Religious Right radio host Janet Mefferd cited an anti-LGBT conservative hate group to argue that educating young children about different gender identities is “child abuse.”
On today’s episode of “Janet Mefferd Live,” Mefferd weighed in on a report that parents complained to a school board in California that a discussion about gender identity in a kindergarten classroom left their children “confused.” According to the report, a teacher read the class two children’s books about transgender people in order to help the class understand a transgender classmate.
“Of course a little kid is going to go home shaking and crying,” Mefferd said in response to the gender identity lesson. “It’s child abuse.”
Mefferd justified her claim by citing statements published by the American College of Pediatricians, which has been identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-LGBTQ hate group, that claim teaching children about transgender identities counts as child abuse because children will be vulnerable to “a lifetime of carcinogenic and otherwise toxic cross-sex hormones, and likely consider unnecessary surgical mutilation of their healthy body parts as young adults.”
The gender identity lesson, Mefferd also claimed, was further proof the “transgender thing” was “what’s being forced upon little kids” ever since the Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage equality.
“You’ve got to get them really young,” Mefferd said. “How can you indoctrinate them and propagandize them if you wait until they’re thinking adults? It’s harder to get a thinking adult on that bandwagon.”
