Conservative Activists Condemn APA for Declassifying Transgender Identity as a Mental Disorder

Janet Mefferd hosted Peter LaBarbera of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality yesterday on her radio show to criticize the American Psychiatric Association for its decision to remove “gender identity disorder” from their manual on mental health. Mefferd even wondered if the APA’s reasoning behind the move might “give pedophiles moral cover.”

According to LaBarbera, “these professional bodies have all been infiltrated by LGBT activists” and have “politicized” science. After lamenting that now schools will have to provide protections for transgender students, he said that sex reassignment surgeries should be made illegal.

One of the things they’re going to do, we all know it, these professional bodies have all been infiltrated by LGBT activists, homosexuals, bisexuals, transgenders, and they are going to set down these guidelines for these poor children who we’ve seen you know with ‘the little Johnny wants to go to second grade in a dress,’ and people who still have common sense in our society say that’s ridiculous, that’s preposterous, that has an effect on all the other kids in school, but we’re going to get these guidelines that say ‘go with that.’

A lot of people go by science, even though science has been very politicized as we’re discussing here, and they go by science and they say ‘well maybe Johnny wasn’t mean to be a boy, he was meant to be a girl.’ We already see parents doing that with their gender-confused children. The importance of this saying it’s no longer a disorder means basically it will propel this radical transgender movement forward. The transgender movement, there’s a whole bunch of variations, some are people who just want to live as another gender without getting the so-called sex-change operation, at its extreme it’s getting these awful , disfiguring sex-change operations which I believe shouldn’t even be legal.

The two agreed that schools should be able to discriminate against homosexual and transgender teachers and warned that a lesbian teacher may try to put a picture of her partner on her desk!

Later, LaBarbera made a completely incoherent argument where he claimed that schools must discriminate against transgender students because if they don’t then “the majority loses its right to guide their children morally and spiritually to the school.” “Law used to be to restrain sin, that’s the biblical purpose,” LaBarbera said, “but now it is flipped in American society and law is encouraging sin.”

Mefferd: One of the fears about ENDA was that if you couldn’t discriminate for example against a transgender teacher, then your kid is stuck with a transgender teacher. Is that something as a potential implication of this news?

LaBarbera: Absolutely. Because you have to see unequal things as equal under the law, that’s the whole point. Same thing with an openly homosexual, what if you had a homosexual activist teacher? What if you had a lesbian teacher for second grade students and she is in a state with a sexual orientation or gender identity law on the books, she wants to put a picture of her lesbian lover on the desk, you can’t stop that. It’s the same with this gender identity.

Mefferd: That does become really troubling when you think about whether or not this will cause, as you mentioned before, a little boy who likes to dress up in girls’ clothing, the school not being able to tell them you can’t wear it. I guess it has yet to be established whether or not a school would have the right to say ‘a little boy has to dress like a little boy’ but it sure does open the question now.

LaBarbera: You know where the ACLU and the gay lobby wants to take it, the trans lobby, they want to say no, the school would not have the right. So the majority loses its right to guide their children morally and spiritually to the school, that’s what’s happening, which is why a lot of people are pulling out of the public school. If gender identity becomes a right, then who is school to trample on the rights? That’s why we see men in female restrooms because they have been given so-called rights to act on their perceived gender identity. It comes back to: what is the purpose of law? Law used to be to restrain sin, that’s the biblical purpose, but now it is flipped in American society and law is encouraging sin.

Mefferd: Of course, that’s the brave new world we’re all living in.