By Larry Craig

A Chicago newspaper recently published a full-page column by Mona Charen who thinks that society needs to wait and give medical science a chance “to measure what is really going on and how best to respond” with this new thing in the world: transgenderism.

We have always had homosexuality (people who engage in sexual activities with members of their same sex) and transvestitism (people who dress and generally act as though they were of the opposite sex).

Transgenderism required advancements in medical technology and expertise to exist.

It also required the rise of postmodernism and identity politics. Postmodernism is a philosophy that values personal experience over objective reality. It questions whether we can actually know true objectivity, because we see through eyes tinted by biases, faulty knowledge, and our own experiences.

Identity politics, practically speaking, probably originated in Marxism or communism. It first focused on economic classes and saw society as a struggle between them. Now society is composed of an ever-increasing number of identity groups competing for equal treatment and societal status.

This last such group now is transgenders.

Charen wants science to say more about transgenderism before society makes too many laws regarding it.

I would say that science has already spoken.

There are two genders, and this is woven into a person’s DNA at the moment of conception. We act as if we can remove certain exterior body parts, create or reform new ones, administer hormone treatments for the rest of a person’s life — and voila.

What? What exactly have we created?

A person’s sexual characteristics are an intrinsic part of a person’s internal body formation. Scientists can scrape off skin cells from your arm and tell you what sex you are without having to even see you.

We are asking our children to experiment with sex at very young ages as it they understood what sex is all about. Then we are asking them to decide at this young age what sex they want to be for the rest of their lives, long before they ever even thought about getting married and having children.

I’m sorry, but this is wrong.

Children need to be taught and guided. A big part of growing up is learning to accept who you are, and that includes the physical characteristics you were dealt — looks, height, general body frame, intelligence, and sex.

We do them no favors when we suggest or encourage them to try to be the sex that they are not.

We are doing that, thanks to new federal guidelines on sex education asserting that there is no such thing as normative sex.

I think science has already spoken on this too.

What we call sex organs are known in science as reproductive organs. And science will go so far as to say that their purpose is to reproduce the species. So then, there is such a thing as normative sex.

And we should not be telling our children otherwise and urging them to experiment now so they can decide what sex they want to be for the rest of their lives.

Transgender people are people. As such, they are worthy of our utmost respect and kindness. Transgenderism is a lie.

Adults are free pretty much to do as we please, as long as we don’t hurt other people. But please, don’t tell children that what they see in the mirror has no bearing on who they really are. True maturity is accepting the person you were given and making a better you. We should not be encouraging and allowing children to undergo hormonal and surgical treatments to try to create a new reality.

This is why we separate human beings into children and adults. Children don’t have the experience and the information to make permanent life-altering decisions, and adults need to stop letting children think that they can and need to.