Focus on the Family, while speaking out in opposition to a bill progressing in the California legislature (AB 1266) that recognizes the identities of California's transgender young people in school settings, had this to say:
The reality is that humans are born male or female. At birth we don’t “assign” sex to a child arbitrarily, as the analysis of this bill implies. We recognize the child’s sex – it is a physical reality. But in the world of this bill, that reality doesn’t matter. Like Cinderella in a fantasy world, a person may choose or change his sex, saying, “I can be whatever I want to be.”
--Jeff Johnson, FoF's resident "ex-gay"
Time and again people have told me that they don't understand why we have such a difficult time having our human rights and civil liberties recognized in law. There it is…plain for all to see.
The folks at FoF have laid it bare. They believe that being transgender is about who we "want to be," rather than being about who we are.
And sometimes, people’s mental understanding of their gender identity does not match the sex of the body they were born into. Denying the reality of their lived experience only serves to shame and stigmatize them, but won’t change their core identity.
--Zack Ford, Think Progress
Zack dug around to get to the bottom of this quagmire. And who did he find, but Peter LaBarbera, lead hater from the anti-LGBT hate group,
Americans for Truth about Homosexuality, who claims that the "idea of socially constructed gender is very radical" and "not safe for kids"? But the
American Psychological Association, which is not a hate group, is in total agreement with the California bill and other passage of nondiscrimination protections that recognize and affirm transgender people. Believing that we do…and have a right to…exist is what best suits our mental well-being, not the condemnation and exclusion proposed by the people at
Focus on the Family and the
Traditional Values Coalition.
TVC takes the following stance:
The Transgender movement is an assortment of transvestites, cross-dressers, and transsexuals, who want to have their gender identity disturbance normalized in our culture. While these individuals deserve our compassion, counseling, and professional care, they should not be allowed to promote their psychosexual disorder as normal behavior.
We are not helping people overcome their sexual confusion, by redefining what is normal. These individuals suffer from mental disturbances frequently brought on by childhood sexual traumas. They need help, not social approval or protected class status under sexual orientation laws.
--Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, Chairman of the TVC
The main focus of TVC at present is to ensure that transgender people are not allowed to be teachers. For some reason, as someone who has been a teacher for 37 years, I find that ignorantly offensive.
If you really desire to get into the down and dirty and disgusting, you might want to have a read of Amy Contrada's 127 page report, The Coming Nightmare of a "Transsexual Rights and Hate Crimes" Law in Massachusetts: WHy Bill H1722 Must Be Defeated, written in 2008 for MassResistance.