legitimate. They are not based in any positive truth or stable reality. They are the result of putting children into a destabilizing crisis and then affirming them into a destructive politicized sense of self. They are made seemingly concrete in our children through a Maoist process of ideological remolding into an oppositional, defiant new mold.

We therefore don’t need to wait to hear what the implementation guidelines and “evidence-based standards” will entail from the WHO. The WHO has already told us that their objective is to affirm a person’s “gender identity,” which is a political article of the Queer Theory cult, not a genuine essential identity of a human being. 

The World Health Organization says that the forthcoming guidance aims to “increase access and utilization” of “gender-affirming care.” So, they have already given the game away: they support the ideological remolding of our children into a destabilizing cult political identity through initiation by means of induced identity crises and confirmation through “affirmation.” Those familiar with cult psychology would recognize this process not as one of “affirmation” but as textbook trauma bonding.

The WHO’s goal is increasing “gender-affirming care” access, not evaluating whether “gender affirming care” might actually cause tremendous harm to many of those that receive it. Deliberately detaching children and their developing senses of self from “any stable reality” and “any positive truth” is guaranteed to cause tremendous harm to the vast majority of those subjected to it.

This is a monumental scandal because Queer Theory explicitly targets children. It does so because children are vulnerable and still forming their core identities as well as their ability to distinguish fantasy from reality. Queer Theory offers confused or struggling kids a promise of making them whole—of solving any confusion or pain they may have while treating them like the center of the universe to manipulate them socially and emotionally. The WHO surely knows this, and it either doesn’t care or seeks to take advantage of it. The American public deserves to be protected from this monstrous program, not subjected to it.

Queer Theory intentionally places children into an identity crisis—into “gender dysphoria,” as it is now called—so those children can be convinced to live “queerly.” It isn’t about empathy for homosexuals; it’s about “alternate modes of ‘embodied kinship’” and discovering “queer aspects” of oneself through identity crisis. The WHO recommends medical professionals worldwide affirm this destructive practice. According to the academic literature, all kids are “queer,” they just don’t know it yet. The WHO wants doctors to help them realize it.

Kids are learning all of this in their schools, which, taken with guidance from organizations like the WHO, sets up a school-to-medicalization pipeline that destroys the minds and bodies of our nation’s youth. What is happening here isn’t a civil rights movement. It’s the greatest child abuse scandal in the history of the world, and it’s being perpetrated by precisely the institutions who should be working to protect children from it. If the WHO is set on going this direction, the United States of America should be equally set on taking no further direction or recommendation from the WHO.

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The Queering of the American Child is available here.