The progressive assault on gender identity is ramping up in earnest — and not just in America.

On Saturday in Rome, Italy, an estimated crowd of more than 300,000 took part in a huge demonstration against a taxpayer-funded, transgender agenda being pushed on elementary school children. “Defend Our Children” was organized by parents in northern Italy incensed by a school program designed to inculcate children in the leftist belief that sexual identity is completely fluid. The effort is called “the game of respect,” and it purportedly embraces guidelines from European sex education standards attributed to the World Health Organization (WHO).

The game entails a box containing several cards. In one aspect, various occupations such as male and female firefighters and plumbers, as well as homemakers of both sexes, are presented, emphasizing the underlying idea that men and women are completely interchangeable. The most pernicious aspect of this game is a card entitled, “If he were she and she were he.” Boys and girls are expected to exchange the clothes they are wearing and then discuss how they feel in their new “role” as a member of the opposite sex.

Parents have been further infuriated by a kindergarten class where school children are subjected to a program highlighting the similarities between male and female bodies. Part of that effort includes a child lying down while the other children place their hands on the supine child’s heart to feel how it beats, followed by placing their hands on the child’s diaphragm to feel how it rises and falls. The accompanying text informs the children that “obviously in the genital area children can see that they are made differently from one another.” And while it does not explicitly instruct children to touch each other in that area, parents are insisting it is “understood” to be part of the equation.

On this side of the Atlantic, The New York Times details the increasing push to perform sex-change operations. The title of the article, “The New Girl in School: Transgender Surgery at 18,” is completely misleading. As one gets further into the story, the real facts emerge. “While hormones for minors are sometimes covered by insurance, surgery almost never is,” the Times reports. “But several doctors said they had performed surgery on minors.”

Dr. Christine McGinn, the surgeon who performed the sex-change operation on the 18-year-old highlighted in the piece, “estimated that she had done more than 30 operations on children under 18, about half of them vaginoplasties for biological boys becoming girls, and the other half double mastectomies for girls becoming boys.” She further explains doctors are trying to “find the sweet spot” with respect to the proper age for such life-altering surgery. “The problem is, it’s not an age, it’s a situation,” she insists.

The article then reveals exactly how far sex-change promoters are willing to go in pursuit of their agenda. “Advocates say that extending treatment to teenagers will alleviate depression and suicide,” the article states. “With that in mind, Oregon’s Medicaid began covering the gamut of treatment, regardless of age, in January.”

And then, the ultimate kicker: “Patients as young as 15 do not need parental consent.”

Back to Italy — because the lack of parental consent is a recurrent theme. “In my children’s schools they are talking about families made up of two fathers or two mothers, without asking parents’ permission,” said 41-year-old doctor Giuseppe Ripa, who attended the Rome demonstration. “It’s dangerous and wrong.”

Trieste parent Amedeo Rossetti confirmed that reality, citing a PTA meeting he attended last February when the program for the second school semester was ostensibly presented. Rossetti asked specific questions about gender-based activities. School officials categorically denied they were part of the program.

Protest spokesman Prof. Massimo Gandolfini said Saturday’s demonstration was an effort “to protect our children from the propaganda of gender theories that are appearing surreptitiously and in an ever more worrying way in schools.” Thus the event also defended traditional marriage and a child’s right to a mother and a father.

That such concepts need defending is indicative of the all-out effort to effect what Pope Francis refers to as “ideological colonization.” Ideological colonization that “does great harm and can even destroy a society, a country or a family,” he declared.

Unfortunately, the pope is behind the times. It is precisely the destruction of cultural norms, and ultimately the nuclear family itself, that forms the basis of this despicable agenda. It is an agenda, for example, that could see Oregon parents saying goodbye to their 10th-grade daughter as she leaves for a short “vacation” during a school holiday — and having a “son” return in her place, after the performance of major surgery. Major surgery undertaken without their knowledge or permission.

As far as Oregon goes, government has provided that permission.

As for the advocates’ notion that sex-change surgery alleviates depression and suicide, a large-scale study in Sweden at the Karolinska Institute determined that, a decade after receiving such surgery, transgender people were 19 times more likely to commit suicide than people in the general population. Moreover, additional studies indicate most young children afflicted with gender dysphoria, a condition where they “feel strongly they are not the gender they physically appear to be,” eventually lose their desire to change their sex.

Yet what happens to children attending Italian grade schools where they are effectively celebrating gender dysphoria? Worse, how many children will end up making the worst decision of their entire lives because they have been marinated in a toxic environment at an age when they are utterly incapable of defending themselves against their progressive indoctrinators?

“At the heart of the problem is confusion over the nature of the transgendered,” writes Dr. Paul McHugh, former psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital. “‘Sex change’ is biologically impossible. People who undergo sex-reassignment surgery do not change from men to women or vice versa. Rather, they become feminized men or masculinized women. Claiming that this is civil-rights matter and encouraging surgical intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote a mental disorder.”

The doctor is partially wrong: There is no “confusion” whatsoever. Leftists have an agenda they are willing to impose by any means necessary. It has engendered a massive pushback in Italy. What are Americans waiting for?